What's On Your Mind? What's in Your Heart?

Earlier today, I spent a good deal of time catching up with an old friend with whom I haven’t spoken to a long time.  He attends the University of Cincinnati, which was the second college on my list of preferences.  In the course of the conversation, he texts me, “I don’t want you to worry, but I wanted you to hear from me that there is a shooter on my campus.  I’m safe though, in a locked storage closet in the Rec Center.”  Naturally, as the anxiety-ridden person that I am, my heart began to pound, and my mind took off racing.

My mom was skeptical of me attending UC, as it is located right in the heart of downtown Cincinnati, in what many inhabitants of the city refer to as the “ghetto”.  I immediately thought the shooter must be someone from this part of town inhabited by many African Americans and other minorities of the city’s overall population.  However, after a feeling of guilt in the pit of my stomach, I took a step back and looked at the bigger picture.  Isn’t it just as likely the shooter is a student at the school?  Or any inhabitant of the city outside of the small ghetto surrounding campus?  So, I decided to fact check myself.

I looked up “school shooting by race” and what I found didn’t shock me at all, based on the finding of this FYS class thus far.  97% of school shooting are perpetrated by males, with 79% of those males being white, often from the upper-middle class.  This just goes to show how quickly our inborn prejudices can force us to jump to misconceptions.  Based on both of these statistics, it is very unlikely that this particular shooter was a minority from the poor part of town, although that was my initial thought.  I am ashamed of the judgement I made.  I am disappointed in my mom’s comment that planted the seeds in my head.

Although her comment most likely meant no racial bias, it led me to misconceptions about minorities that could not be more wrong.  Racism is subtle, and can be seen in our words and actions, of course, but also inside our very minds.  Sometimes, it’s the judgments we make and the things we think that define us most, and I’m ashamed of some of the thoughts that ran through my head today.

I found the statistics on school shootings at: http://www.politicalresearch.org/2014/06/19/mass-shooters-have-a-gender-and-a-race/.