Seriously, what the hell is he talking about? Shockingly, this guy writes for Salon.
Elliot Rodger was/is a white man.
For some people, this fact is very controversial and upsetting.
As I wrote in ‘The True Alpha Male’: The Santa Barbara Mass Shooting, Elliot Rodger, and Aggrieved White Male Entitlement Syndrome, when the bad behavior of white people is publicly called to account, said person’s relationship to “Whiteness” is rarely discussed.
To be forced to include white mass murderers, madmen, and Right-wing domestic terrorists as part of the tribe is very uncomfortable and disconcerting. […]
This is understandable: what reasonable person would not want to excommunicate them from their community and affinity group?
Elliot Rodger constructed an identity for himself as “Eurasian” and proceeded to internalize American society’s cues and lessons about power, privilege, race, and gender. He then lived out his own particular understanding of what it means to be white and male in the United States.
Elliot Rodger demanded and expected power and control over others. He saw respect from others not as something earned but rather as a birthright. Elliot Rodger’s life is the very definition of unearned privilege and advantage. In his desperate search for validation and affection from his white father, he projected and acted on a particular type of elite, dominative, aggressive, white masculinity and sense of entitlement.
While some would like to focus on the fact that he has an “Asian” mother as leverage for discounting his Whiteness—one of the intellectual weak spots of the White Right and the race science crowd is an obsession with “pure races”, which are non-existent, yet remain an intellectual fixation for white racists—Elliot Rodger was performing white masculinity as he understood it.
Whiteness is an identity based upon maintaining a superior power relationship over people of color.
Whiteness is not just a reflection of “biological race” or assumed racial group membership by virtue of parental or family lineage. Whiteness is a political project with its own set of values and normative assumptions about how society should be organized.