POC and school shootings

October 12, 2021

School Shootings and Students of Color

By Jack Cashill

To paraphrase Jeff Foxworthy, if you feel a shiver of excitement when “school shooting” trends on Twitter, you just might be woke. Last Wednesday, Erica -- a nurse and “humanist” -- proved her wokeness in spades.

“They’re already making excuses for the shooter ‘he got in a fight with someone,’” she tweeted. “Okay, but who chooses to shoot people? White males are a problem #TexasShooter #EnoughIsEnough.”Although reluctant to admit as much, many on the Left welcome a school shooting. Perhaps more than any other event, a shooting reinforces their empty mishmash of a worldview. It allows them to flaunt their hatred both of guns and of their lily-white selves. For Erica, the Texas shooting was a twofer -- or at least it seemed to be.

Alas, the rush was short-lived. About 20 minutes after the original tweet, Erica tweeted back to her 405 followers, “Oh F***. He’s a POC.” For the record, Erica did not use asterisks, and “POC” is woke shorthand for “person of color.”

Had Big Media been even just a little bit honest about race and crime, Erica would not have embarrassed herself as she did. A well-informed Erica, upon hearing of a school shooting, might have tweeted, “Oh F***. He’s probably a POC.” In the real world, Erica, he almost always is.

The POC in question was 18-year-old Timothy Simpkin, a black student at Timberview High School in Arlington, Texas. Systemic racism had apparently failed to keep this young man down. He wore fancy clothes and drove a $35,000 car. Others allegedly bullied Simpkin because of his good fortune.

Weary of the bullying -- or so the story goes -- Simpkin shot and critically wounded a 15-year-old student, race unknown, and a 25-year-old man. Also injured in the panic that followed the shooting were a teenage girl and a pregnant teacher. Incredibly, Simpkin was released on a $75,000 bond and was home partying while the 15-year-old remained in a coma.

Simpkin was not an outlier. Less than a week prior, also in Texas, Dexter Kelsey, a former student at YES Prep Southwest Secondary School in Houston, shot and injured the school’s principal. Kelsey is black, the principal Hispanic. This case generated almost no media attention beyond Houston.These news stories should have surprised no one. Based on the available evidence, it would seem that all of the 14 school shootings to date this school year involve a person of color. This year, too, as in most years, every incident took place in or around a public school.

Given that these cases usually involve minors -- one shooter was age 7 -- the evidence that the police and media provide does not always include names or photos. In a few of these cases, I have had to deduce the race of the shooter from the milieu of the shooting and the identity of the victims, bystanders, and witnesses. In thirteen of the cases, as best as I can figure, the shooter was black. In the fourteenth case, a fatal one out of Albuquerque, the accused 13-year-old shooter was, in fact, Hispanic and the 13-year-old victim black.

The Albuquerque shooting on August 13 was the first this school year. On August 18, in Orangeburg South Carolina, a 14-year-old opened fire in the high school parking lot, wounding three. On August 27, in Woodbridge, Virginia, a teenager shot and wounded two students in his high school parking lot. On September 1, a student at a Winston-Salem High School shot and killed another student. And the list goes on.

Erica might take comfort knowing that none of these 14 shootings resulted in mass casualties as occurred most notoriously at Columbine and Sandy Hook. Although white students were responsible in both those cases, white males have no monopoly even on the mass shooting subset of the larger phenomenon.

In November 2019, for instance, an Asian-American student named Nate Berhow shot five of his Santa Clarita, California, classmates before shooting and killing himself. In 2007, unforgettably, a Korean student shot 49 others at Virginia Tech, killing 32 during the most lethal school shooting in American History.

For all the disinformation the major media spreads, on no other subject are they as consistently and perversely wrong. Indeed, to even suggest that white males dominate school shootings makes no more sense than to suggest white males dominate the NBA.

Counting on the ignorance of the public, academics take race and crime disinformation to another level still. Consider this excerpt from a 2020 articleby Joshua Gregory in the journal Children & Schools:

Even though nearly all school shootings are committed by white students, no etiological theory has contemplated the possibility that whiteness contributes in any meaningful way to the perpetration of school shootings…. The present article takes up the task of beginning to theorize the relationship between whiteness and school shootings, exploring the likelihood that whiteness acts as a moderator, leading whites, but not non-whites, to commit school shootings in response to similar antecedents.

To report that “nearly all school shootings are committed by white students” is Orwellian in its wrongness. Gregory, who is himself white, teaches in the Social Welfare program at UC-Berkeley. Not surprisingly, his work ”focuses on whiteness and neo-abolitionism (the abolition of whiteness), critical theory and philosophy, histories of whiteness and social welfare, and the integration of critical theories with social work praxis modalities and research methodologies.” Despite the Berkeley gig, this taxpayer-funded CRT propagandist is no more a scholar than Al Sharpton or AOC.

Denying reality has consequences. In their race-addled wisdom, officials of the Broward County, Florida, School District convinced themselves a few years back that the huge differential in arrests between white and black students had less to do with actual behavior than it did with institutional racism.

To minimize the arrest gap, the school district adopted a program that allowed school officials, not the police, to determine what acts deserved referral to the criminal justice system. To make the issue seem less stark, authorities cloaked the black/white crime disparity with EEOC boilerplate about "students of color.” This semantic game-playing opened the door for a young man named Nikolas de Jesus Cruz to continue his violent ways unchecked.   

In February 2018, that violence culminated in the deadliest high school shooting in American history. Cruz shot 34 of his fellow students, killing 17. This shooting happened specifically because the school district designated Cruz as a POC.

Parkland was on you and your friends, Erica. Think about it before the next time you tweet.

Jack Cashill’s latest book, Barack Obama’s Promised Land: Deplorables Need Not Apply, is now widely available. See www.cashill.com for more information.