I don’t know about you, but I don’t find killing people – for any reason – commendable, or funny, or cute, or hot. And online these days that can feel like an isolating worldview.
Which is to say, this past week I was quite disgusted as I watched many Americans engage in one of the country’s most disturbing activities: the valorization of deadly white vigilantes.
Of course, I’m talking about the overjoyed — sometimes even lustful — reactions to Luigi Mangione, the man arrested last week in the fatal shooting of UnitedHealthcare’s CEO, and Daniel Penny, the man acquitted by a New York City jury after the strangulation. death of a black subway passenger last year.
The circumstances of the murders are of course very different. But the praise for Penny and Mangione was similar.
Both men have been on the receiving end of the hero worship that in the US often seems intent on cloaking the violent acts of white men with adoration or mythological courage – even if it involves a stone-cold killer.
Penny has become a folk hero among conservatives, who from the start have portrayed him as a defender of public safety. Immediately after his arrest, when little was known about him other than that he had been filmed strangling Jordan Neely, a homeless subway rider with a history of mental illness, right-wingers donated millions of dollars to his legal defense. And after his acquittal, Republicans have essentially fallen over each other in their race to glorify him.
Mangione has achieved meme status in his own right, being portrayed by some – including on the left – as someone who has allegedly turned to murder as a means of holding the exploitative healthcare industry accountable. (A lawyer said Wednesday that Mangione is expected to plead not guilty in New York.)
I must say it was startling to see the group of liberals praising someone accused of a brutal murder. To hear them tell it, Americans – in the same country where voters widely supported putting Donald Trump and his billionaire cronies in power – have had enough of wealthy elites, and the person who shot this CEO is a byproduct of that moral rage.
Color me skeptical.
One reason? To state the seemingly obvious: When black and Latino people kill, there is usually no obsession about why. And we certainly don’t tend to see a groundswell of sympathy – or worse, celebration. Yet in the US, softened portrayals – and sometimes outright praise – of white killers have become commonplace. (See: Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, and serial killer Ted Bundy, to name a few.)
All of this got me thinking about a piece that filmmaker Terence Nance wrote a few years ago about the tired trope of the “angelic” white savior in movies and television — and I think his critique is worth considering as we witness of this latest hero worship.
“The trope is a bedtime story designed to lull the white masses to sleep with a smile on their face and peace in their hearts, knowing that someone who looked like them did the right thing at the end of the day, and them too. …doing the right thing,” Nance wrote. “It’s an ambitious fiction that somehow doesn’t sustain itself. White angel movies are not examples of angelic behavior for the white masses; if they do, this modeling should produce even more true white angels, or at least a critical mass of them (unless Bill Gates decided to start his foundation after seeing Blood Diamond).
This article was originally published on MSNBC.com
