white supremacy

The problem with designating white male mass shooters as mentally ill is not the denigration of people with mental illness or that the characterization is itself wrong. 

These men are no doubt quite psychically ill, as are all white people who live in our settler, white supremacist societies. White supremacist societies produce psychic structures that make everyone ill, though differing processes and effects of racialization mean that those who are racialized as white are largely unaware of the illness they inhabit and that inhabits them, and they usually don’t identify or experience their racialization as white as a site of trauma, pain, or trouble, except when the promises of whiteness fail them. And even then they often fail to identify the actual source of their problem: a sick, settler capitalist society that largely doesn’t serve them. (more…)