Opinion | Why Racist Violence Keeps Happening

When I was a child, I loved going to the Dollar General. It was the one place I could pick out any toy I wanted, confident that my mother wouldn’t turn me down because it was too expensive.

I would wander the aisles looking for the perfect item, often settling on a clear plastic water gun or the brown paddle with a red ball attached to a string. I was not particularly good at the game; the slippery little ball would careen this way and that, never quite hitting the sweet spot in the middle. It didn’t matter because the toys from Dollar General didn’t usually last very long.

I do not know what took three African American people to the Dollar General in Jacksonville, Fla., on Saturday. It could have been toys, food, medicine, cleaning supplies or some other low-cost item. I do know they were brutally killed there, and I know that the suspect in their killing was a white man who reportedly had swastika markings on his AR-15-style rifle.

These three people didn’t die because someone hated Dollar General any more than the Black people in Buffalo perished because some mad man had a beef with the produce department, nor any more than Ahmaud Arbery lost his life because of fury at runners. The three African American people at the Dollar General were killed for the same reason the Black churchgoers of Mother Emanuel were slain. They died because they were Black in a country that still produces white supremacists intent on hatred and death.

It is not a total mystery where this hate comes from. Anti-black racism and white supremacy are frequent topics of research in history, law, anthropology, economics, sociology and religion. Yet when the question is raised in classrooms across America, educators get labeled “woke” or “critical race theorists.” If we let some politicians and pundits tell the tale, the study of racism is more dangerous to the Republic than the racism that keeps claiming Black lives.

I do not believe that we can educate ourselves out of racism, and I doubt that the person who attacked the Dollar General could have been diverted by any college course or book. Racism resides in the mind, the heart, twisted imaginations and long-festering resentments that surge in times of perceived loss of power. Racism persists because it is politically, socially and economically useful. It is a way of avoiding looking at one’s own faults and struggles, and instead finding meaning in having someone below you, trapped underfoot. The loss of that perceived hierarchy is a fear that can be tapped into to gain political office, boost television ratings and make money. In a country with a ready supply of assault riffles and anti-Black animus, the results are too often deadly.

What cannot be faced cannot be healed. Addressing anti-Black violence would require that we take seriously the disease of racism that has infected our Republic since its founding. A problem of this scale deserves our best minds and our attention.

African Americans have never relied on government approval to make sense of our plight on this soil. No school board approved W.E.B. Du Bois to write “The Souls of Black Folk” or James Baldwin to compose “The Fire Next Time.” Those projects arose out of deep longing to understand and to be understood, to wrestle some meaning out of irrational hatred.

You can close all the doors and shut the windows, but the truth will seep in through vents and chimneys. Americans must let the truth into the house or it will suffocate itself on the toxic fumes of malice and false memories. We were never as innocent as we like to believe.

This week we celebrate the 60th anniversary of the March on Washington and Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. Too often it is forgotten that the purpose of the March was to argue for jobs and an economic redress that would end Black people’s long sojourn in poverty. Dr. King wanted us to have more options than the toys at Dollar General.

Still, the speech is rightly remembered for the hopefulness of his vision. Despite all that Dr. King had seen, he longed for an outbreak of love on the other side of hatred. He said, “I have a dream that one day down in Alabama with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of interposition and nullification, one day right down in Alabama little Black boys and Black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.”

As if in reply, less than three weeks after that speech, on Sept. 15, 1963, white supremacists bombed the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala., killing four young girls. Those two events say something about the options that remain ever before this country: fight for the outbreak of true community, or for violence and death.

Shortly thereafter Dr. King found himself at a pulpit, delivering a eulogy for children. Reflecting on the meaning of the deaths of these girls, he said, “They say to each of us, Black and white alike, that we must substitute courage for caution. They say to us that we must be concerned not merely about who murdered them, but about the system, the way of life, the philosophy which produced the murderers. Their death says to us that we must work passionately and unrelentingly for the realization of the American dream.” We do not give up in the face of hatred because that would give the enemies of love and justice the victory they so desperately desire.

It is a hard thing to dream while you are mourning, but Dr. King urged us to it.

That work continues. Too many people are comfortable with this nightmare, but some of us still dare to dream.