The Transformation of Adam Johnson

Adam P. Johnson is an anthropologist. He spends his time thinking about how environments shape living things. It’s more complicated than many people realize, Johnson tells his students. Organisms aren’t just bits of clay that are then molded by their contexts.

Instead, he says, think of a cake. When you mix the batter, it’s just a collection of ingredients. But in an oven, ingredients and heat interact, spurring a transformation. Together they create something that didn’t exist before.

The cake can’t be unmade. At a certain point, science tells us, there’s no turning back. So it is with organisms — including humans, Johnson tells his students. An environment changes, and people change with it. They become something new.

On April 30, 2019, a man entered Johnson’s classroom, raised a pistol, and started shooting.

On April 30, Johnson became something new.

Johnson has always been curious. As a child, he spent hours outdoors. He’d explore the rows of corn and okra and vines of muscadine grapes on his grandparents’ farm in a rural county of North Carolina.

He loved books and told people he would be an author when he grew up. He was raised a devout Christian but learned to value skepticism, and he wasn’t afraid to question authority when he thought he knew better. During a Sunday-school class, Johnson’s youth pastor told the children that dinosaur bones were placed underground by God to test people’s faith. He remembers thinking, “That seems wrong.”

His faith eventually fell away. The words of a high-school teacher stuck with him: “Don’t ever believe anything anybody tells you if you can go and figure it out for yourself.”

Johnson rode his curiosity to college, where he tried out psychology and biology, but those disciplines — at least the courses he took — didn’t align with his worldview. They relied heavily on genetics to explain behavior, Johnson thought, which didn’t seem right.

Life took him away from college. He didn’t like his classes and had a good-paying job at Best Buy, so he dropped out. He got married and had a child. He promised that he’d go back to school by the time his daughter was 2 years old. He wanted to set a good example. He stuck to his word and re-enrolled at East Carolina University.

He’d liked an anthropology course, and the professor encouraged him to major in the subject. He took a few more courses and felt as if he’d arrived home.

Here was a discipline that looked at the world through not just one window but many. It felt more holistic than biology or psychology. And it offered a way for Johnson to become a storyteller, something he’d always wanted. Through anthropology, he could write real narratives about real people to help solve real problems.

He eventually earned a master’s degree from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and was hired as a part-time lecturer. By then his marriage had ended.

Around that time, Johnson started a blog, Anthropology 365. It was a place for him to throw ideas at the internet like spaghetti and see what stuck.

His topics ranged from book reviews to the film Black Panther to structural violence. He shared snippets of his life, too. But he wrote most of his blog posts with a tone of academic distance.

Until April 30. Late that afternoon, Johnson was teaching on the second floor of the Kennedy Building. It was an anthropology and philosophy-of-science course, one that he had designed.

Shortly into the class period, a gunman arrived, said nothing, and fired. After the first shot came a short pause. Then more gunfire.

Amid the chaos, Johnson hurried to a door. He held it open while most of his students fled. Then he, too, escaped.

Two days later, Johnson was at home, still shaken. Making sense of his new reality. He needed an outlet for his feelings, so he did what felt natural. He started to write.

His mentor, Jonathan Marks, an anthropology professor at UNC-Charlotte, had urged him to record everything he remembered about the shooting. Treat it ethnographically, he told Johnson. Document it. Analyze it.

“We’re scholars,” Marks told The Chronicle. “That is what we do.”

So Johnson, 33, sat down at his computer. He began with a summary: There was a “horrific event” in his classroom. Two students were killed. Four others were injured.

He set his terms: He would not share the names of the victims or the survivors. Professors protect their students, and anthropologists protect their informants. He also refused to write the name of the shooter, because, he wrote, “no one should speak it.”

Then Johnson typed what he remembered:

On that day, Johnson wrote, students sat around tables as one group presented a video about static- versus dynamic-universe theory. Johnson sat at a table, prepared to take notes.

About seven minutes in, the presentation was interrupted by ear-splitting bangs. They bounced off of the classroom’s glass surfaces.

Johnson stood. He kicked his chair to clear a path.

He hurried to a door away from the shooter and held it open. A student fell. He picked her up and pushed her back among the fleeing students.

Then he ran.

He rushed down a flight of stairs into a large courtyard while students scattered in all directions. He realized they should get behind locked doors.

Grabbing a few of them, he dashed toward the anthropology department office. As they ran, they yelled, “Active shooter!”

In the department chair’s office, they dialed 911. After minutes that felt like hours, they watched police officers run toward the Kennedy Building.

Eventually Johnson and the students were escorted to the east side of campus, where they learned that the shooter had been taken into custody. When Johnson saw several other students who had survived, they embraced.

After recounting the minute-by-minute, Johnson shared what little he knew about the gunman, who was a former student. He had been enrolled in the course and attended a few classes before dropping out. His behavior had seemed, Johnson wrote, “completely typical.”

Johnson then pivoted from the personal to the systemic. He wrote as an anthropologist.

After mass violence, public discourse tends to focus on one “magical solution,” he wrote. Sometimes it’s better mental health. Or getting rid of gun free zones. Or less access to firearms. But rarely is there an appeal to address the ultimate, not proximate, causes of such violence, he argued.

Why do mass shootings occur so frequently in the United States? To start, he wrote, let’s look at structural issues. Look at our lack of socioeconomic security and the disillusionment that comes with it. He cited the French sociologist Émile Durkheim, who studied suicide, and who he thought could offer an appropriate framework.

Johnson wrote that he planned to engage with the shooting again, when he was emotionally and mentally able to do so. Writing it all down made it real for him. Reflecting on how he’d acted helped him make sense of what happened. For the moment, it gave him control.

When he finished typing, he felt some relief.

The blog post spread. His words were reported by The New York Times and ABC News. His inbox filled with messages from fellow anthropologists, other scholars, and a few survivors of other shootings, who offered condolences. One scholar dedicated a class period to him.

Many readers thanked Johnson for sharing his recollections. “I do not know what lies in store for you professionally after this trauma,” wrote one commenter, “but it is clear to me that whatever you do, you will always be an anthropologist.”

The post also resonated with at least one person close to one of the two victims, Riley Howell and Ellis (Reed) Parlier. The father of Howell’s longtime girlfriend found the post around the time of Howell’s funeral and began to read but didn’t make it through.

He returned to it weeks later. In the comments, he thanked Johnson for taking the time to record thoughts and memories.

“I am analytical,” the father said, “and those things help me.”

What helps a person whose life has been upended? For some, it’s trying to leave the pain behind. For others, it’s returning to the scene of the trauma, searching for ways to comprehend it.

Any catharsis that Johnson felt when writing his blog post soon evaporated. A day or two after he wrote it, clearer memories of the shooting flooded into his mind, all at once.

He’d assumed he hadn’t actually seen that much. He realized that wasn’t true.

He could see Howell tackling the shooter while being shot at, saving lives. He could see things he would never share with anyone except the students who were there, who could understand. It’s a private box of memories.

Johnson couldn’t control when the memories would play. He remembers staring out his kitchen window at his woodsy backyard when a clip, without warning, began to loop.

His sleep became fitful. His dreams got worse. He tensed at explosive noises. He felt his mood shift from stoic to anxious, and his chest would tighten with fear. The week after the shooting, he was still teaching a course at a community college, and he felt anxious standing in front of the classroom, as if he might start “bleeding from my eyes.”

He’d go trail running, which used to calm him. But now, every time he passed a young white man, he’d wonder, Will he shoot me in the back?

Other questions would bubble up. What if he had acted differently? What if he’d tackled the shooter?

He’d discuss these questions with Marks and Marks’s wife, Peta Katz, a senior lecturer in anthropology at Charlotte. After the shooting, their home became a respite for Johnson and his partner, Sarah Pollock, a sociologist. The four of them would sit, eat, drink, and talk. Pollock says it helped to be in the presence of friends who were scholars, who not only cared deeply about what had happened but also spoke the same analytical language.

He couldn’t have acted any other way than he did, Katz says they told Johnson. And he acted admirably, she says.

Johnson realized that “what if” questions were pointless. The doors they opened led nowhere useful. In the moment, he had made no deliberate choice. “I just did things,” he says, “and I didn’t get shot.”

He wondered, too, Why did the shooter choose his classroom? Choose that entrance? Choose that day?

But he realized that those questions had no satisfying answers, either. Besides, understanding why the shooter chose his classroom wouldn’t bring him solace, he says, because it would never undo what had been done.

He soon lost his interest in individual actors and discovered doors that seemed to lead somewhere productive. How Johnson talked about the shooting evolved, Katz says. That first night, what came out was “bits and pieces of fear and terror.” Later it became more layered and more nuanced, she says, as Johnson oriented the experience through an academic lens.

The classroom attacker was a young white man. Whether that identity played a role in the shooter’s motivation, Johnson couldn’t say. But when he looked beyond the individual, he could see a pattern.

He thought about the other mass shootings carried out by young white men who wanted to inspire fear. Charleston. Christchurch. Young white men who felt entitled. Young white men who felt resentful.

To better understand, Johnson began to read. He read The Accidental Homo Sapiens, about the messy process of human evolution. He reread Bullshit Jobs, about meaningless work and its consequences. He read White Fragility, about the defensiveness that white people display when their views of race and racism are questioned.

Johnson thought about oppressed people who’ve historically been crushed “under the boot” of white supremacy, as he put it. He thought about how the gains made by those communities upset the applecart for white people who’ve felt entitled to their privileged place in line. He thought about how manliness is often synonymous with violence.

He thought about the environment that gives rise to mass terror, the alchemy that mixes to radicalize young white men.

He talked about those things with Pollock. She, too, found comfort in reading scholarly works after the shooting. They both shunned news headlines in favor of peer-reviewed research about gun politics, masculinity, and socioeconomic decline.

Pollock says she wanted the right kind of information in her brain — information that could clarify her thoughts, not muddy them. She likened it to treating a wound. Cleaning it is useful. But if you continue to touch the wound after it’s clean, she says, “it just hurts.”

They couldn’t avoid every headline. On August 3, a gunman opened fire at a Walmart store in El Paso, Tex., killing 22 people. The police say the 21-year-old white shooter said he was targeting “Mexicans.” The shooter allegedly posted a racist manifesto that drew from the same theory of white genocide cited by the Christchurch mass shooter in New Zealand.

By that time, Johnson and Pollock had moved to Texas, so that he could pursue a Ph.D. at the University of Texas at San Antonio.

On Facebook, Johnson scrolled past coverage of the shooting. He saw little discussion of the victims or of the shooting’s social consequences. Instead, it was endless photos of the shooter, plastered with his name. It reminded him of the Charlotte news coverage, which had filtered through to him despite his efforts to avoid it. He was sick of it, he says.

But Johnson didn’t just want to stew. Now he was an insider, and his insight could be of use to someone. So again he started typing what he’d been thinking about.

What came out was a blog post titled “White Men and Their Toxic White Fragility.” Johnson told his readers to think about the people who commit these atrocities. It’s right-wing white men, he said.

He cited a 2011 paper published in Perspectives on Psychological Science that argues that white people see racism as a “zero-sum game.” Many whites now view anti-white bias as a bigger societal problem than anti-black bias.

The current discourse around racial inequality forces white people to confront their role in maintaining these structures and the benefits they receive, Johnson continued. Meanwhile, men in general are watching their ability to dominate slip, if ever so slightly.

When toxic masculinity and white fragility interact, he wrote, a consequence is extreme violence.

Meanwhile, mass shootings become headlines tapped for nightly ratings, he wrote. Politicians use victims’ names for their own benefit with no real change in sight.

“We,” Johnson concluded, “are sick.”

Writing the piece felt therapeutic. But he knew he was probably preaching to the choir. He assumes that his readers are mostly other anthropologists who are amenable to his arguments. But there’s purpose in pointing out the obvious, he says.

His insight resonated. A racist sounded off in the comments section, he says, but other anthropologists thanked Johnson for his perspective. He was invited to propose a session on the topic at the American Anthropological Association’s annual meeting in November.

But not enough people signed on, he says, and the opportunity fell through. Johnson wasn’t angry, just disappointed. Maybe it’ll happen next year, he says — if people still care next year.

Time crept on. Johnson sat with his feelings, his changed life. The grief that he felt didn’t lift. It was unlike anything else he had experienced.

He had known grief before the shooting. His marriage had ended. Most of the year, his daughter, now 9, lives far away from him. He’s lost his best friend, his grandparents, and, most pivotally, his father.

Two days before Johnson’s 12th birthday, in 1997, his dad died in a drunken-driving accident. Years later, Johnson tattooed on his wrists his father’s birth and death dates. “To remind me to not do stupid stuff,” he says.

The man was always fun but rarely responsible. “Great daddy, terrible father,” Johnson says. As a boy, he processed his emotions by filling a composition notebook full of thoughts.

Rituals offered some comfort. There was dirt to throw on the casket. Hands to shake at the wake. Chicken and dumplings to stockpile in the fridge.

Rituals, Johnson says, create a softer transition for sadness. You’re slowly moved back into society until the feelings that you feel become normal for you.

That didn’t happen after April 30. After the shooting, Johnson did things to feel OK again. Writing was chief among them. But a ritual is a ritual, the anthropologist says, only when it’s recognized by other people.

Other people acted strangely around him. Either they treated him with kid gloves or they grew uncomfortable when the shooting arose in conversation. The air would get heavy. Johnson had gone to one therapy appointment to talk about the shooting, but he never returned. The interaction felt canned. There was this gap, he said, that the therapist couldn’t bridge.

Even supportive friends and acquaintances would tell Johnson, “You’re doing so well,” which he took to mean, “You are able to behave in a way that isn’t a drag, and thus my experience of you is positive.” It could feel that they assumed the trauma hadn’t cut deep, which it had. Or that it was gone, which it wasn’t.

Johnson policed his emotions around others. He didn’t want to be a bummer or display great joy, either. Happiness itself could elicit an intense sense of guilt. In talking with the students who survived the shooting, he heard similar experiences.

Johnson had spent the summer thinking and writing about the broader world. In September he looked inward. He turned his anthropological lens on himself. “I feel trapped in a never ending cycle of grief,” he wrote in a blog post, “and grief is the topic that I want to explore.”

He explained the importance of grieving rituals. In some cultures, people wail. Others self-flagellate. The Malagasy people, in Madagascar, “turn the bones” of the deceased, meaning they exhume the remains of ancestors from the family crypt to be rewrapped in fresh cloth.

But what happens, Johnson asked, when what you are mourning isn’t a deceased relative or friend, “but the death of your old life; a trauma that has transformed you into a new self?”

He didn’t have a clear answer.

What he had were bad days and less bad days and some better days. He had random bouts of depression, anxiety, a fear of going out in public, feelings of lack of control, guilt, and grief, all mixed together.

What he had was a sense of being stuck. Without set rituals, he wrote, people can’t move on. They aren’t allowed to move on. They’re in liminal space. They’re nowhere.

“I can tell you from personal experience,” he concluded, “it is absolutely exhausting.”

Being in a classroom has gotten easier, but Johnson sweats more than he did before the shooting. He’s looked at his students and wondered, Who could be the person who kills me or their classmates? Occasionally, he’s thought, I hope it doesn’t happen today.

It’s a horrible way to think, he says. But it’s the way it is.

He spends his work weeks walking around the San Antonio campus, where large signs remind him that, in many spaces, it is legal to carry guns. Johnson said he’s taken to assuming that there’s a gun in every backpack.

He attends graduate classes with his Ph.D. cohort, most of whom know what happened. They’ve been supportive. Once, during a class discussion of mass violence, another student nudged his foot and asked if he was OK.

As when he was a child, he finds calm in nature. He and Pollock have a favorite spot. On sunny days, they’ll walk through a thirsty creekbed. They scan the dry dirt for rocks to flip, hoping to find something scuttling underneath. They’ll spend hours spotting nothing and then all of a sudden, to their glee, a scorpion will emerge.

The home they’ve bought is bright, filled with books, and decorated with 3-D-printed primate and monkey skulls. Love letters scribbled on sticky notes paper the walls and cabinets. Messages in fluorescent marker decorate windows.

Pollock and Johnson have written notes to each other since they began dating, about three years ago. After the shooting, the notes took on an additional meaning. Pollock says she wants Johnson to feel safe and secure.

“I love you more and more, my amazing soulmate!” reads one note on Johnson’s desk, written on a pale pink heart. “I wish I could hold you and make this better.”

For Pollock, the scariest part of the shooting’s aftermath has been not knowing what Johnson needs from her. She’s done little things, like offer to take an online active-shooter training for Johnson when UT-San Antonio required it. She’s done big things, like just being there, every day.

She tries not to impose her own ideas of how Johnson should feel. When he talks, she wishes she could say something comforting or brilliant. Usually she just listens.

Together they’ve settled into a daily routine. Pollock teaches sociology at Texas A&M University at San Antonio. Johnson studies and writes. They make sure to drink coffee in the mornings together, their ritual.

Around the kitchen table, on a November afternoon, they talked about the shooting. They talked about the questions that still plague other people.

Johnson’s mother, Susan Wrenn, is one of those people. She spends evenings diving deep into topics that pique her interest. For a while, one of those topics was mass shooters. She kept a chart of their character traits and other factors, like their familial relationships or who was president at the time of the massacre. She was trying to pinpoint why they do what they do.

In her own way, Wrenn was attempting to explain the unexplainable. Sometimes, after hours of streaming documentaries or scanning library books, it would feel that she was getting somewhere.

So far, no answer has crystallized. She hasn’t lost hope.

“I keep thinking, it’s not over,” Wrenn says in a phone interview. “I’m going to figure this out.”

“I keep telling her that’s not a thing,” Johnson says.

There are no easy answers, he says. Prosecutors have said that the shooter in his classroom was burdened with student debt. He reportedly told them that he’d committed the shooting as a way to go to prison. His defense lawyer has said he has “a strain of autism.”

To Johnson, those aren’t reasons. They’re bad rationalizations. He’s taught many students who were on the spectrum, many students who were stressed about debt, and they’ve never shot up a classroom. Again, people rely on proximate, not ultimate, causes to explain mass violence. In doing so, they see an incomplete picture. A single color, not a mosaic.

Wrenn thinks her son is working through the five stages of grief. Days after the shooting, she remembers him being intensely angry, a person who was unrecognizable to her.

Johnson sees it differently. The five stages of grief, he says, are bullshit. Other people have expectations of how he, a traumatized person, is supposed to behave. It can come from a place of love. They want him to get better. But it doesn’t work that way.

“Grief,” he says, “isn’t this forward march of progress.”

There is no upward climb. There’s just you, someone new.

At the kitchen table in the autumn light, Johnson tried to think of a metaphor that could explain what being a different person feels like. Everyone wants a metaphor, he said.

But he couldn’t. Because there is none.

There are human experiences that can be understood by loved ones, scholars, and strangers who didn’t live through them. This isn’t one.