{"id":36710,"date":"2014-06-16T02:28:44","date_gmt":"2014-06-16T02:28:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=36710"},"modified":"2014-06-16T02:28:44","modified_gmt":"2014-06-16T02:28:44","slug":"elliot-rodgers-half-white-male-privilege","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=36710","title":{"rendered":"Elliot Rodger\u2019s half-white male privilege"},"content":{"rendered":"

Elliot Rodger\u2019s half-white male privilege<\/strong> <\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

Salon<\/a>
\nThusday, 2014-05-29<\/p>\n

Joan Walsh<\/strong><\/a>, Editor at Large<\/p>\n

The killer\u2019s Asian heritage matters. So does his ugly class entitlement. Misogyny crosses lines of race and culture<\/em><\/p>\n

The widespread recognition that Elliot Rodger\u2019s killing spree was the tragic result of misogyny and male entitlement has been a little bit surprising, and encouraging. Why, then, has it been so hard to get his race right?<\/p>\n

From the left, headlines (including on Salon<\/em>) have labeled him \u201cwhite,\u201d though most stories at least nodded to his Asian heritage (his mother was ethnic Chinese Malaysian). Chauncey DeVega\u2019s fascinating piece on Rodger\u2019s crime as evidence of \u201caggrieved white male entitlement syndrome<\/a>,\u201d a malady that includes other white male mass killers from Columbine\u2019s Eric Klebold to Newtown\u2019s Adam Lanza, didn\u2019t mention his status as half-Asian.<\/p>\n

When commentators noted the omission, DeVega (whose work I admire) doubled down in a follow-up piece,\u201cYes, Elliot Rodger is white!<\/a>\u201d He argued that Rodger \u201cconstructed an identity for himself as \u2018Eurasian\u2019 and proceeded to internalize American society\u2019s cues and lessons about power, privilege, race, and gender. He then lived out his own particular understanding of what it means to be white and male in the United States.\u201d<\/p>\n

Not that I have a lot of sympathy for Rodger, but it twists his already twisted story to label him simply white…<\/p>\n

…\u201cThe media, as usual, has oversimplified his identity and experience of race in typically binary terms, which miss the complex nuances and grey areas of that identity and experience,\u201d University of California, Santa Barbara, sociology professor G. Reginald Daniel<\/a> told me via email. (Daniel is also the editor in chief of the Journal of Critical Mixed Race Studies<\/em><\/a>.) \u201cMy feeling is that some of his many issues are related in part to his struggles with or questions about how \u2018white\u2019 he was or was not allowed or perceived to be.\u201d…<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Elliot Rodger\u2019s half-white male privilege Salon Thusday, 2014-05-29 Joan Walsh, Editor at Large The killer\u2019s Asian heritage matters. So does his ugly class entitlement. Misogyny crosses lines of race and culture The widespread recognition that Elliot Rodger\u2019s killing spree was the tragic result of misogyny and male entitlement has been a little bit surprising, and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,16,8413,20],"tags":[17378,142,17511,10962],"class_list":["post-36710","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-asia","category-communications","category-usa","tag-elliot-rodger","tag-g-reginald-daniel","tag-joan-walsh","tag-salon"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36710","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=36710"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36710\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=36710"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=36710"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=36710"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}