Atlanta vs Boulder Shootings Exposes the Evil of Identity Politics

Let’s rewind: Robert Aaron Long, 21, gunned down eight innocents in cold blood at three different day spas in suburban Atlanta. After interviewing Long’s parents and finding out he had a tracking device in his car, police were able to arrest him as he attempted to flee to Florida. Upon interrogating Long, he claimed he was a sex addict and that his attacks were motivated by a desire to “eliminate the temptation” of these day spas, which apparently provided an outlet for his addiction. Long was a member of a Southern Baptist church in Georgia, and (like virtually every perpetrator of this kind of violence) apparently showed no signs of desire or inclination to commit such a horrific act.

That’s literally all that is known so far. While the mature position for any onlooker – and especially those who have influential public voices – should be to wait and see – the cries of racism, sexism, and anti-Christianity began almost immediately.

Asian-American politicians and celebrities blamed the event on Trump’s labeling of the coronavirus being of Chinese origin, claiming Trump’s simple identification of Wuhan as the origin of the virus most certainly motivated this killer.

Kamala Harris and Joe Biden implicated Trump.

Perhaps most egregiously, both the leftist secular media and so-called Christian media vilified the orthodox Christian beliefs of the Southern Baptist Convention, unquestioningly linking the fact that the killer attended a theologically conservative church (which presumably teaches traditional gender roles and preaches against sexual sin) to his motivation for the killings.

Got it? Long is a white male who called himself a Christian and most of the victims are Asian women (he also killed a white woman and a white man and wounded a Hispanic man, but we’re supposed to ignore this). While we can’t take Long at his word that his killings were not motivated by race, we are supposed to take him at his word that he is a Bible-believing Christian. See how that works?

Identity politics (along with related frameworks Critical theory and social justice) is a collectivist approach to politics and society that puts people into groups based on gender, race (ethnicity), religion, economic class, and sexual preference. It seeks to confer status, societal oppression, and moral responsibility onto entire groups of people based on these traits. In modern America, whites, males, and Christians are considered privileged and oppressive classes of people – that is, identifying a person as a member of one or more of these groups not only makes them oppressive by nature, it makes them culpable for the wrongdoing of any member of the same group.

In the instance of the Atlanta shootings, not only is the shooter to blame (because of his whiteness, maleness, and supposed Christianity), but the institutions of whiteness, maleness, and the Christian church are also to blame. Conversely, the Asian victims of his crime (not the whites or Hispanics, of course) are automatically said to be victimized based on their Asian ethnicity and femaleness.

Now take the Boulder supermarket shooting: The killer is Ahmad Al-Issa, also 21 years old. He is reportedly a Trump-hating, Isis-sympathizing Muslim. The media, upon learning Al-Issa is not white, will pivot towards their favorite political policy agenda: gun control. The Boulder shooting will be blamed on the guns and perhaps mental illness, while the Atlanta shootings will be blamed on racism and traditional Christianity.

This kind of prejudicial hatred and dishonesty coming from the government-media-academia cabal exposes for all to see the evil of judging people based on their skin color or their class. It renders a society incapable of being truly just in its application of the law and its equal treatment of all citizens. While the Atlanta shooting will be laid at the feet of all white Christians, the Boulder shooting will be labeled as clearly not Islam-related, and instead white Americans will be warned not to let their supposed anti-Muslim bigotry inform their view of the tragedy. See how this works?