I Just Assumed

I assumed he was white.

It's just a gut reaction whenever I hear about a mass shooting, I think "white man." Like kiddie rape and wire fraud, mass murder has been designated a "white crime" in my mind the same way crack dealing has been labeled a black one. It doesn't matter what the stats say, that's how I see the world.

I figured the man who killed nine people at a beer distributor was white, and I promptly forgot about the sad, but unsurprising incident. Consequently, I was shocked when a friend told me that the young man who killed his co-workers after coming in to be fired was a black man.

You can imagine how surprised I was when I learned his family claims that he killed all of those people because of racism.

Lately, I've been reading a lot of Walter Mosely's novels. Those of you who have read his work know that racism is a character in every single book Mosely creates. It takes different faces and it has different characteristics, but it's always stalking the pages. Mosely loves to discuss what it's like to be black in a country that ain't.

One of the themes running through his work is the anger and cowardice that lives inside the heart of an abused man. And, in Mosely's work, black men are often abused in a variety of ways. By their families, by their employers, by their lovers and, ultimately, by themselves. The abuse isn't limited to black men, but, as a man, Mosely's insight seems truest when he's talking about black men.

I don't know the young man who shot up that beer business, but I think I understand a little of his killing rage. Maybe his slights weren't as serious as those once endured by our ancestors, his degradation was likely only a pale shadow of the abuse blacks have faced in times past. But, his dreams were likely larger as well. He probably had accepted and embraced the lie of the America Martin Luther King Jr. once imagined, and which corporations tell us has been achieved every February. A color-blind America where it's only about the content of man's character, not the melanin content in his skin.

Mama Lorraine told us about dreams deferred, didn't she.

Shriveled, rotten dreams fester and ferment inside a man's mind and the bitter wine they produce is more than mildly intoxicating. The wine of the grapes of wrath does strange things to a psyche. It makes it seem reasonable to kill nine people instead of finding another job. It makes suicide seem like an acceptable ending to a day filled with the blood and pain of others.

It makes you mad.

No excuses can be made for murder. Sticks and stones have not ceded their domain to words.

But, while there is no justification, there is understanding. There is understanding of the madness that accompanies racial injustice. The madness that makes you want to lash out and forces you to distrust the aims of authority figures. That madness says that you have the right to join others at playing judge, jury and executioner.

Being told that you are less than, that you deserve death and denigration for the mere crime of your birth is a twisting thing. It twists reality, it twists minds, it twists morality. It twisted that young man who killed nine people, and it twists other people every day in large and small ways.

So, I guess I shouldn't have been surprised that we ended up with a big mess. And neither should you.




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