On Saturday, a 28-year-old man crashed a stolen truck into a house in Winthrop, MA, and shot and killed two people with legally-acquired handguns. The victims were David Green, a retired Massachusetts state trooper, and Ramona Cooper, an Air Force veteran. Both were African American. Investigators have found racist and antisemitic writings in the shooter’s home, and they believe that he had been driving at high speed, on a Saturday, to one of Winthrop’s two synagogues. His victims were probably targets of opportunity. The shooter was probably thinking that, if he couldn’t slaughter Jews, he could just execute African Americans instead.
The authorities are investigating the murders as a hate crime. Suffolk County District Attorney Rachael Rollins said that the shooter “had some very disturbing beliefs, white supremacist beliefs, regarding… members of our Jewish population as well as Black individuals.” She added, however, that this racist, antisemitic, white supremacist terrorist who murdered two people and clearly intended to murder many more, was “not on my radar.”
There is a great deal that disturbs me about the murders in Winthrop. I am horrified that there has been yet another white supremacist terror attack and I am chilled to the marrow to think that it happened six miles from my home. I have to worry about homicidal antisemitic violence every day. Only six years ago, I would have shrugged the notion off as absurd in 21st century America yet, today, it is a mundane reality. I worry that my very existence has placed my non-Jewish spouse in a danger that she never asked for simply because I am a Jew.
But what I find most disturbing of all is the fact that the white supremacist terrorist who left two people dead so close to my home was not on anyone’s radar.
The Winthrop shooter wound up his racist and antisemitic rage to such a fever-pitch that he stole a truck and embarked on a murderous rampage that he must have known would end in his death or, at very least, his arrest and conviction, and nobody noticed. He was able to legally buy firearms, plan and execute his attack, but he wasn’t on anyone’s radar.
The shooter was, by all accounts, an average, college-educated, middle-class, white Christian man. He had recently completed a PhD in Physical Therapy, had married his sweetheart in a COVID ceremony profiled in the Boston Globe (it was, the columnist wrote, a “sweet and touching” tale), posted romantic messages to his spouse in social media, and loved bunnies.
In other words, he was just an unremarkable guy; maybe a little goofy about the bunny thing, but otherwise normal. And that fact terrifies me.
This was an ordinary man who concluded that murdering African Americans and Jews is something normal people do. It is even more frightening to realize that he did not live in a vacuum. Even allowing for the isolation of the last year-and-a-half of social distancing, the shooter had a family, he was married, he lived among neighbors in a community, and studied in a graduate school program that requires clinical practicums.
This man, who believed that white people are “apex predators” and committed a heinous act of violence to demonstrate the fact, was thus always surrounded by people. It beggars the imagination to believe that he kept his “racist and antisemitic rhetoric” to himself amid his family, friends, colleagues, clients, and classmates, yet he was never on anyone’s radar. No one alerted the police; no one complained. Indeed, DA Rollins observed, “to all external sources he likely appeared unassuming.”
That is because, in white, Christian America, even in liberal Massachusetts, racism and antisemitism are unremarkable. Perhaps the shooter’s spouse, reputedly a Bernie Sanders supporter, shrugged it off because she had just heard that kind of thing in the air around her before. After all, she might have thought, the racist joke was funny and, you know, those Jews really do seem to run global commerce. Maybe he said something to a classmate, or over beers with his bros, that they found in poor taste, but they let it slide. After all, you don’t end a friendship over a tactless comment and, besides, it was directed at someone else.
Over the next days and weeks, someone will certainly suggest that the Winthrop shooter had hit a rough patch in his life, that he was having a bad day, that his rage was fueled by professional, financial, or marital disappointment, and he just snapped and took it out on the Jews and African Americans he hated – to be the “apex predator.” It’s a familiar story after all, one that we know well as the explanatory narrative of Magaism and Donald Trump’s rise to power.
Yet, even if any of it is true, the fact remains that, up until the very moment that he stole a truck, crashed it into a house on the way to gun down Jews at Sabbath prayer, and decided that he might as well murder Green and Cooper as his consolation prize, the bigotry that directed the shooter’s fury passed unremarked and off-the-radar. To the eyes of his spouse, family, friends, and colleagues, this white supremacist was just a regular guy, and that could only be because, among my white, Christian neighbors, his bigotry is apparently normal.
The very nearness of Saturday’s terror has intensified a fear that has haunted my thoughts as racist and antisemitic violence has escalated over the last six years: that I could very well die because some white supremacist bigot had a bad day at work, had a fight with his spouse, or just decided that the time was right to kill some Jews. This is not an abstraction; they are coming for my African American, Asian, Muslim, Sikh, LatinX, LGBTQ, and Jewish friends, and for my family. They are coming for me.
Our white Christian neighbors need to interrogate their privilege that white supremacist terrorists are not coming to murder them and their families. They need to confront the bigotry in their midst that is so mundane that they have let it pass without comment. If they don’t, it is only a matter of time before another rampage like the one on Saturday suddenly turns up on the radar.