FTW editor alleges a bunch of stuff after USA Today fires her over tweet

My calculus on mass shootings has much less to do with the number of victims than with the intent of the perpetrator.

If a road rage incident ends up with someone pulling out a gun and killing the three-plus occupants of the other vehicle, to me, that's not a mass shooting.
If a fight outside a bar ends up with someone coming back to get revenge and shooting the three-plus combatants on the other side, to me, that's not a mass shooting.
If some teenager comes to an elementary school armed to the hilt with weaponry available to him in no small part, one can surmise, because his mother received $200,000 a year in alimony, and carries out his intention - committing a mass shooting - to me, that's a mass shooting.

 

Well, it is.

 

The thing Jhaveri needs to ask herself is what purpose she thought her original tweet would serve. Say the shooter did end up being a white male - so what? What does that prove? Even if most Columbine style mass shooters are white men, most white men are not Columbine style mass shooters. So why even go there?

My guess is it was just for yuks: "white people lol," "how'd I know it was a white guy," etc. It's pretty much become a throwaway line among my leftist friends. Doesn't bother me, and I think it's weak when someone in a majority group claims offense to something like that. That said, it's an antagonistic thing to say. Say it enough times, you're gonna push a lot of white people to a point where they feel like they have no choice but to defend themselves. Being white might not even be a part of their self-identity, but if you continuously identify them as white, and insist that no white person can escape his whiteness, you're creating an environment where a lot of white people are gonna feel compelled to defend whiteness when you ascribe awful character traits to whiteness. That's not good.

 

I agree with most of your post, but the fact is the people who are so defensive of their whiteness often would be carping about something else — the coastal elites, the unfairness of our economy, etc. I empathize with them to some degree, but at some point you also have to keep chugging and realize you’ll probably face some significant roadblocks.

 

And now perhaps you know just a tiny fraction of what Black people have experienced all these years.

 

Or maybe I knew and understood that beforehand and you feel a weird need to convince yourself that you hold the moral high ground over others.

 

Nope, not really.

Put the gun back in the holster, chief.

Basically, the point was, who gives a shit if a few white people feel the need to “defend” themselves. Something no white person really has to do anyway.

Your previous post seemed to be trying to drum up sympathy for white people. Sorry if I’m not having it.

 

Staff at USA Today’s FTW blog at odds with publication after editor fired for addressing racism