by Ijeoma Oluo
In my heartbreak, rage, and weariness I fired off a simple message online talking about how heartsick I was and begging for a shift in how we address white male terrorism and white male identity.
A few hours after posting my message, I received a short and straightforward email: “My name is Carrah Quigley. I am the daughter of a school shooter. I would love to provide any information I can share with you about white male aggression and American culture. I was literally raised by this subject.”2
Quigley offered to send me links to articles about her and offered to be of assistance to my book project.
A few days later, we spoke over Skype. I was immediately struck by how sincere and warm Quigley seemed, and how obviously passionate she was about the issue of mass shootings. She sat on the couch in her living room while her dogs walked up occasionally, looking for affection. I huddled in front of my computer in the tiny cabin. We talked for over an hour.
Carrah Quigley had, by all accounts, a happy childhood. She and her siblings adored their father, Bob Bechtel, who was a loving father and a respected teacher. Quigley described Bechtel as a man who would hug you so tight he’d leave you gasping for air. Her image of her dad came crashing down when she was nineteen. Bechtel sat her down and told her his biggest secret: he had murdered someone decades earlier.
Bob Bechtel was a twenty-two-year-old student at Swarthmore College in 1955. He was bright, but was an outsider who didn’t make friends easily. He was poorer than most of the other students at the elite school, and he felt like they looked down on him for it. He told his daughter that a few students had bullied him at college, adding to the trauma of the teasing he had experienced throughout primary school. According to Bechtel, the trauma from the bullying caused him to briefly lose his mind. Whenever Quigley asked him what he was thinking on January 11, 1955, he insisted, “I wasn’t thinking. You’re not understanding. I was temporarily insane.” He would say this over and over again.
“I think he was so used to a level of anxiety, threat, and PTSD all the time due to bullying that I don’t think he would have even known how close he was to exploding,” Carrah explained to me. “I think this was just the next logical step, because he couldn’t somehow shift or change his belief that blaming the world would solve everything. The world is against you. It’s you against the world. Even if five guys bullied you throughout high school, just five guys, you would perceive it as the whole world.”
Bechtel entered his dorm hallway at three a.m. on January 11, 1955, with a gun and enough ammunition to kill every person in the building. He walked to the room of eighteen-year-old Francis Holmes Strozier, took a shot in the dark, and struck Strozier in the head while he slept, killing him instantly.
Bechtel told his daughter that the moment he knew he had killed Strozier, he came to, and he no longer wanted to go through with his plan to kill everyone in the dorm. “There was this instantaneous squeezing of his heart,” Quigley told me, “and he gasped for air and he stopped. He said in that moment he realized he was loved far more than he ever thought he was hated.”
Bechtel emptied his gun, shooting into the floor instead of at his fellow students, and waited for the police to arrive.
Bechtel was found not responsible for the murder of Francis Strozier by reason of insanity and was sent to the Fairview State Hospital for the Criminally Insane.
Reading the court transcripts from Bechtel’s appeal of his sentencing for the murder of Strozier, I see a slightly different picture of Bob Bechtel than the one he painted for his daughter. Bechtel had long shown signs of extreme paranoia and a proclivity toward violence. In high school he had been hospitalized for psychiatric treatment and said he had thoughts of killing a classmate who he claimed had threatened him, stating, “It was either he or I.” Bechtel was discharged from the Air Force after only forty-three days with a diagnosis of “anxiety reaction, schizoid personality, paranoid personality, paranoid delusions” after he attacked a fellow soldier who he believed had stolen his records.
At Swarthmore, he regularly quarreled with his classmates. Unhappy, Bechtel left college and returned home, but he was upset to find that his mother was not as sympathetic as he had expected. Upset at his mother’s response, Bechtel took two guns from his home and headed back to campus. He entered his dorm prepared to kill all 120 students, and shot Francis Strozier in the head.
Whereas Bechtel had described to his daughter an immediate clarity and remorse upon killing Strozier, the testimony he gave in his appeal shows a different frame of mind: “He stated that he has no feelings about the killing, feels no remorse, and is neither sorry or glad he did it. He could see no difference between war… and his action.”3
After less than five years at Fairview, Bechtel was found to be sane and was released. Still in his twenties, Bechtel was able to rebuild his life. He went back to school, married, had kids, and became a professor at the University of Arizona.
Years after confessing his secret to Quigley, Bechtel began to speak publicly about the shooting in order to raise awareness of the impact of bullying in schools. Bechtel was, by all accounts, passionate about breaking the cycle of violence that he himself had once been caught up in.4 To Bechtel, these young white men opening fire in classrooms and shopping malls were perpetrators, but also victims themselves, of violence. In order to stop them from lashing out in such devastating ways, he argued, society needed to show them love and connection.
Quigley described hearing news of another school shooting, when Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold killed thirteen of their classmates at Columbine High School in 1999: “I came home and looked at my dad, and he said, ‘You realize that this could have been prevented.’ He said, ‘All anyone ever had to do was just listen to these children, and just be with these children.’”
I pointed out to Quigley that young white men are more likely to carry out these shootings than anyone else, and asked her why she thought that was the case. She described the pressures her father felt to achieve a white male definition of success, and how easy it was to compare himself to others and to blame others whenever he fell short: “It’s in a constant state of anxiety, so to speak. Something can be taken away because it’s all lack, lack, lack. It’s all about how you compare to other people because you can’t exist on your own.… So much of what makes a white male angry is the climb and the hierarchy.”
But I think it’s more than just the climb. It’s the expectation that many white men have that they shouldn’t have to climb, shouldn’t have to struggle, as others do. It’s the idea not only that they think they have less than others, but that they were supposed to have so much more. When you are denied the power, the success, or even the relationships that you think are your right, you either believe that you are broken or you believe that you have been stolen from. White men who think they have been stolen from often take that anger out on others. White men who think they are broken take that anger out on themselves. There were 47,173 suicides in 2017. Of those, 70 percent were white men, and the rate of white male suicides is rising.5 Across the country, people are mourning the losses of sons, fathers, husbands, and friends who have chosen this particularly devastating way out.
Right now, white men are the biggest domestic terror threats in this country. They are shooting up schools, shopping malls, and casinos. Seventy percent of school shooters are white males.6 In the years since the terror attacks on September 11, 2001, white male terrorists have killed more Americans than Jihadi terrorists.7 In a world where many people of many different races and genders are bullied, where many people feel left out and overlooked, it is white men who are choosing to turn that pain and fear into self-harm and murderous rage far more frequently than almost anybody else in America.
Whatever is happening with white men that causes them to open fire on innocents, I’m not sure how much of it can be prevented by simply listening to them.
I do believe that love can solve many problems. I believe that love can guide us through some o
f the darkest times. But what does it mean to truly love white men who are violently enforcing white male supremacy? What does it mean to truly love white men who feel entitled to status and are angry at the world when they do not get it? And what would it mean to love the same people whom those white men seek to harm?
The emails started coming in 2018. They would usually arrive after I had posted an article on race or gender, but sometimes they would appear at random. I still remember the first one, which shook me.
“I know you think I should kill myself because I voted for Donald Trump, because I’m white, because I’m a male, so I’m just going to, since that is the only ethical conclusion.”
The email listed the various hardships the sender had endured. Poverty, mental illness, discrimination. But none of that mattered, because I had shown him that the problem was that he was a white man and he should die. And so his death would be on my hands.
“I’m going to kill myself because that’s exactly what you want and will make you happy and I will teach you a lesson when the whole world learns about it.”
The email continued, describing how he was going to kill himself (with a Glock that he kept at home) and reiterating that it would be my fault. He then ended with a racist tirade, calling me a “worthless monkey bitch.”
I have received many violent emails from white men over the years, but I sat with this one for a while. I tried to process what I was reading and tried to figure out what I should or could do about it. In the end, I placed it in the same folder as all the death and rape threats.
A few weeks later I received another email from a different sender. The message, with slight wording differences, was essentially the same. This white man was going to kill himself and I was to blame. A few days later I got a similar message via Twitter messenger. A few days after that, another email.
As the threats of suicide piled up, I began to see a coordinated campaign to harass me, and as disturbing as it was, it was also sadly fascinating in what it revealed. These men were trying to terrorize me with what they saw as the only logical conclusion to my antiracist, feminist work: the mass suicide of white men. They wanted me to know that they saw my work to end violent misogyny and white supremacy, and they saw that it was a threat, not only to their norms and their status but to their very lives.
These men wanted me to know that they were miserable, they felt screwed over, and they felt demonized. They wanted me to know that the only option available to address white male patriarchy was either to maintain the status quo that was making us all miserable, or death. They wanted me to know that they were not capable of growth or change and that any attempts to bring about that growth or change would end them.
Nobody is more pessimistic about white men than white men.
I am the mother of two boys. Two beautiful young men who were born as beautiful babies full of endless possibility. It was shocking to watch how quickly the patriarchy came to claim my sweet little boys. They weren’t even in preschool before I had to battle a world that wanted to take everything that was soft and kind and generous about them and turn those traits into hardness, cruelty, and dominance. I watched my older son, who had the most brilliant smile I have ever seen, struggle under the weight of being repeatedly told by society that his loving, open nature was a weakness.
The teenage brain can be a very dangerous place. As young people grow and get ready for adulthood, their world is rapidly changing—as are their hormones. A great day is often the best day of their life and a bad day is often the worst. And if you ask a teen how they are doing on a bad day, if they are willing to talk to you at all, you may hear that every day they’ve ever had is bad, and every day they will ever have will be bad. Teenagers often have difficulty projecting themselves into a different, better future. It can be a very scary time, and the consequences can be very real.
I could have lost my son, the driving force of my heart and soul, to this despair. I’m forever grateful that part of him wanted to live, and that part decided to reach out for help.
It has been years since that terrifying time for my family. We worked with some great therapists, spent a lot of time healing together, and my son grew out of his hardest phase. Not all families are so lucky. Sometimes there is no intervention that can save our children from the claws of anxiety and depression. It has only been in the last two years or so that I’ve been able to relax somewhat—feeling confident that we made it through the worst of it, that I was going to see my baby grow into a man.
Then, early in the morning on August 14, 2019—two weeks from my son’s eighteenth birthday—I got a call from the King County sheriff’s office that there had been a report of shots fired at my house. I was across the country, getting ready to head home from a conference. We do not own any guns, and my son doesn’t have any friends who own guns, so I knew there was a strong chance this was a hoax. But what if. They were going to send officers to my home.
What if?
I sent a neighbor to go knock on the door, then on my son’s window. My son had been sound asleep, unharmed. But the police had received a call from someone pretending to be my son and stating that he had killed two people in the house. They were going to send an armed response. To my home, where my son was alone and barely awake and very confused.
What if we had fought so hard to save my son only to lose him because an angry white man decided to send armed cops to our house at six a.m.?
When I read the emails I receive from white men threatening suicide, I read them as someone who knows what the despair of suicidal thoughts looks like. And when I look at the threats and harassment that I and so many women and people of color have received from angry white men, I know what that despair looks like when it’s mixed with the entitlement and bitter disappointment of white male mediocrity.
I don’t know if the men who emailed me were actually considering suicide; I doubt they were. I think they were just having some sick, twisted version of fun. But when I look at white male identity in America, I see it all. I see the desperation, the disappointment, the despair, the rage.
White male identity is in a very dark place. White men have been told that they should be fulfilled, happy, successful, and powerful, and they are not. They are missing something vital—an intrinsic sense of self that is not tied to how much power or success they can hold over others—and that hole is eating away at them. I can only imagine how desolately lonely it must feel to only be able to relate to other human beings through conquer and competition. The love, admiration, belonging, and fulfilment they have been promised will never come—it cannot exist for you when your success is tied to the subjugation of those around you. These white men are filled with anger, sadness, and fear over what they do not have, what they believe has been stolen from them. And they look at where they are now, and they cannot imagine anything different. As miserable as they are, they are convinced that no other option exists for them. It is either this, or death: ours or theirs.
I don’t want this for white men. I don’t want it for any of us. When we look at the history of white male identity in this country, it becomes clear that we are only stuck in these cycles of reactionary violence and oppression because we have not tried anything new. We have become convinced that there is only one way for white men to be. We are afraid to imagine something better.
I do not believe that these white men are born wanting to dominate. I do not believe they are born unable to feel empathy for people who are not them. I do not believe they are born without any intrinsic sense of value. If I did, this would be a very different book. I believe that we are all perpetrators and victims of one of the most evil and insidious social constructs in Western history: white male supremacy.
The constraints of white male identity in America have locked white men into cycles of fear and violence—where the only success they are allowed comes at the expense of others, and the only feelings they are allowed to express are triumph or rage. When white men try to break free from these cyc
les, they are ostracized by society at large or find themselves victims of other white men who are willing to fulfill their expected roles of dominance. When women and people of color try to free themselves from the oppression of white male supremacy, they are viewed as direct threats to the very identity of white men, and the power structure upholding that identity works swiftly to eliminate the threat.
White male supremacy protects itself not only through the expected violence of white men, but also through control of societal norms that keep us invested in the perpetration of white male power. Think of how the white male glorification of violence has saturated our action films, in which the hero can only maintain or gain freedom through use of a gun. Think of how many career advice books tell women to cooperate less and compete more in order to succeed. Think of how often people of color are expected to abandon their regional and racial dialects in order to be seen as “eloquent” in school and work. Think of how whenever a white man in a nice suit and bold tie, with salt and pepper hair, a strong handshake, and an allergy to apology stands behind a podium—we want to elect him to office.
We have to investigate the way in which all of us, regardless of race or gender, have been conditioned to uphold white male supremacy. We are expected to support white male supremacy in order to get a promotion, to be respected by our peers, for our children to succeed in school. We must ask ourselves what we are willing to give up in order to be free. We must question what we value as individuals and as a society. Leadership should not look like one race or gender; power shouldn’t either. We must look at how our votes, our money, and our individual privilege are tied to making sure that white men remain in power over us.
And we must look at what we have been missing out on, at our inability to truly value people who are not white men or who are unable to mimic white men to achieve success. What can women and people of color accomplish in a world that doesn’t see us as fundamentally lacking? What can we accomplish in a world that sees difference as an opportunity instead of a threat? What other paths to success have been open to us this entire time that we’ve refused to embark upon?
