Parenting & Family Quote by Van Jones

Jones is doing something politically risky and rhetorically savvy: he hijacks the language of “unthinkable tragedy” and points it back at the audience that usually gets to own innocence. Columbine has become shorthand not just for a school shooting, but for a very particular media story about lost suburban purity, a rupture in the “good” America. By insisting you “never” see it “done by a black child,” he’s not offering a criminology lecture so much as exposing whose violence gets treated as a shocking exception and whose gets filed as grimly predictable.

The subtext is an indictment of narrative framing. When violence is associated with Black kids, it’s often explained through pathology: broken communities, gangs, “culture.” When it’s suburban white kids, the press reaches for bewilderment, mental health, alienation, video games, anything that preserves the idea that whiteness is basically safe and normative. Jones is saying that “We can’t believe it happened here” really means: we can’t believe it happened to us, or among people we instinctively read as “ours.”

“It’s only them!” is the provocation and the trap. It risks flattening complexity (there have been school shootings involving nonwhite perpetrators; violence is not a racial monopoly). But that bluntness is the point: he’s forcing a conversation about which tragedies trigger national soul-searching and which are treated as background noise. The intent isn’t to absolve anyone; it’s to accuse the culture of selective shock, selective empathy, and selective innocence.