I don’t know about you, but I don’t find killing people — for any reason — laudable, or funny, or cute, or hot. And online these days, that can feel like an isolating worldview.
Which is to say, I’ve been pretty disgusted over the past week, watching many Americans engage in one of the nation’s most disturbing pastimes: the valorization of deadly white vigilantes.
Of course, I’m talking about the overjoyed — at times, even lustful — reactions to Luigi Mangione, the man arrested in last week’s fatal shooting of UnitedHealthcare’s CEO, and Daniel Penny, the man acquitted by a New York City jury after the chokehold death of a Black subway passenger last year.
The circumstances of the killings are quite different, to be sure. But the praise for Penny and Mangione has looked alike.
Both men have been on the receiving end of hero worship that, in the U.S., frequently seems intent on shrouding white men’s violent acts with adoration or mythological valor — even if it’s a stone-cold murderer.
Penny has become a folk hero among conservatives, who have framed him as a defender of public safety from the beginning. Immediately after his arrest, when little was known about him other than that he’d been filmed choking Jordan Neely, a homeless subway rider with a history of mental illness, right-wingers donated millions of dollars for his legal defense. And after his acquittal, Republicans have basically been falling over one another in their race to lionize him.
Mangione has achieved meme status in his own right and has been portrayed by some — including on the left — as someone who allegedly turned to homicide as a means of holding the exploitive health care industry accountable. (A defense attorney said Wednesday that Mangione is expected to plead not guilty in New York.)
I must say, it’s been startling to witness the raft of liberals praising someone accused of a brazen killing. To hear them tell it, Americans — in the same country where voters broadly supported hoisting Donald Trump and his billionaire cronies into power — are fed up with rich 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 doesn’t tend to be an obsession over why. And we certainly don’t tend to see a groundswell of sympathy — or worse, celebration. Yet, in the U.S., softened depictions — and at times, outright praise — of white killers have become common. (See: Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and serial killer Ted Bundy, just to name a few.)
Yet, in the U.S., softened depictions — and at times, outright praise — of white killers have become common.
This has all had me thinking about a piece that filmmaker Terence Nance wrote a few years ago on the tired trope of the “angelic” white savior in movies and television — and I think his critique is worth considering as we witness this latest hero worship.
“The trope is a bedtime story designed to rock the white masses to sleep with a smile on their faces and peace in their hearts, knowing that someone who looked like them, at the end of the day, did the right thing, and they too … are doing the right thing,” Nance wrote. “It is an aspirational fiction that somehow does not self-perpetuate. White angel movies do not model angelic behavior for the white masses; if they do, this modeling has yet to produce more real-life white angels or at least a critical mass of them (unless Bill Gates decided to start his foundation after seeing Blood Diamond).”
Ja’han Jones is an MS NOW opinion blogger. He previously wrote The ReidOut Blog.