I’m tired of “thoughts and prayers.” Put Up or Shut Up.

Y’all, I’m tired. I’m tired of our do-nothing congress responding to every mass shooting with “thoughts and prayers.” I’m tired of our media refusing to acknowledge the cause of these gunmen’s actions. I’m tired of conservatives pretending “mental illness” is the only reason these hateful men commit the acts that they do. Frankly, Orlando was not about “mental illness,” your “thoughts and prayers” won’t make homophobia go away, and a refusal to acknowledge homophobia as an issue that needs to be called out in all its forms will just embolden and legitimize the viewpoints of men like Omar Mateen. Now y’all were quick to call this mass shooting an act of terrorism and try your damndest to blame it on Islam. However, when Dylann Roof walked into a black church, gunned down nine black folks, and left a manifesto outlining the racial motives behind his attack y’all couldn’t even call it racism. Y’all sent “thoughts and prayers,” blamed his attack on “mental illness,” and refused to even acknowledge that his hateful racists thinking led to his hateful racists actions. Why do we always refuse to acknowledge the systemic issues within the United States? Instead, we legitimize hatred of folks that are not white, heterosexual, cisgendered, or christian by calling bigotry “controversial.” Y’all, it is not offensive to call a spade a spade. Dylann Roof is a racist, Omar Mateen is a homophobe, and their radicalization is endemic of a country that thinks being shamed for racism and homophobia is far worse than actually committing acts of racism and homophobia.

 

You don’t think that’s the case? Tough luck, I got some bad news for you big fella – that is the world we live in and it is unacceptable. Just look at how the media tolerates and courts Donald Trump. The man calls Mexicans “rapists and murderers” and the media wants to call his statements “controversial.” That’s not controversial, that’s disgusting. That’s xenophobic. That’s bigoted. Lots of things we can call Trump’s statements, controversial ain’t one of them. Over 100 LGBTQ+ folk are murdered or wounded in the worst mass shooting on US soil in recent history and our media does not even have the gall to point at the elephant in the room, just like they can’t seem to muster the “courage” to call Donald Trump’s statements bigoted. We’re told “don’t politicize Orlando” by conservatives that just spent how many months politicizing transgender use of bathrooms? Get out of my face with that mess. You think there isn’t a problem? You think hatred of people we can readily identify as different isn’t rampant? I’m gonna need y’all to open y’all’s eyes cause y’all lyin to y’all selves. We got Christian pastors praising the shooter but some of y’all gonna still gonna play deaf, dumb, and blind to the hatred all around us and blame Islam or “mental illness.” Y’all ain’t fooling anyone. You can fool y’all selves but you’re not fooling me.

 

The Orlando shooter was a regular on terrorist watchlists and legally acquired a firearm. How does that happen? Why is that okay? Why did our Senate just shoot down four bills that could potentially prevent men like Omar from legally acquiring firearms? I need y’all to put up or shut up. Name another country that would have allowed this man to legally acquire a firearm. I’ll wait. Are we going to continue to give men that actively want to hurt us the means to do so, or are we going to do the right thing and nip this problem in the bud? I want y’all to think about what type of America you want to live in. An America where blatant bigotry is tolerated instead of repudiated? An America where any madman with malice in his heart can walk into a store, acquire a firearm, and carry out his bigoted plans? Maybe an America where we blame “mental health issues” on all of our problems but continue to offer up no solutions? I don’t know what y’all’s vision for America is but I hope it isn’t any of those. We failed Sandy Hook, Charleston, and Orlando. We fail when we refuse to acknowledge and shame hate. We fail when we refuse to do something about our lax firearm regulations. We fail when we blame “mental illness” but do nothing for our mentally ill. And we will fail again when the next individual with a hateful agenda decides to shoot up a school, church, or club. Until we call out hate, implement common sense gun control, and stop using “mental health issues” as a shield to hide behind when confronted with our culture’s systemic bigotry, nothing will change. Nothing will change, y’all.

New Year, Same Problems

About two weeks ago, on the 2nd of January, a little over a dozen armed white men took over a federal wildlife refuge in Oregon over they have been calling “the tyrannical overreach of the federal government.” They don’t like mandatory minimum sentencing laws and they don’t like complying with federal land use regulations but being frustrated does not give people the right to mount an armed resistance against the federal government. Furthermore, regardless of their claims, they are in clear violation of the constitution and U.S. law. Yet these men have not been removed by local or federal law enforcement. In fact, the response by local law enforcement has been cordial in some cases. Yes, some individuals have asked the militants to leave but, by and large, both the initial and ongoing response have been positive. There is something wrong with this whole situation. How is it that a couple of armed white men can just occupy a federal building, tell the world that they are ready to kill or be killed, and not be immediately removed or apprehended – does white privilege really extend to would-be insurgents?

The response these men have received is in stark contrast to the media coverage and law enforcement response Black Lives Matter protesters have received. When a group of armed individuals takeover federal territory and threaten the use of force to coerce the U.S. government into legislative action, one would think it would be all over the mainstream media and that the coverage would be negative. Yet the media coverage only served to highlight the privilege white people in this country experience. Mainstream media outlets, from ABC to Fox News, failed to truly highlight the gravity of these individual’s actions, initially characterizing them as peaceful protesters. One outlet in particular, Fox, went so far as to suggest that open rebellion is authorized by the constitution. CNN went so far as to attempt to draw a parallel between these men and typically peaceful protesters of color by stating that these men aren’t looting or destroying property. Such a parallel blatantly ignores the fact that the actions these men have taken are seditious, treasonous, and insurrectionist and that protesters are not the ones looting or destroying property. When even the so-called “mainstream liberal media” falls prey to implicit racial biases while conducting real time coverage of events, we know we have a problem.

Oregon is a blue state, the most they have done is ask the militants to leave. When Minnesota, another blue state, had a run in with Black Lives Matter at Mall of America, law enforcement arrived like they were entering a warzone. We are talking about states like Oregon that have liberal meccas like Portland in their borders and a state, Minnesota, that was called the 2nd most liberal state in the Union in 2014. They are not in deep south red states. Suffice it to say, if armed people of color or Muslims took over federal land and threatened violence in the face of attempted removal by law enforcement, we would be seeing a different kind of media coverage from outlets across the American ideological spectrum. My friends, do not tell me that there is not an implicit bias or that we are now “post-racial” or “post-racism.” There is no one that is not guilty of some kind of implicit bias in this country. What does that say about us as a people? It says we have not jumped the racial hurdles we faced during Katrina. The media has not learned much since that tragedy, Katrina occurred over 10 years ago and the consideration afforded these men and the lack of consideration afforded peaceful unarmed black protesters is eerily similar to the characterization of white families as “scavenging for survival” and black families as “looting.” Both white and black families were merely trying to survive in the midst of a tragic natural disaster. Yet one group of people (white people) were cast in a positive light while another group of people (black people) were cast in a negative light. All that does is feed into and reinforce the implicit biases we as a country are guilty of holding.

My friends, we have to admit that we have a problem in this country. That problem is white supremacy and its tools, implicit bias and racism, are insidious and lead to dangerous outcomes for people of color, like a 12 year old child with a toy gun being fatally shot within 2 seconds of law enforcement arriving on the scene. We have to admit that white progressives, as well-meaning as we are, can also fall prey to the same primitive thinking and stereotyping that reinforces systemic biases and racism in this country. My fellow progressives, if we truly want to move forward as a nation and represent a post-racial tomorrow, we must be conscious of our own biases that do feed into age-old stereotypes of people of color – biases that often lead to catastrophic outcomes for communities of color.

 

Institutionalized, Racism among Millennials

Last week, the United States was given a harrowing reminder of her dark past and her troubling present. A man by the name of Dylann Roof committed an act of terrorism in Charleston, South Carolina against nine African Americans in the historic Emmanuel African Methodist Episcopal church on the anniversary of a failed slave revolt by Denmark Vesey after seven months of planning. This man is 21, driven by a white supremacist ideology, and part of a generation we often state is less racist and prejudiced than prior generations. So, how does a millennial become so radicalized in a color blind post-racial society?

One explanation is that our society is neither color blind nor post-racial and that the myth of a color blind post-racial society has allowed millennials to avoid directly addressing their prejudices. Some social scientist posit that millennials actually harbor just as many racial stereotypes as their parents, and that America’s history of structural and institutionalized racism combined with a mythos of color blind post-racism will only sow the seeds for a system where we have racism without racist. When we examine millennial ideology, we find the same race based divides on issues like criminal justice reform, affirmative action, so-called “reverse racism,” and police misconduct of previous generations. Furthermore, although millennials are said to be the most educated generation, they also happen to be the generation that gets much of their information from social media. It is no wonder Dylann was so easily radicalized when he searched for the phrase “black on white crime” and came upon the Council of Conservative Citizens, an organization categorized as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, where the implicit biases he developed growing up in the United States were given fertile ground to grow and bloom into full blown racism.

Perhaps millennials are not so far flung from the Jim Crow era that they would so readily discard the vestiges of racism, both structural and institutionalized. By telling this generation that color does not matter and that racism is over, we have given them a blank check to ignore the prejudices they may develop over their lifetime through media. When one grows up exposed to a media culture that attributes crime committed by people of color to a character flaw within people of color, it is hard not to develop biases. When one is bombarded by nightly news that disportionately reports black crime, it would be hard to not unwittingly buy into the narrative being pushed. Dylann states in his manifesto that what led to his “awakening” was the Trayvon Martin case, that while watching the news it was readily apparent that Zimmerman was right and that Trayvon was wrong. It would be wholly disingenuous to say the media reporting of the Trayvon Martin case was not biased. There wasn’t a moment during that case that Trayvon was not portrayed as a “thug” or “hooligan” or “troublemaker” by mainstream televised media.

Millennials like Dylann, no matter how far removed from America’s days of overt racism, are just as susceptible to succumbing to the influence of a toxic ideology like white supremacism, and if we never have an honest discussion about systemic and institutionalized racism more millennials are liable to go the way of Dylann and that would have devastating consequences for race relations in America. Until we talk about race we won’t mature as a country. We’ll continue to lose lives to far right ideologues, both ideologically and literally. It’s gonna be hard y’all, but it needs to be done.