US Problem is Not Gun Violence, But White Supremacy

The recent shooting of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile – two unarmed black men – by police in Louisiana and Minnesota respectively, coming on the back of a string of such police shootings in 2016, led to the explosion of shocking gun violence in Dallas, where 12 police officers were shot during an anti-police violence protest.

Such was the fast-paced nature of these events – the shooting of Sterling and Castile, followed by the tragic aftermath in Dallas, that upon arriving in Warsaw for the NATO Summit, President Obama was forced to address the issue twice within a 12 hour period. In his initial response to the shooting of Sterling and Castile he warned of the “racial disparities that appear across the system year after year”, before later describing the subsequent mass shooting and killing of police officers in Dallas as a “vicious, calculated and despicable attack on law enforcement.”

Micah Johnson, the shooter in Dallas, was an army reservist who told the police when surrounded that he wanted to kill white people, especially police officers. He was eventually killed by a bomb the police detonated via a robotic device; the Dallas Police Department claiming that negotiations with Johnson, begun with the objective of persuading him to surrender peacefully, had broken down.

This latest eruption of gun violence once again poses the question of race in America. It poses the question of whether America’s problem is gun control or whether it runs even deeper – i.e. whether it is an issue of white supremacy and racism of which gun violence is merely its most lethal symptom? Is the dehumanization of blacks and minorities that a growing number of the country’s citizens allege merely a continuum of a cultural legacy that goes all the way back to slavery? And does this legacy continue to poison the country’s institutions and law enforcement?

Evidence pointing to the affirmative in answer to each of those questions comes in the shape of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, who with every verbal assault unleashed against Mexicans, Muslims, and minorities throughout his campaign for the White House has seen his support grow rather than diminish. His Democratic Party opponent Hillary Clinton, meanwhile, has on her political record public and vociferous support for her husband Bill Clinton’s infamous crime bill, passed when he was in office in the 1990s, out of which the mass incarceration of black people and minorities – the most socioeconomically disadvantaged demographic in the country – was born.

Black Lives Matter, the grassroots organization formed in response to the murder of Trayvon Martin by armed security officer George Zimmerman in 2012, states on its website that its campaign “is a call to action and a response to the virulent anti-Black racism that permeates our society.” Huey Newton, founder of the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California in the 1960s, described the problem thus: “The policemen or soldiers are only a gun in the establishments [sic] hand. They make the racist secure in his racism.”

Revisiting Malcolm X’s ‘Ballot or the Bullet’ speech of 1963, we come across words that many young black Americans born after he uttered them would find impossible to disagree with. “No, I’m not an American,” Malcolm X said, “I’m one of the 22 million black people who are victims of Americanism. One of the 22 million black people who are the victims of democracy, nothing but disguised hypocrisy. So, I’m not standing here speaking to you as an American, or a patriot, or a flag-saluter, or a flag-waver – no, not I. I’m speaking as a victim of this American system.”

The shocking events that unfolded in Dallas would not have come as a surprise to many. Micah Johnson claims to have been acting alone, but let us not delude ourselves that the murder he embarked upon met with universal revulsion in a country in which mass shootings have become a near weekly occurrence. A sense of justice denied to black people by law enforcement and a judicial system that is not color-blind is more prevalent than even Obama would care to admit.

Speaking of which, liberal America made the mistake of allowing itself to believe the country had left its ugly and shameful legacy of racism behind with the election of Barack Obama as its first black president back in 2008. Obama’s arrival in the White House appeared to mark the neat and tidy denouement that had long been sought to the civil rights struggle of the sixties, announcing America’s post-racial society future and the achievement of the dream so eloquently and passionately outlined by Martin Luther King in Washington so many decades ago.

However rather than signify the culmination of Martin Luther King’s dream of a society shorn of racism and prejudice, an America where men and women are not only created but also treated equal, Obama’s election merely papered over the cracks for an all too brief moment. That the American dream for black people throughout America exists in the form of a nightmare is revealed in social indices – on housing, employment, wealth, crime, etc. – in which their condition of alienation, exclusion, and marginalization is laid bare.

Within the nation’s low income black communities, law enforcement does not exist to protect but to hunt, intimidate, harass and in the last analysis kill them, producing the very climate of anger which Micah Johnson drew upon to commit mass murder in Dallas. White supremacy – an ideology of domination reflected in America’s internal strife and its malign role in the world as an imperialist power – is as American as apple pie.

That said, dehumanization works both ways, calling to mind the sophic words of Friedrich Nietzsche: “Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not because a monster.” Anton Sterling, Philando Castile and the five police officers murdered in Dallas share a bond in death which transcends race, background, or anything else that may have divided them in life.

It’s a sad state of affairs when you have a society in which the only equality to be found is the kind that lies in the morgue.

The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official position of Sputnik.