This is the weekly column written by Blavity:Politics Senior Editor Kandist Mallett.
At its foundation, America is a place of violence. This country was created through colonization and the genocide of the indigenous people of this land. It was able to become rich and powerful through the kidnapping and enslavement of African people. That violence has been continued on a state level through police killings and military occupations around the world.
If we want to know what the source of mass shootings are, then we must look beyond the recent rise of white supremacy acts that have occurred under Trump’s presidency, and instead, examine the white supremacy that has long existed within this country.
On August 3, 21-year-old Patrick Wood Crusius went to a Walmart shopping store in El Paso, Texas, and killed 20 people, injuring 26 others. The shooter wrote a manifesto saying the reason he was carrying out the terror attack was because of his fear of a “Hispanic invasion”. The shooter was a self-identified Trump supporter, and his manifesto repeated much of the rhetoric being heard on Fox News.
On Wednesday, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) conducted the largest single-state raid in U.S. history. Across Mississippi, ICE targeted seven poultry plants and arrested 680 people, leaving hundreds of children separated from their parents and left alone on their first day of school. While this act of terror may not have led to any immediate deaths, the fear and uncertainty it produced amongst the 680 people arrested and their families, as well as the larger immigrant community, are the same.
This country can’t, on one hand, be horrified by a mass shooter that is targeting immigrants and then ignore an institutional structure that is created to target and terrorize those same immigrants. Our government continues to instill a fear of the “other” by using such rhetoric as “securing our borders” and “illegal immigrants.”
Since the inception of immigration laws, white Americans have had this fear that non-white immigrants were a threat to their own safety and growth. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was created in defense of white “racial purity.” Since then, the U.S. has continued to pass laws that have made it difficult for non-white people to immigrate and become citizens of this country.
The shooting in El Paso is a symptom of a much larger problem. White supremacy is not just lone wolves in 8chan, but, rather, it is something that is institutionally upheld through laws and governmental departments. This is the very reason why reports that a State Department foreign officer is leading a white nationalist organization isn’t shocking news, or that around 400 current and former law enforcement officers were found to be members of various Facebook hate groups.
So yes, let’s talk about gun control and changing the culture around guns in this country. But, let’s also talk about our immigration system and how we talk and treat immigrants in this country and how that also played a part in these deaths.
