A friend shared a post on her Facebook wall today. “When a black man kills, he's a menace to society. When a foreigner kills, he's a terrorist. When a white man kills, he's psychologically unbalanced.” It provoked some discussion. Here are my thoughts. Our US culture is suffering the psychic cost of our brutal past. I believe that one of the costliest wounds has been our blindness, as Americans, to our common humanity.
The sad proof is the hypocrisy of the benefactors or those who (or we who) might privilege from our historically white supremacist and sexist society when it comes to owning up to even just the hint of the smell of benefiting from this historically American paradigm. The paranoia is delusional. And our citizens have been acting on these delusions. Many of these beliefs are common in U.S. prevailing culture - especially that hooey about being 'blind to color'. The fact that anyone would insist that they have some sort of equanimity or right to position themselves outside the realm of constantly negotiating the racist system our country is encoded with, reveals not just a lack of vision, but a corrupted perspective on par with the violence of a lie. It ignores the suffering of many of our country's citizens. So it denies it.
And denial of suffering is ultimately an act of violence. It is evidence of the blindness that hobbles our nation's psychic growth past our violent history. ...How many of the most recent massacres in our country have been perpetrated by those who actually DO subscribe to terrorist notions, and whose mission it TRULY IS to menace our society? These massacres were 'thought out' to the extent that they were originated in HATE, and fed by a BELIEF. Examples of this type of violence keep our reputation sterling: the Klan/militias. Tim McVeigh. the cross burnt on a neighbor's lawn last summer. the Uni-bomber. the Atlanta child killer. now this massacre. the scorned ex-husband. the man with the boy sniping from the trunk of a car. the guy who shot Gabby Gifford. The shoe bomber. Charles Manson. all of them. All of them are on the dark side of the same society we all more or less live in, or are victim to, or profit from, or are somehow beholden to. They were all Americans with momentary or ideological or ethical or biological factors inspiring an appetite for destruction.
What joins our sense of "who we are" in a country so large? Is it our vision of ourselves (how we convey ourselves in our modes of entertainment or technology- i.e., how we spend our time and money)? Does the media reflect these desires in terms of its profits? Some people are under the impression that any media outlet with the word "news" in the title might be beholden to the US citizenry to also give us quantifiable information so we can optimize our situations in our private and communal lives. Meanwhile the media in our country are awash in violence. Is it celebrated? Violence is undoubtedly iconic entertainment, a pop culture commodity in the US that people gladly pay more money for, all the time.
These things are all connected, but yet it seems their hateful successes depend on NOT being seen; both a cultivated blindness and cloak of invisibility, releasing our responsibility for cultivating a hungry blood lust. This is why our present society is as close to blood thirsty as a society can be, yet the "taste-makers" and "job creators" are loathe to acknowledge responsibility in the matter, let alone any advantage they personally might have had over someone of a different race, culture or religion, during their rise to power in the dominant culture. These are the people who might insist on their blindness to "color". This denial is violence.
If we keep denying what a violent culture we truly are, and that most of the violence here is NOT based in randomness, or spectacle, then we will continue to let this go on and pretend it isn't us. The blood is on all of us now, color-blind or not. The Facebook post isn't about violence. It's about our society's racist perception of violence and how we might be implicated for contributing to the ills of society from whence this killer sprung.
Thursday, Oct 31, 2019 · 10:26:24 AM +00:00 · nicolakphoto
I return to this story based somewhat on the proliferation of the rhetoric “this is not who we are” in the wake of violence, hatred and other fall-out from fear mongering in recent years. It’s a phrase that many of us answer back to with “uh, yes it is.” The vehement disassociation from that which is proving who we are, is the fertilizing denial that fosters the very racist, misogynistic agenda rooted rotten in the past, inadvertently beckoning it forth. This is Us.