The Quiet Trigger
In the aftermath of two recent shootings—one at Utah Valley University, the other at a Colorado high school—a familiar silence has returned. Not the silence of grief, but the silence of omission. Both shooters were young white men. Extremist ideologies reportedly radicalized both. And yet, the headlines barely whispered the word: whiteness.
This is not new. It is a pattern. And it is time we named it.
Tyler Robinson, 22, fired a single fatal shot at Charlie Kirk’s event in Utah. Bullet casings were engraved with coded, homophobic messages tied to online gaming culture.
- Desmond Holly, 16, wounded two classmates in Colorado before dying by suicide. His social media echoed Columbine iconography and Holocaust denial.
Both were white. Both were ideologically charged. Both were framed as anomalies.
But they are not anomalies. They are symptoms of a deeper epidemic—one that festers in silence and is rarely named: white-on-white crime.
Here is The Data We Ignore:
- 85% of white homicide victims are killed by other white people, according to FBI statistics.
- Cities like Las Vegas, Kansas City, and Tulsa—predominantly white—rank among the top 20 in murder rates.
- White perpetrators are often described as “troubled” or “mentally ill,” while systemic patterns of radicalization and violence go unaddressed. Young White males commit mass murder at such an alarming rate that one would think they were bred to murder other white people.
This is not just a media failure. It is a cultural blind spot. If the White House wants to protect White Americans, it should get serious about tackling White on White crime. White people are their biggest enemy. The greatest threat to the White family is twenty-something White males radicalized online by old White men unwilling to change with the times.
Robinson and Holly were not radicalized in Baltimore, Cleveland, Detroit, Philadelphia, Washington, D. C., or Memphis. They were radicalized in homes as wholesome as apple pie and ice cream on a hot Fourth of July. It makes sense to deploy the National Guard throughout the majority White neighborhoods to protect our schools and places of worship from radicalized young White men who have easy access to the deadliest weapons money can buy.
Mainstream narratives racialize crime when the perpetrator is Black or Brown—but de-racialize it when the perpetrator is white. Whiteness becomes the default, the unspoken, the invisible. And in that invisibility, violence thrives.
Critical whiteness studies have long warned us: when whiteness is treated as neutral, its harms go unnamed. When white violence is framed as exceptional, its patterns go unexamined.
This is where authorship matters. This is where rhythm becomes resistance. This is where the counter-archive begins.
As someone who’s spent decades documenting the unsung—from Black college baseball to civic milestones in Macon—I know the power of naming. I see the urgency of testimony. And I know that silence is not neutrality—it is complicity.
Substack offers us a space to speak without filters, to archive what mainstream media erases, and to build a legacy from the margins. This post is not just commentary—it is a call to authorship.
Share this post with someone who still believes white violence is rare. If the depot in the White House wants to make White Americans safe again, he will get serious and address the causes of White-on-White crime.
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If we don’t name the trigger, we can’t disarm it. And if we don’t tell the story, someone else will—without rhythm, without memory, without truth, like Charlie Kirk.
Let’s build the counter-archive together.