American legacy

August 4, 2019

    Two in twenty four hours.  Three in less than a week. The accelerating pace and mind-numbing regularity of mass shootings in this country is terrifying.  On the same sultry summer day, both El Paso, TX and Dayton, OH, were the sites of mass shootings carried out by young white men.  While less is known about the body armor-clad Dayton terrorist, the El Paso gunman, who drove ten hours from Allen,TX, to carry out his crime, posted a racist manifesto, proudly declaring his intention to “quell the Hispanic invasion,” (Source:  “Minutes Before El Paso Killing, Hate-Filled Manifesto Appears Online,” by Tim Arango, Nicole Bogel Burroughs and Katie Benner, The New York Times,8/3/19).

     Given the unpredictability and increasing frequency of mass shootings, we could be forgiven for succumbing to the temptation to retreat from the world and curl up in despair.  Instead, we should react with defiant, clarifying and focused rage at the hydra-headed forces condemning us to this fate.

     We should be enraged by our politicians’ continued nihilistic refusal to enact any meaningful gun control laws, or at a bare minimum, laws to get weapons of war out of the hands of civilians.  In the face of a mounting body count, Republicans remain intransigent, despite the fact that an overwhelming majority of Americans favor stricter gun laws, (Source: “Americans support gun control, but doubt lawmakers will act,” by Chris Kahn, Reuters.com, 2/8/19).

     We should be ruthless in critiquing lazy journalism that applies the same hackneyed narrative to each mass shooting in their zeal  to conflate whiteness with innocence. We should not hesitate to call out their use of the same shopworn phrases to describe the killers as “quiet loners,” who were “odd,” but came from a “nice family”, as if suburban subdivisions with manicured lawns were a stand-in for virtue.

     We should be unflinching in our disgust with tech platforms that build algorithms designed to send users down a rabbit hole of extremism.  For them, the ad revenue derived from the increased time on their platforms trumps any concern that they are engines of radicalization, contributing to an army of white nationalist terrorists, (Source:  “YouTube Extremism and the Long Tail,” by Conor Friedersdorf, The Atlantic, 3/12/18).

     We should be enraged by the stochastic terrorist in The White House, whose constant demonization of Latinx immigrants and use of dehumanizing stereotypes about Black people has directly caused a three year spike in hate crimes, endangering people of color, Jews and Muslims, (Source:  “Hate crime rising in 30 US cities, as overall crime rates decline, study finds,”  by Jason Wilson, TheGuardian.com, 7/30/19).

    Most of all, though, we should be angry at ourselves, for our steadfast refusal to confront the stubborn fact that these white supremacist terrorists are the spiritual descendants of the colonists, who, armed with the self-serving philosophy of “Manifest Destiny,” used violence to eject Native Americans from their land, murdering millions in the process.  They are the heirs to those who used violence to subjugate enslaved Africans, ensuring their entitlement to 243 years of free labor at the point of a gun.

      We should be angry at ourselves for not knowing that the underlying rationale for the inclusion of the Second Amendment in the Bill of Rights was to ensure the ability of white slaveholders to protect themselves from Black slave rebellions and to aid anti-Indian militia in their battles with Native Americans, (Sources:  “Was Slavery A Factor in the Second Amendment?“ by Carl T. Bogus, The New York Times, 5/24/18 and Loaded:  A Disarming History of the Second Amendment,  by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, City Lights Books, 2018).

      The inconvenient truth is that murder in the service of white supremacy is as much a part of our legacy as The Declaration of Independence or the First and Fourteenth Amendments.  Running away from that fact won’t make it any less true.