Cabin Fever: Was Chris Dorner's Death a 'Targeted Assassination'?
Travis Gosa is a Professor of Social Science at Cornell and he blogs at hiphopedu. His specialty is in the field of Inequality. As a featured guest today on 'Air Cascada', he barely had time to get started on the subject of Chris Dorner. Dorner has been apothosized as Hero and Horror. His dual citizenship in American Mythology serves to highlight - bring to the surface, really - the deeply engrained racism that poisons American culture. Racism today seems to have become a reflex, a subconscious and/or unconscious respose to The Other.
The only surprising aspect of the story is that it did not happen sooner. That it does not happen more often. The social, economic and political disenfranchisement of African-Americans describes a strange arc: It is virtually in the DNA of White citizens so much so that it goes unrecognized; so much so that many White people quite confidently tell one another that they aren't racist...of course they don't say that out loud to their Black friends and associates. Because African-Americans know it's not like that..
- KBOO