Roots of the Jonesboro Schoolyard Killings: Envy of the Feminine

Just after the Jonesboro schoolyard murders, I arrived in northeast Arkansas early last April with my wife and baby daughter. I was anxious to assume my post as clinical psychologist and director of a small but active community mental health center in Paragould, a town approximately 20 miles north of the now famous (or, if you like, infamous) town of Jonesboro. I was lured there from my position in a state-run psychiatric hospital located in Chicago, Illinois, by a federal government agency called the National Health Service Corps. This agency is a kind of white-collar Peace Corps which places health professionals in “underserved,” mostly rural, areas of the nation. In return for two years of service, the National Health Service Corps pays off the individual’s student loans.

The mass murder in the schoolyard at Westside Middle School in Jonesboro, in which five girls and a female teacher were shot and killed by two fellow classmates, boys a mere 11 and 13 years old, occurred in late March of last year, just prior to our arrival. This article contains some of my preliminary thoughts regarding the meaning of this tragedy. To be clear, I do not claim to have definitive answers regarding the possible social and psychological roots and meaning of this tragic incident. Rather, I wish to raise preliminary questions about the possible effects of the social and cultural climate of the American South on the psyche of people living there. I write from the perspective of a psychoanalytically oriented psychologist with an interest in anthropological and sociological theories of human nature.

Two days after moving into our condominium in Jonesboro (we settled in the largest town in the region hoping to smooth the transition from Chicago), my wife and I met some older neighbors of about 55 or 60 years of age who were lifelong residents of this area. They shared their enthusiasm for the economically prosperous Jonesboro, and listened to our descriptions of Chicago. Eventually, the discussion turned to the Westside tragedy about which the man, in an apparent attempt to protect his community (and himself) from what he believed to be the critical scrutiny of a Northerner, commented, “Everyone talks about how violent the South is, and this will just fuel the fire.”

Indeed. I would be less than honest to say that I am unaware of the South’s perverse love affair with authoritarian social and political structures, the latest example of which is arguably the mania for state-sponsored executions now occurring in Texas. The South’s earlier embrace of slavery and, following that, its legally instituted policy of racial segregation, go without saying. In my own job, I was often harshly criticized by both supervisors and colleagues for such things as giving clients copies of the psychological evaluation which I wrote about them and attempting to establish group supervision to facilitate discussion about work-related problems, including staff conflicts. The response of various colleagues to these and other practices and ideas was to inform me, directly and indirectly, that those at the top of the organizational hierarchy disapproved. In a discussion about this issue with one of my staff, a social worker, I once asked rhetorically, “They made me a director. Shouldn’t I direct?” Her response was, “You mean well. But, don’t forget, this is the South.”

Her comment returned to my memory on various occasions. One of those times was the day I decided to find out what the office space next door to our clinic was used for. I walked there to see the words “County Department of Community Punishment” etched on the glass door. I suddenly remembered having seen a court-referred client who had commented to me that he was sent “by the guys next door,” a comment which confused me at the time but which I failed to query. Now I was no longer confused. At that moment I realized that our clinic offices were located directly adjacent to what, in other parts of the country, would probably be referred to as the County Department of Adult Probation. As a clinician I never want my work to be associated with punishment.

I wondered at the roots of this authoritarianism. Over the following months, I began to identify a possible source in the widespread prevalence of Protestant

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fundamentalism. For example, our baby-sitter, a woman of 19, once explained to me that her Christian church was, in her words, “pretty liberal” in comparison to other area congregations. I asked what she defined as liberal and was told, “Well, we’re not allowed to dance. But singing is all right, as long as it’s during church services.” Further, I have regularly been asked by total strangers if I would come to their church for a visit, on the premise that this is the appropriate way to become integrated into the community. Also, I became accustomed to seeing Jonesboro residents donning T-shirts with various evangelical slogans such as “What would Jesus do?” and “Saved.” Local churches have been extremely politically active in Jonesboro and throughout the area, with the result that the entire county is “dry” (that is, alcohol sales are forbidden). Finally, the realtor who showed us our condominium once noted that Jonesboro is a “family-oriented” community. When I asked her to explain the reason for this, she cited the political involvement of various ministers who, as she said, “keep the bad element out.”

A defining feature of Protestantism — particularly in its fundamentalist forms — is its vision of God as cosmic father figure, the ultimate authority who, as the Nicene Creed says, will “come to judge both the quick and the dead.” I began to wonder, Is it possible that the shadow of this heavenly Father falls over the entire region, to be expressed, albeit covertly, in even the most apparently secular activities? If so, I reasoned, then the authoritarianism I experienced in some form everyday, might be traceable to the existence of a heavily patriarchal social organization. This patriarchal social system would ultimately be derived from a Protestant Weltanschauung, with which the citizenry would be unconsciously identified. For example, is it possible that the two boys accused of this crime were responding, at least in part, to the psychologically suffocating effects of growing up in a social environment in which conformity, particularly of the kind rooted in an attitude of subservience, is emphasized one-sidedly?

The problem may not be so much with the South and its social structures, or with peculiarly “Southern” ways of interpreting reality. Rather, I wonder if it is possible that in the South we find expressed in unusually concentrated form a more widespread, pathognomic American social and cultural value, one rooted in the above-mentioned Protestant worldview upon which our nation is founded. Specifically, I mean the construction of maleness along, or perhaps I should say opposite, the lines of all that is fluid and ambiguous, or “natural,” including the psychological qualities of emotion, empathy, and the desire for interpersonal mutuality and attachment. This vision of masculinity is manifested in, and perpetuated by, the unconscious misogyny of our social and political structures. For example, feminist scholars such as Mary Daly (Gynecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism, 1978) and Camille Paglia (Sexual Personae, 1990) argue that normative American visions of the “healthy” or “well adjusted” self valorize assertiveness, self-sufficiency, and achievement. Further, they state, these idealized psychological characteristics are one-sidedly ascribed to males, with the result that females are viewed as intrinsically less healthy or less well adjusted. These writers also note that, for all the superficial bravado of this construction of masculinity, it is one built on psychological quicksand. Specifically, they state that it is a vision of selfhood formed largely on the basis of an opposition to the “feminine” values of intimacy and empathy which challenge notions of the self as a well-defined, self-contained entity, rather than on the basis of an affirmation of its own unique creative potentials. These scholars also echo the psychoanalytic formulation that we secretly long for, and even identify with, the qualities which we consciously most despise or fear in others. Based on this premise, Daly, Paglia and others assert that the one-sidedness of popular American concepts of masculinity imply, not simply that socially-dominant men loathe “feminine” qualities, but also that as a group they are deeply desirous — and even envious — of these qualities.

I suggest that events such as the Jonesboro schoolyard murders should cause us to think more deeply about if and how we Americans instill this “normative” masculine identity in our young boys. For example, is it possible that this tenuous construction of masculine identity creates and maintains a uniquely “American” vulnerability to narcissistic injury among males? Can we infer that the one-sided investment of American males in the values of independence and assertiveness leaves them with a sense of crushing shame when confronted with their own disavowed dependent longings? Further, do interpersonal interactions which reveal the poverty of this construction of selfhood figure in incidents of explosive, retaliatory rage by our young men, as they counter-phobically reassert their wish for dominance and

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independence through violence?

The manner in which the Jonesboro schoolyard murders were actually carried out is, in key respects, a microcosm — as well as a caricature — of certain of the social values upon which rural, and particularly rural Southern, communities are founded, values which themselves are rooted in the long tradition of Western patriarchy. For example, an examination of the events both leading up to and surrounding the murders implies that the accused harbored profound contempt for “feminine” psychological qualities. First and foremost is the fact that all of the victims were female, and that the older of the two boys had proposed the murders following his having been “dumped” by a girlfriend. The boy’s use of guns, particularly their reliance on so-called “long rifles” to carry out the assault, is of such phallic significance as to barely warrant mention. Second, prior to the shootings, the older boy was investigated by Minnesota police, who suspected him of having sexually molested a three-year-old girl there (as a young boy he had lived in Minnesota with his grandparents). There is also evidence suggesting that throughout their lives both boys had been force-fed a symbolic diet of exaggerated but nevertheless widely popular American cultural images of maleness by various family members. For example, the younger of the two boys had a reputation in Jonesboro of riding about the streets on his bicycle sporting army fatigues, with a hunting knife strapped to his belt. Most of us are by now probably familiar with the formal portrait of the older boy, taken when he was five or six years old. In this picture he, like the younger boy, appears clad in military garb, proudly clutching a toy rifle.

The idea that the American South is more likely than other parts of the nation to foster the unmodulated, violent expression of “male” values by troubled youngsters is supported by the fact that three of the last four public school massacres occurring in the U.S. prior to my writing took place in the states of Kentucky, Mississippi, and Arkansas. The hypothesis that these killings occur in response to authoritarian and one-sidedly moralistic social structures rooted in a specifically Protestant worldview is supported by the facts that the high school students murdered in Kentucky were attacked as they gathered in a school hallway for an impromptu prayer and the assault on Mississippi high school students was orchestrated by a group of teenagers who had formed a Satanic cult consisting of self-proclaimed social outcasts. (Psychologists who study such cults regularly describe them as functioning to support a counter-phobic flight from intolerable, unconscious guilt.)

I pose a question. In committing these crimes, is it possible that these boys recreated, in microcosmic form, what is perhaps the key psychological flaw of a one-sidedly patriarchal organization of society and culture — namely, that in attempting to subjugate frightening “feminine” forces, patriarchy ultimately succeeds in doing no more than revealing the brittleness, instability, and ultimately self-undermining qualities of a worldview built upon the aggressive disavowal and rejection of things “female”? Looked at from the above perspective, the tragedy at the Westside Middle School represents a tragic intersection of the public and private spheres of existence, one which acts as a mirror of key social and psychological underpinnings of the cultural milieu which spawned it. By killing females en masse, these boys were arguably acting upon some of the premises of the patriarchal worldview transmitted to them.

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