On May 14, 2022 Peyton Gendron walked into a grocery store in Buffalo, NY and shot 13 people, killing 10. On June 17, 2015 Dylan Roof walked into a church in Charleston, SC, shot and killed 9 people. Both of the shooters were young white males (18 and 21) and each chose his location specifically because they wanted to target African-Americans.
These events are similar and are equally unacceptable. Most white people I know would happily “flip the switch” on either of these individuals if they were strapped into an electric chair. Most white people I know are furious when dumb-ass white kids or other self-proclaimed white supremacists do something stupid like this. Whether it is as awful as murder or as juvenile as painting swastikas on a synagogue.
It is because of my belief that the vast majority of white people disapprove of and condemn, publicly and privately, these types of events and that the majority of white people want black and brown people to fully participate in the American dream, that I get frustrated with the response of certain black (and white) progressives to these types of tragedies.
Let’s start with a metaphor. I see a man in a Lexus run a stop light and speed off recklessly weaving through traffic. Since all I know for sure is that the man ran a red light and was driving recklessly, it is human nature for me to fill in the gaps in the story with pseudo facts that are consistent with my life experience to explain the things I don’t know. I might assume the guy is wealthy (he’s driving a Lexus), he’s late for an important business meeting (he’s a man with money), and he thinks he’s the most important person on the road (he’s driving recklessly in an expensive car). All of these assumptions make it easy for me to determine that the guy is an asshole.
The truth might be completely different – the guy could be in a hurry because his wife or child was just taken to the hospital with a medical emergency. Maybe the guy just stole the car and is making a getaway. It is these basic underlying assumptions that we make that tend to dictate our perceptions of events.
Meena Harris had to retract a tweet after the Boulder, Colorado shooting in March. The original tweet stated that Violent white men are the greatest terrorist threat to our country. This tweet garnered over 35,000 likes during the short time it was up. When it was reported that the shooter was a 21 year old of middle eastern heritage, she issued a retraction. In her retraction she said, I deleted a previous tweet about the suspect in the Boulder shooting. I made an assumption based on his being taken into custody alive and the fact that the majority of mass shootings in the U.S. are carried out by white men. Her basic underlying assumption, that young white men are often the perpetrators of these types of attacks, lead her to a quick conclusion that fit her world view.
We shouldn’t fault Meena for jumping to that conclusion. The face of mass shootings in the U.S. is a young white male in camo or para-military gear. We’re all a little surprised when it turns out to be something other than that when these terrible events occur. She filled in the gaps of facts she didn’t know with pseudo facts based on her life experience and basic underlying assumptions. I appreciated her honesty in the retraction.
Mark Cuban made a similar admission in 2014. This occurred during the national discourse related to the shooting death of Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman. Part of Zimmerman’s defense was that Martin was wearing a hoodie, making him seem more threatening. Cuban, not trying to defend Martin, admitted during an interview that if he was walking down the street and saw a group of black teenagers in hoodies coming his direction, he would likely cross the street. He tried to soften his answer by saying he’d do the same if it were white guys in motorcycle gang gear. Nonetheless, Cuban was pilloried for his original answer based on a racial stereotype. Just like with Meena, Cuban should not have been so soundly criticized. Like it or not, the black teenager in a hoodie (or group of black teenagers in hoodies) are the face of street crime in the U.S. just as the white kid in camo is the face of mass shootings. It is a source of frustration for white people I talk with that black leaders don’t seem as angry with the black kid in the hoodie who is caught on video committing a violent crime as white leaders are with white kids who shoot up a school or a church.
It didn’t take long for activists to jump on the Buffalo shooting as a means to gain political leverage. Even though all we know for sure is that Gendron was a self-proclaimed white supremacist and hated black people by definition, the rest of the story is already being written based on underlying assumptions. Here’s an article from the Huffington Post that makes a pretty weak attempt to link Peyton Gendron’s actions with the Republican party platform as a cause and effect. Like many progressive constructs, it sounds as logical as someone proclaiming that these kids were possessed by demons, or the event in Buffalo happened because it was a full moon or Venus was on the cusp of Aquarius.
Black progressive activists and white liberals who have embraced the 1619 project and writings of people like Dr. Ibram Kendi interpret these events with basic underlying assumptions about America and particularly white Americans that are often as erroneous as my interpretation of the Lexus driver being a rich, self-important ass. (See my earlier blog on the Narcissism of 1619).
74 million Americans voted for the Republican candidate for President in the 2020 election. 1.5 million viewers tune-in to Fox News everyday. Fox News is the media mouthpiece for Republican politics. If the Republican platform via Fox News is a dog-whistle for this type of activity as writers like Law Ware and Meena Harris believe, and Gendron is not a lone-wolf, but a mainstream Republican as Talia Lavin claims in a recent Rolling Stone article, wouldn’t you think this type of thing would happen more frequently than a once every couple of years? If law enforcement is an extension of white privilege, wouldn’t you see packs of white militia members committing drive by shootings regularly in black neighborhoods while law enforcement turned their heads?
Unfortunately the cold statistics related to these types of events as well as officer-involved shootings of unarmed black people, horrible as they are, do not support the underlying assumptions of those who seek to benefit politically and professionally from these tragedies.
As far as basic underlying assumptions go, it is equally true to say that America has a racist heritage that has disadvantaged and continues to disadvantage black and brown people, or to say, America offers black and brown people in 2022 the best opportunity on the planet to pursue life, liberty, prosperity and happiness. The former is easy to prove. The latter is evidenced by the fact that there is no mass migration of black and brown people out of the U.S. to a country of continent where they believe they have more opportunity. In fact, the southern border is filled with black and brown people from all over the world willing to risk everything just to get here.
Either, but not both of those statements can be adopted as the basic underlying assumption that guides the behaviors of young African Americans. Unfortunately, it’s hard to get rich and famous by preaching and teaching the latter, so those young people are getting fed a steady diet of the former. To the nation’s detriment, I fear.