Criminal Minds T.V. Show Demonstrates Case of White Supremacy
The hit drama series Criminal Minds depicts a serial killer police officer targeting immigrants and relates to hopes of creating positive immigration reform.
This 2010 thriller episode begins with a suspenseful chase in a pitch black night in the dessert. There’s a Hispanic man running from someone on a quad dressed in all black with a skull mask on, carrying a sword on his back. In the next scene, we see the iconic Quantico FBI Behavioral Analysis Unit team in a conference room discussing 3 decapitated heads sent to the police station of a small border town in Terlingua, Texas. Throughout the episode, we find out that the killer has been murdering and decapitating immigrants crossing the border into the U.S. for a very long time. In the end, it is revealed that a white male deputy, was the serial killer responsible. Though the show never explicitly stated it, I argue that the deputy was motivated by white supremist beliefs.
Andrea Smith’s Heteropatriarchy and the Three Pillars of White Supremacy Rethinking Women of Color Organizing discusses the 3 logics behind white supremacy: Genocide/Colonialism, Slavery/Capitalism, and Orientalism/War. The Criminal Minds antagonist falls under the Genocide/Colonialism and Orientalism/War categories. Under Genocide/Colonialism, Smith claims that white supremacy logic states that indigenous people must disappear and that nonindigenous people occupying the land are the rightful owners of the land. She states, “…they must always be disappearing, in order to allow non-indigenous people the rightful claim over this land. Through this logic of genocide, non-Native peoples then become the rightful inheritors of all that was indigenous” (Smith 2). During the episode, while the FBI team chases the deputy in their vehicles through the dessert, they communicate to him through the radio giving him an opportunity to surrender. Declining their offer, he responds, “This is my dessert. You think you can find me out here? Come on out.” His cocky remark signals that he feels possessive of the land, despite it originally belonging to Mexico. He feels that as rightful owner of it, he has a right to keep it from other nonwhite people.
In another part of the episode, the team remarks on the lack of missing persons reports. The deputy answers them, “How can someone be missing if they ain’t ‘spose to be here in the first damn place?” His remark suggests that the missing Mexican immigrants are less than people and don’t deserve to be reported missing. With this, he places himself above the immigrants, positioning himself superior to them. This scene falls under Orientalism/War where Smith states, “Orientalism was defined by Edward Said as the process of the West defining itself as a superior civilization by constructing itself in opposition to an “exotic” but inferior ‘Orient’…The logic of Orientalism marks certain peoples or nations as inferior and as posing a constant threat to the well-being of empire” (Smith 2). The deputy believed he was superior to the inferior immigrants and therefore justified his removal of them.
These beliefs are not only present in popular television, they represent realistic ideas that are detrimental the unity of the United States. Though it’s been an ongoing issue, immigration reform has recently been the center of mainstream news with the dramatic actions and plans of our current president. Programs like this Criminal Minds episode can begin to shed light on the issue over white supremacy and its radical, dangerous followers. It’s not enough to solve the problem but it can encourage us to have conversations about taking action.
