The Great Smoky Mountain Journal

Staff, Wire Reports

Posted: Sunday, January 21, 2018 07:22 PM

Drexel University Professor: "Whiteness" Caused Church Shooter Devin Kelley To Kill 26 People In Texas Sunday

Whiteness” caused Texas church shooter Devin Kelley to open fire on parishioners Sunday, killing 26 people, according to a controversial Drexel University professor.

George Ciccariello-Maher, the liberal professor who was booted from campus for tweets blaming the Las Vegas massacre on “Trumpism” and “white victimization,” now claims white “entitlement” is the motivating factor behind mass-shootings.

“Whiteness is never seen as a cause, in and of itself, of these kinds of massacres,” Ciccariello-Maher said in an interview with Democracy Now!, adding, “despite the fact that whiteness is a structure of privilege and it’s a structure of power, and a structure that, when it feels threatened, you know, lashes out.”

He promoted the interview on Twitter as a discussion about “white masculinity, militarism, and terror after Sutherland Springs.”

Ciccariello-Maher, who now only teaches online classes, said the public needs to be asking questions such as: “What makes white men so prone to this kind of behavior?”

Though Ciccariello-Maher acknowledged he didn’t know all the facts about the Texas massacre, he said feelings of frustrated “entitlement” and an “institutional apparatus that trains people in violence” and makes them feel “they’re on the losing side of history” can lead them to “resort to violence.”

Ciccariello-Maher said recent mass killers have “clear mental issues,” but he added “the cause needs to be identified outside and beyond that…”

Ciccariello-Maher said the far right demonizes Muslims and “jumps on any violence by people of color,” but “doesn’t want to talk about the real deep structures of white supremacy in our society...not just the fringe, not just the Nazi movements, but what people are going through every day and what it is that is driving people to these kinds of situations, where they feel so entitled to dominance, that when that’s questioned, they can explode in these very, very unpredictable ways.”

Ciccariello-Maher connected President Trump to the rise in mass shootings.

“Trump makes hay out of the fact that white men, in particular, feel as though they’re the victims of this society, despite being in absolute control of it,” Ciccariello-Maher said. “And this is something that is powerfully dangerous, and it’s why we’re not seeing only the rise in violent attacks, more generally, and the rise of far-right movements, but we’re certainly seeing, you know, clearly, sort of some very serious incidents of mass violence, as well.”

Following the massacre at the First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs, Ciccariello-Maher retweeted the controversial tweet he sent out after the Las Vegas shooting: “A White Man.”