Dear white Americans: You’re not racist about guns. You’re worse. | Opinion
Dear white Americans,
I come before you with bowed head, heavy heart, and a long-overdue apology.
I’m sorry for doubting you, for wrongly assuming you were turning a blind eye to gun violence, outside of offering up thoughts and prayers after every high-profile shooting, because it was disproportionately hurting people who wear dark skin like I do.
I was wrong. I know now your indifference had nothing, or very little, to do with race. You just don’t care, or more charitably, you care more about a cartoonish version of the Second Amendment, one that has convinced the majority of the residents of the most-prosperous nation Earth has ever known that tens of thousands of bullet-riddled bodies every year – in the form of murder and homicide and suicide and preventable accidents – is a reasonable price for our freedom.
I’m writing this apology in the wake of yet another mass shooting at yet another school, this time at Michigan State University. But, let’s be honest. The details don’t much matter, neither does the location, something you made clear with your reaction to the slaughter of little white boys and little white girls at Sandy Hook a decade ago and white men and white women six years ago at a concert in Las Vegas. That this keeps happening in the U.S. on a level it doesn’t happen anywhere else in the industrialized world says loudly and profoundly that this is what you want.
And to think, I spent all those years harshly judging you for not caring about my high school friend who was blinded after being shot in the head; or my brother’s girlfriend being killed in a drive-by shooting; or the young man whom I tried to mentor who ended up shot dead anyway; or the other one who was shot to death during an incident that claimed the life of a Davidson police officer in North Carolina; or the one sitting on death row in South Carolina because of his involvement in the shooting deaths of two convenience store workers in the Myrtle Beach metro area.
Each of them was black. I thought you didn’t care because they were black. I thought you didn’t commit to doing something serious about our sick gun culture because the victims were so often black. I thought you kept making excuses about why we couldn’t unwind an untenable situation – a culture so saturated in guns we’ve convinced ourselves we need armed-agents of the state to enforce minor traffic violations because it isn’t unreasonable for cops to assume whoever is driving isn’t armed – because you didn’t experience the pain of gun violence the way people who look like I do have.
Historically, race has played a role, with laws saying white men and white boys were legally obligated to enforce slave laws, to Ronald Reagan embracing gun control measures, at least for a while. And it likely still does, just not in the simplistic way I had once imagined. I get why you weren’t moved by Trayvon Martin’s killing, or at least I thought I did until you were equally unmoved by coffins filled with the bullet-riddled bodies of white children.
Rep. Elissa Slotkin of Michigan, after the latest mass shooting we’ll treat like wallpaper, said “you either care about protecting kids, or you don’t. But please don’t tell me you care about the safety of children if you’re not willing to have a conversation about keeping them safe in a place that should be a sanctuary.”
“If this is not a wake-up call to do something, I don’t know what is,” she said.
A 21-year-old Michigan State University student took to TikTok to express her grief about the shooting as well. She’s now a survivor of two mass shootings – the first at Sandy Hook 10 years and two months ago, a fact that she says is incomprehensible.
She’s white, not black.
Again, I apologize for believing you were blinded by race or racism. I didn’t realize you loved Glocks and AK-47s more than you love my kids or even your own.
I won’t make that mistake again.
Issac Bailey is a McClatchy Opinion writer based in Myrtle Beach, SC
