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If the Austin bomber had been brown or Muslim, and if his first victims had not been people of color, the US media would have immediately described the criminal as a terrorist and made him their top story. This is so obvious that one sounds dumb just saying it. But many Americans did not hear about the bombings until two white men in an upscale Austin neighborhood were injured by a bomb on March 18.

The police and many newspapers and blogs are describing the suspected bomber, Mark Conditt, not as a terrorist but as a person going through some personal stuff. In a word, the suspect is just one of us. Some of us can handle a stressful period (unemployment, being dumped, so on), and some of us just snap. The Austin Police Chief Brian described Conditt's 25-minute confession as "the outcry of a very challenged young man talking about challenges in his personal life that led him to this point." Donald Trump only tweeted this: "AUSTIN BOMBING SUSPECT IS DEAD. Great job by law enforcement and all concerned!" And, after a period of media silence, he made this official statement: "This is obviously a very, very sick individual, or maybe individuals." Why this lack of enthusiasm? The crime doesn't have the drug of racism.


Because racism offers most of its material benefits to a few people, one has to assume its power not to be in the world of things but in the mental one. We should consider it to be a stimulant much like coffee or tea or tobacco or the other empty foods that emerged at exactly the same time as capitalism (the 17th century). Indeed, I have argued elsewhere that this economic system, which began not as a relationship between the state and the market, but the state and piracy, could not have developed without these addictive stimulants. Racism is a stimulant, but it's not, however, consumed like a food but, as with patriotism, is experienced as a form of grooming (never separate the human from the ape).

A quick note on patriotism: This is not an old and deep feeling. Much of it wasn't there before the 19th century. Patriotism matured into the form that it has today with the development and dissemination of the technologies of mass grooming. The history of the word jingoism, which begins in 1878 with the conservative British prime minister Benjamin Disraeli and the Russo-Turkish war, and which was a powerful stimulant for the British working classes (it made possible the impossible: the Conservative Party, which is an alliance between workers and their betters, their masters, their natural foe), exposes the newness of this feeling. In the US, the Republican Party, which is also an unholy alliance between the working classes and their betters, racism and patriotism has been fused into one stimulant. End of note.

As the addictive foods have little to no nutritional value, American racism has little or no material value for most white Americans. Certainly Trump benefits from it (indeed, it is the single leading reason he is in the White House), but almost all of his voters and supporters do not. They are simply addicted to it. They, like their parents, and their parents parents, can't get enough of it. And so, when they learn that a mass shooter or bomber will not supply them with a racist jolt (a bad hombre, a sand nigger), they have little or no interest in the story.

Last night, I watched MSNBC, CNN, and FOX at prime time. During that period, none of these cable networks had anything to say about the white man who blew himself to bits of gore, blood, and bone in Texas the day before. Was he a terrorist? Why did he first target people of color? Why is there a spike in white terrorism in the US? There was nothing like that. FOX went on and on about Hillary Clinton and how this white and former sheriff can save Chicago from Dems (I'm not exaggerating). And there was something about an atheist making life miserable for a navy chapel, and another thing about how YouTube was persecuting law-abiding gun owners by banning ads for guns. MSNBC was stuck to those Russians. CNN was wall-to-wall on that porn star.

Because we can't expect working-class white Americans to see that their racism is exploited by the masters of American wealth, we have to classify it as an addiction, as something that fleetingly fixes a self-threatening existential crisis. Without racism, what else is there to whiteness? Nothing. Without it, many white Americans would become like that Coketown elephant whose head moves "monotonously up and down... in a state of melancholy madness."