Just Another Day in Post-Racial America
Notes on the Shooting of Two African Americans in Kentucky
Notes on the Shooting of Two African Americans in Kentucky
If you say it wasn’t racial
When they shot him in his tracks
Well I guess that means that you ain’t black
It means that you ain’t black
— Drive-By Truckers, “What It Means”
I’m struggling for words. A white man with a history of mental illness, racist rants, and domestic violence walks into a supermarket, pulls out a gun and kills two African Americans. The story gets virtually no play in The New York Times. AP carries it but buries it on its website. The same goes for all the other major papers.
The story, however, brings together all of the strands of America in the Age of Trump: The visceral hatred floating in the air — hatred for black, brown, and Muslim; our unwillingness to take gun violence seriously; and the way we’ve co-opted mental health as a catch-defense when a white man is responsible; the different ways in which white and black suspects are treated; the different worth we apply to black victims.
But because just two people were killed — one the cousin of a friend of mine — it apparently is not worth our time.
Here is what the AP reported: A white man walked into a Kroger’s in Jeffersontown, Kentucky, just outside Louisville, “pulled a gun from his waist and shot a man in the back of the head, then kept shooting him multiple times ‘as he was down on the floor.’” The shooter then “reholstered his gun, walked outside and killed a woman in the parking lot.” Multiple officers converged on the scene, captured the man, and charged him with murder.
The man — I’ve decided not to name him in this piece — remains in custody and alive.
Imagine the roles were reversed. Imagine a black shooter. Ask yourself whether you think he would have survived, whether you think he would have escaped the fate that greeted the long list of dead black men killed by police in recent years.
And it wasn’t his only run in with police. In 2009, according to WDRB, the Kroger’s shooter “was pulled over for weaving in traffic” and then charged a deputy after he jumped from his car. Again, imagine the outcome had he been black.
Imagine the shooter was an immigrant or a Muslim, imagine the coverage that would blanket cable news, the conspiracy theories that would be floated on Fox, and the fiery rhetoric President Donald Trump would offer his base.
The shooter, however, was a 51-year-old white man, one with a history not only of mental health issues, but of run ins with law enforcement, domestic abuse, racist behavior, and an apparent sex crime. His gun rights had been stripped from him twice, and federal law would appear to prohibit him from owning a firearm — and yet, he walked into Kroger’s with a holstered hand gun.
It’s too early to know how he obtained the gun. But given the truck-size holes that exist in our gun regulations, it should surprise no one that he managed to get his hands on one.
To the extent that we will discuss this shooting, assuming that we will at some point, it will be framed as a mental health issue, as a lone and troubled man — and all of the larger questions will get shunted aside. It is clear that the shooter was troubled, but focusing on this one admittedly large piece of the puzzle too often allows us to ignore the other intersecting elements, and especially the role of race.
These were not random victims — as the reporting already has made clear. The gunman apparently yelled out to a white bystander “Don’t shoot me. I won’t shoot you. Whites don’t shoot whites.” And police are reporting that he “tried to enter the predominantly black First Baptist Church of Jeffersontown about 10 minutes before the Kroger shooting” — an eerie echo of Dylann Roof and the Mother Emanuel A.M.E. Church shooting three years ago.
As Shaun King writes, the shooter “made his intentions pretty damn clear “ that he “came there to shoot black people.”
Trump says the simmering anger in this country is primarily caused by the news media, but I’m pretty sure that’s not what caused Bush to shoot and kill a grandfather in front of his grandson and then a mother pushing some groceries through the parking lot.
It was racism. These killings were hate crimes. Saying otherwise is not only an insult to the victims and their families, but to the entire black community of Louisville, which is reeling right now from this.
There will be those who say I am unnecessarily racializing and politicizing this atrocity. Let the process run its course, they will say. They said the same thing about Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, and Philando Castile. They said the same thing about Mother Emanuel. They’ll say it now, and I suspect they will say it again and again, because race is the inescapable fact of American life, though only 14 percent of the population live this reality on a day-to-day basis.
If you can’t see it, you’re not looking closely enough. If you can’t see this is a hate crime, then maybe you’re part of the problem.
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Read my column on the Bothum Jean shooting at The Progressive Populist.
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