The murderer is a white man, aged 21. And that age keeps sticking in my head, because 21 when we generally agree that someone is irrevocably An Adult - and yet it's far too common for white men to arrive at adulthood already radicalised into violence and bigotry.
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Radicalisation that's capable of producing this degree of brutality doesn't crop up overnight, which means that the murderer was radicalised through his teens and potentially earlier. And yet the handwave logic of Boys Will Be Boys so often says those years don't really count -
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- because aren't they just children, just young adults? Surely we shouldn't say that teenagers are racist or misogynist, as though they can't ever improve. Surely we should wait to see how they turn out as adults to judge them. But if you do that? This is the risk you run.
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As the parent of a white boy growing up in an age of digital radicalisation, the thought that terrifies me most is losing my son to that sort of toxicity: of failing to track his beliefs about the world, his pattern of development, or challenge him if it ever became worrying.
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I have no idea what specific set of domestic or personal circumstances radicalised the Atlanta murderer to such a degree that he not only decided to murder a group of Asian women, but had the gall to claim afterwards that his motive had nothing to do with racism. But:
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- he was, by the way we reckon these things culturally, a brand new adult. He didn't arrive where he is overnight. Perhaps he has a racist family, perhaps not. But he was radicalised to white supremacy, racism and misogyny before he hit adulthood. Those seeds are sown YOUNG.
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Assuming it ever was - and that's a big if - it's no longer sufficient to be passive parents, unaware of when white kids and white boys in particular are absorbing toxic messages and the early seeds of future radicalisation. That shit needs to be cut off at the ROOT.
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My kid is 8 and watches gaming streamers on YouTube. His dad and I are like fucking HAWKS keeping track of which accounts and videos he watches; have explained the dangers of just clicking on whichever video pops up next and following that chain out.
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Does he fully understand the extent to which YouTube's algorithm, especially when you watch gaming videos, is a radicalisation pipeline? Of course not: he's 8. But that's not too young to *start* the conversation: to begin explaining that not everything online is good or true.
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He's old enough to understand that some people are treated differently because of their skin colour or where they come from, and that this isn't okay. Old enough to learn why I get cross when his virtual school history texts talk benignly about "settlers" instead of "colonisers."
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Does he always understand everything right away? No. But that's the point: these aren't one-and-done conversations that you save up for when your kid is eighteen and already potentially a decade plus into being exposed to shitty views on the internet without your intervention.
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You talk about the hard stuff early in large part so that *talking about it at all* is as normal as discussing math homework: so that you can *keep* talking about it, in more and more detail, the older your kid gets. THAT is how you combat radicalisation.
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The point being, fellow white people: way too many of us grew up in social cultures where race wasn't discussed, or where we were taught colour-blindness, or given pat speeches about "the melting pot," and it's other groups that suffer when our own bigoted chickens come roosting.
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It's a cycle that WE need to break, and that starts with talking to our kids about race, gender, culture - about all the stuff we've been raised to think is Too Hard and shouldn't they be older first, it doesn't really apply to nice folk like us anyway - while they're still kids.
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Because otherwise, this is the result: Dylan Roof, Brock Turner, Kyle Rittenhouse and now this murderous racist asshole. All young white men barely into adulthood; all radicalised before then. Culturally, this is our issue. Let's fucking fix it already.
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End of conversation
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