White savagery

It’s been a couple of months since I wrote about the far-right blogger Lawrence Auster. And, like a girl missing her period, that’s cause for concern.

Fortunately, Mr. Auster posted something yesterday – titled “Black savagery, cont.” – which I feel compelled to respond to.

Auster quoted a black writer, Carol Swain, whose brother was killed by a group of black teenagers. “According to a neighbor who witnessed the attack,” Swain wrote, “five teens knocked my brother to the ground, kicking and stomping him until the neighbor intervened. Kevin staggered home, collapsed into a coma and was declared brain-dead within hours of the attack.”

This moved Lawrence Auster to write:

“Do people of other races behave in this way? No. This sort of murderous pack savagery is characteristic of blacks and blacks only. Yet it is never identified as a black phenomenon.

“This doesn’t mean that all blacks, or a majority of blacks, or a large minority of blacks, are savages,” Auster continued. “It means that this specific type of behavior is recurrent among blacks and among no other race.”

“Black savagery” is a recurring phrase in Auster’s racial commentaries. And yet, due to his ideation of himself as a rational thinker and a non-bigot, Auster insists that his declaration is not “reductionist” (i.e., illogically simplistic).

Well... for starters, there’s the factual matter of his claim. If Larry Auster thinks “no other race” engages in deadly group beatdowns, he hasn’t heard about the ways aluminum ball bats are deployed on the Navajo reservation. According to an eye-opening article I read in Harper’s a decade ago, the homicide rate in Navajoland is four times the national average.

But the bigger flaw in Auster’s racialization of styles of violence is best illustrated by another type of murder. The type where a victim – most often a woman – is mutilated for sick thrills. The sadistic sexual homicide.

I’m talking about white savagery.

I’ve wanted to share this for a while... been waiting for the right time. There’s a 1995 book called “Mindhunter: Inside the FBI’s Elite Serial Crime Unit,” written by ex-profiler John Douglas.

He tells of a case where a white woman – a 26-year-old teacher of handicapped children – was murdered in the Bronx in 1979.

This case, according to Douglas, was taught at the FBI training academy for years thereafter, being “a good model of just how we came up with a profile and how the police used it to push forward a baffling and long-unsolved murder.”

I must alert you, the following details are disturbing.

The young woman’s naked body was found on a roof landing of the apartment building where she and her parents lived. Her jaw, nose and cheeks were broken from blunt-force trauma. She had been strangled to death with her own purse strap, then bound with her belt and stockings.

“Her nipples had been cut off after death and placed on her chest,” Douglas writes, and “bite marks were on her thighs and knees.” The killer left an umbrella and a pen inserted in the woman’s vagina.

With that pen, he had written on her body “Fuck you” and “You can’t stop me.” There were also traces of semen.

“The only tangible piece of forensic evidence was a single negroid hair found on the body during the autopsy,” Douglas writes.

The body had been discovered after a 15-year-old black boy who also lived in the building found the woman’s wallet in a stairwell.

The police put together a task force of 26 detectives. They questioned more than 2,000 potential witnesses and suspects, but made no progress. Then two of the detectives consulted the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit.

John Douglas came up with a profile.

“I suggested that the police seek an average-looking white male between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-five, ... who would be disheveled in appearance, unemployed, and mainly nocturnal, live within a half mile of the building with his parents or older female relative, be single and have no relationships with women and no close friends, ... and who would have a large collection of bondage and S&M pornography.”

Douglas ruled out the 15-year-old black kid as a suspect... because he was black.

“Even though the examination of the body had turned up the negroid hair, I was convinced we were dealing with a white killer,” Douglas writes. “Very rarely did we see this type of crime cross racial lines... and I had seldom, if ever, seen this kind of mutilation from a black subject.”

To put it bluntly, then... there was something distinctively white about this crime because of its sadistic savagery. That’s not me saying it; that’s a founding father of criminal profiling.

Now, this doesn’t mean that all whites, or a majority of whites, or a large minority of whites, are savages. It means that this specific type of behavior... well, you get the point.

If I were to be reductive about it, like a Lawrence Auster, I would wonder aloud: What is it about the nature of white people that causes them to kill so savagely?

As for this particular murder investigation, the police used John Douglas’s profile and zeroed in on a 30-year-old unemployed actor, a white guy, who lived with his widowed father in the same building as the victim. He not only fit the profile (including the bondage-porn collection), but his teeth matched the bite marks on the woman’s body.

He was convicted of murder.

And what about that “negroid hair” found on the victim’s body during the autopsy? Turns out it came from a body bag that hadn’t been properly cleaned between uses.