Like many, I am unsure what to think of the gun violence in America. The recent shootings of two black men were captured on video and leave little room for question. Both were armed, but in the one case, Alton Sterling, where the actual shooting was captured on video, it was clear enough that he had been restrained and could not use his gun, even had he wanted to do so. Yet the call, "he has a gun" led almost immediately to the pop-pop-pop of gun shot heard in the video. In the other case, Philando Castile, it will remain forever unclear whether Castile was reaching for his gun, but given his background and the circumstances, there is plenty of room to doubt that he was doing so. Yet, we are told, “This had nothing to do with race and everything to do with the presence of the gun that Mr. Castile had,” Minneapolis attorney Thomas Kelly told Time magazine, adding that Yanez is “deeply saddened” for Castile’s family. I would imagine that, if they were around to be asked why they had the guns, both would have responded with "self-protection," but the gun did little to protect them and in both cases the mere presence of the gun led to their shooting.
In both cases, I do suspect it had quite a bit to do with the "presence of the gun," though not everything. It is one thing for a white man to carry a gun for "self-defense," quite another for a black man to do so. A white man has little reason to believe that he carries the gun in "self-defense" from the police and other legal authorities, unless he chooses to believe so. One thinks of Cliven Bundy in their armed occupation of federal land, brandishing weapons in "self-defense" against the government itself. According to CNN, he cited his faith in a speech to members of the socially conservative Independent American Party in St. George, Utah. "The Lord told me ... if (the sheriff doesn't) take away these arms (from federal agents), we the people will have to face these arms in a civil war. He said, 'This is your chance to straighten this thing up.' " Most white Americans, however, are not engaged in civil war against the government, and have little reason to believe that they must defend themselves against the police. The two videos mentioned above, however, along with a number of incidents in the recent past, do tend to reinforce the impression within the black community that they are under siege by the police, that a routine traffic stop could turn into what appeared to be an outright assassination. While there is a conspiracy laden paranoia fueling the likes of Cliven Bundy sense that he is engaged "in a civil war," there are the facts of daily life, captured on video, fueling the protests of Black Lives Matter and the sense that they are engaged "in a war of liberation." It is perhaps not surprising that we are again hearing the black panther party, not as an historical artifact, but as a resurgent presence urging racial violence to throw off the oppressor.
It is perhaps also not surprising that a troubled individual might take up the call, and five police officers at a peaceful protest were shot and killed by a sniper. While I'm sure that details will emerge surrounding the shooter here, just as the details emerged to surround the Orlando shooter, and they will likewise support a theory that a deeply troubled individual latched onto an extremist black nationalist point of view which provided not only an explanation for his inner turmoil, but also a path to glory denied him in a more quotidian reality. People seemed puzzled that he seemed dissatisfied with the Black Lives Matter movement, but one suspects, had he survived the robo-bomb blast that killed him, he would have said that peaceful protest was insufficient, that black people have to take up arms to end the oppression, that we are engaged in a civil war and must "straighten things up." He wanted to kill white people, no doubt, just as the shooter at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church wanted to kill black people, no doubt, and the details of his life too will support a theory that he was a deeply troubled individual who had latched onto an extremist white nationalist point of view which provided not only an explanation for his inner turmoil, but also the path to the "race war" that he hoped to ignite to "straighten things up." The modes of discourse fueling radical islamic terrorism are the mirror image of the modes of discourse fueling black against white violence. The modes of discourse fueling black against white violence are the mirror image of the modes of discourse fueling white against black violence. We are caught in the infinite regress of a tunnel of mirrors with no real escape.
While identity politics can be rational, revealing the inequities in the enlightenment happy state of "justice for all," for the most part it is pre-rational. I do not recall a pre-birth checklist where I had to select from the options of identity. There were no row of boxes labeled gay or straight, black or white, muslim culture or christian culture, male or female. I did not choose the attributes most significant to an identity politics -- a straight white male within a predominantly christian culture -- yet there you have it. Rationality implies the deliberation of choice, but if being a straight white male is all you need to know of me to vilify me, even worse to vilify me to the point of killing me, something has gone dreadfully wrong. It goes almost without saying, but the most extreme modes of discourse target, both literally and figuratively, those aspects of identity that come before choice and an anger inflamed hatred erase or distort any choices that might come after. On Breitbart, for example, ran an article headlined: "New Black Panthers and BlackLivesMatter activists protesting the deaths of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile were arrested and weapons were confiscated Saturday evening in Baton Rouge, Louisiana." The article itself is mostly a series of videos supplied through Twitter feeds, but it's the comments that most interest me. One reader, or perhaps watcher, commented:
Its sad that most black Americans are so blinded by the victim narrative, hatred, and ignorance, they don't realize they traded one plantation for another. The democrats simply use them for votes now instead of in the fields. I know that might be a [sic] insensitive thing to say, but i [sic] know if the black population woke up and took a look at their culture, youth, and welfare dependency, then they would be outraged at the farce they've bought into for decades.
There's so much wrong with this comment that one hardly knows where to begin, and perhaps that's the fundamental problem. To point out one's "insensitivity," one's lack of empathy, doesn't excuse it. On the contrary, it exacerbates the problem and simply reveals the "insensitivity" as intentional. It just might be, perhaps, that the "black population" buys into the "victim narrative," because they have been subjected to hatred and ignorance. It just might be, perhaps, that the black population has looked at their "culture, youth, and welfare dependency" and discovered that it's inherent problems can be explained, if not wholly, at least in part, by the sorts of systemic racial injustice that leads to the sorts of shootings we are witnessing throughout the nation. It might just be, perhaps, that movements like the civil rights movements in the 60s and the current Black Lives Matter movements are attempts to rise above the "victim narrative," and assert their basic rights as Americans. It might just be, perhaps, that the more radical New Black Panthers are simply turning the tables, taking up arms to make the victimizers the victims, and capitalizing on their "chance to straighten things out."
I am not qualified to speak for the "black population," or for that matter individual black people. I cannot condone violence, and don't -- period -- and violence doesn't beget empathy, it begets more violence -- period. Had it ended there, given the acknowledgement of insensitivity, one might be able to engage in some discussion, enlarged the realm of his empathy, but of course it didn't end there. If one needed a tutorial in "hatred and ignorance," the continuing discussion provided one. Commenting on his comment, another writer wrote: "They are to much concerned about their next joint and whiskey to care. And it is sad! If their grand mothers of old were around, someone would get a switching to remember." To which another commenter wrote: "WRONG DUMBASS,,, THEIR GRANDMOTHERS TAUGHT THEM TO KILL WHITEY JERK OFF." And it escalates from there. Another commenter wrote: "They are to [sic] fuc*ing dumb and stupid to figure out that they are being used by Obama and Hillary. Obama and Hillary don't give a rat's ass about them. Obama and Hillary are just using them to bring in martial law. Afterwards, the dumb asses will be sent to the DHS camps." To which the previous commenter wrote: "THOSE IGNORANT YARD APES HAVE ZERO SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC SKILLS ,, THEY ARE ONLY GOOD FOR ONE THING,,,, FERTILIZER FOR WATERMELONS" and again "THE NAGGERS ARE STUPID IMBECILES THEY WILL NEVER WAKE UP,, IN FACT THE WHITE MAN NEEDS TO PUT THEM ALL TO SLEEP,,, PERMANENTLY ! SMILE WAIT FOR FLASH COCONUT." One really can't engage in discussion or argumentation on the commenters core points because there are no core points. At basis, it's an affirmation of faith in white identity and a call to genocide against the "black population."
If I were persistent enough, I'm sure I would find black nationalist sites, comparable to white nationalist sites, that did issue comparable calls to violence, and it would be equally dispiriting. I did search the more "liberal" web sites (Salon, Huffington Post, et cetera) for a comparable call to violence, but I couldn't find it, at least not as immediately or as easily as I found it on the conservative Breitbart, which tends to indicate that it IS worse than I would want to believe. I am not the first to say this, but there is an asymmetry on the conservative side. Former congressman Joe Walsh, for example, took to twitter and wrote: "3 Dallas Cops killed, 7 wounded. This is now war. Watch out Obama. Watch out black lives matter punks. Real America is coming after you." Walsh later revealed that Twitter deleted the tweet." While we might be thankful that he is an ex-congressman, it nevertheless points at the degree to which ostensibly mainstream republicans and their leadership are aligned with what can only be called white nationalist thinking. While we might point out that Trump has taken a more "conciliatory tone" after the shootings, that doesn't quite qualify him to be a "racial healer." One doesn't have to dig far to find him "re-tweeting" broadly racist memes from white supremacist sites, which shows at the very least a propensity to believe the worst about the "black population." As reported by PolitiFact, "a day after a black activist was kicked and punched by voters at a Donald Trump rally in Alabama, Trump tweeted an image packed with racially loaded and incorrect murder statistics." I won't repeat the statistics, but again as reported by PolitiFact, the original tweet could be "traced the original image back to a Twitter stream that appears to originate in the United Kingdom and features a modified swatiska with the line 'Should have listened to the Austrian chap with the little mustache.'"
So, what happens if Trump is elected, if the mentality represented above prevails into something resembling power? I really don't know, but I do know that the "problem" and our developing "troubles" will not go away. I doubt that the "black population" of the US will simply bend to his attitudes in quite the same way that a corporate employee bends to the will of the CEO, nor will they be quite as compliant as the jewish population was for the "Austrian chap with the little mustache." The worst hopes of the likes of a Cliven Bundy, or the church shooter, might well be realized, and a form of "civil war" might well erupt. It will not be Obama who declares martial law and calls upon the national guard, and best case scenario, we will revisit the 60s and early 70s. The worst case scenario is something for dystopian, post-apocalyptic fiction, and I will leave it those with darker, more paranoid imaginations than my own.
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