The Empty Throne
It is not widely acknowledged or accepted, but one way or another, almost every white child in American culture is promised a throne. Yes, there are the children adorned with crowns and saturated with “princess” imagery and gifted the soft permission of those who can do no wrong, but there is something deeper and more insidious as well. There is a country of dominion and conquest, genocide and exploitation, a bred and bloody entitlement that life should deliver only rewards.
For generations, this expectation has underwritten white success and fostered white resentment. It has consecrated unspeakable crimes and undermined unfathomable achievements. Because in offering whiteness a throne, our society was promising that it would have subjects to rule over.
And so I am brought to the Buffalo shooter: a white supremacist terrorist who killed 10 Black people as revenge for his antisemitic belief that they were tools in a Jewish plot to replace whites. It’s not his thoughts or actions that surprise me — we are awash in the language of supremacy from visible and empowered people, designed to incite just such a response — but that he was so young and so motivated.
There is A Thread percolating around Twitter about this young man having a toothache. It comes up over and over again in his digital diary, a minor obsession amidst his tremendous cruelty. The toothache is a trivial thing, an inconvenience that he had the resources to repair if he had sought it. And as many, many people have pointed out: many marginalized people, including the 10 Black people he murdered, have weathered more painful challenges without committing terrorism.
The critics rightly say that pain is not an excuse for violence, that his relatively insignificant suffering pales in comparison with the damage he has inflicted, and that trying to find a motive or reason for this horrific act is dangerous humanization for an act of inhumanity.
All of this is fair and true, and I am not in disagreement with their conclusions or their umbrage. White people constantly want excuses for the monstrous acts of individual and systemic violence they commit against Black people in particular, and the thread is an easy opportunity to comfort themselves — if that’s what they want.
Because I read it more generously — maybe too generously — and chose to see it not as an excuse or call to empathy, but as a map of how simple it is to give away your humanity.
We have promised a throne to so many white children that we have left them unprepared for failure and unreceptive to loss. Our society seeps them in their own boiling resentment and then requests their obeisance to the people they have been told they have a right to rule. Again and again, day after day, society feeds their assumptions, stokes their rage, bolsters their entitlement, and waits until they have their excuse.
The path to radicalization is littered with broken expectations — of who they should be and what they should have, of access and achievement and power, of the world and their place in it. These are the painful and unyielding questions we must all grapple with, and rather than hardening my heart, it strengthens my resolve.
Because as much as I’d love to lay all of the violence at the doorstep of whiteness, the rage of disappointed hopes is a human experience. For some, it brings them to terrorism, for others, gang initiations. Pretending that they’re born evil is abdicating our responsibility to pull apart the circumstances that provide the spark that sets their brokenness ablaze.
White supremacy is responsible for this tragedy, but it is not alone. Forgetting that is a strategy to breed the next generation of petty kings, cutting their way to the throne they were owed.
