Another week, another group of families experiencing the grief associated with gun violence. Alton Sterling, Philando Castile, and five Dallas police offers were each shot down in a heinous and vicious manner. To be sure, the circumstances were quite different. Sterling and Castile were murdered by those sworn to protect and serve. The police officers were assassinated while actually protecting and serving nonviolent protestors. Yet each life was precious, and each death was senseless.
Of course there are those who will exploit these tragedies for a narrow ideological agenda. Former Congressman Joe Walsh immediately took to Twitter on behalf of “real America” to declare war on anyone daring to profess “Black Lives Matter.” Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick referred to protestors as “hypocrites” for expecting protection from police officers when shots rang out. In the mind of people like Walsh and Patrick, we are either for the police or against them.
We must resist this level of immature debate and anemic analysis. Neither should we become overly consumed with whether individual cops are “racist,” nor accept the “few bad apples” defense of police departments. Such logic ignores how all officers make decisions in a split second. This is why it is more important to interrogate the prevailing assumptions and stereotypes that inform America’s obsession with militarized policing and incarceration. The evidence is clear. Split-second decisions based on faulty assumptions too often result in black and brown folk being carried away in body bags.
Some years ago I experienced this militarized policing first hand, when several of my fellow alums from Morehouse and Spelman College were in Little Rock, Ark., for a wedding. About ten of us were leaving the hotel when two of the cars accidentally collided. We called the police in order to get police reports for the insurance companies of the involved drivers. Within a few minutes two police cars sped into the parking lot and officers jumped out with their guns drawn yelling, “Put your hands on top of the cars.” They were not responding to our 911 call, but rather, we discovered, to the call of a hotel guest who reported a “gang fight” in the parking lot. We were guilty: black bodies occupying a space that defied the optical politics of who belongs where — bodies which could have easily been executed with the slightest wrong move.
Along with police brutality, we must interrogate our most commonly held assumptions about gun violence more broadly. The National Rifle Association would have us believe, for instance, that the greatest way to combat gun violence is placing guns in the hands of “good guys.” This is why so-called “Stand Your Ground” and concealed carry laws have proliferated in recent years. What do these laws mean when black and brown bodies do not receive the split-second benefit of being considered “good”? As the murders of Sterling and Castile can attest, such laws might as well come with a “whites only” clause.
Slain police officers in Dallas offer another strong counter. A cowardly lone gunman with a semiautomatic weapon was able to wound nine and murder five highly-trained and heavily armed good guys with the efficiency of a battalion. It took a robot bomb to end the raid. One wonders if the N.R.A. will now promote the right to carry concealed bombs.
It’s easy to turn to hateful rhetoric or myths when confronting gun violence. But really that conceals this nation’s fear.
Consider the N.R.A. Its agenda is based on the fears of its white and disturbingly nativist constituency. Visions of an invariable, often hyper-racialized boogey-man convince N.R.A. supporters that security comes from clutching bigger, more advanced weaponry. Unfortunately, as long as most of the members cling tight to their guns, they are unable to let go of the lie that is at the root of their fear — God did not design America for their supremacy and control.
Fear animates state and federal lawmakers. While college campuses, movie theaters, and sacred spaces become killing fields, fear of political backlash from the gun lobby thwarts what the majority of Americans desire: effective gun control legislation. This is why fear informs how police forces patrol communities. Since anybody might have a gun in this nation, police officers embrace a “shoot first, ask questions later” rule of engagement. Couple this blue wall of fear with the pervasive depictions of the “dangerous black man” in the American imaginary, and this is how you end up with over one hundred unarmed African Americans dying at the hands of police last year.
America’s gun obsession fuels this culture of fear. If we are going to move forward as a nation, it is time for us to replace our fear with faith.
We must have faith in our capacity to become a country that does not control large segments of our society based on race and class. And we must have faith that one day this nation will make it as easy to acquire quality education, affordable housing, and living wages as it is to stock a personal gun cabinet. This is our only way forward. If not, this nation might ultimately drown in its own blood.