Before I learned about the hail of bullets in Orlando, I was working on a post about Brock Turner, the former Stanford student who sparked a firestorm of indignation, along with his equally oblivious parents, Dan and Carleen, and Aaron Persky, the judge who gave him six months for raping an unconscious woman behind a dumpster. The Turner story interrupted my plans to write about the battle over where transgender people can use the restroom, which I still plan to address in a separate post. These topics are different, but they have this in common: their roots reach deep into the bedrock of our society, and the toxic weeds that have grown from those roots will overrun our garden unless we dig them up.
Good news and bad news
First, the good news: we are standing with, rather than blaming, the victim in the Brock Turner case, and expressing intense, universal grief over the mass murder of homosexuals. There may be people who believe Turner's victim was “asking for it” by drinking too much, or that God's wrath against gays was the real reason for the Pulse nightclub massacre, but if they feel that way, they are mostly keeping it to themselves, because of societal pressures that didn't exist until recently.
The bad news is that we still have a lot to do, and none of it will happen without frank conversations and open minded listening. How often does that happen, these days? And yet, to move forward, we need to communicate, and maybe even achieve the all-but-impossible goal of reaching a consensus that isn't the status quo. Talk about new gun laws and enforcing the current ones is important, but I suspect the results will be the same as always, at least with the current Congress. Instead, perhaps we can use this moment to discuss more fundamental issues. Perhaps we can talk about why far too many people feel they have right to decide who doesn't matter, and then to treat those they have dehumanized accordingly. While we're at it, let's talk about why people like the Turners feel like they've been handled unfairly when their white son, who dabbled in the kind of illegal drugs that would have branded someone with more melanin a thug, was sentenced to even a small amount of jail time for striking a mortal blow against a young woman's psyche by invading her body, an act for which none of the Turners shows any real remorse. Let's talk about what should be an uncomplicated idea: that human worth isn't determined by gender, race, ethnicity, religion, or sexuality.
Turner's sentence was part of a pattern
First, the Turner case, which was an egregious example of a trend. Every day, young white men and women get slapped on the wrist for crimes that send young African American and Hispanic defendants to jail for long periods of time. I predict that judges will go back to business as usual, sentencing white youths more leniently than black or brown youths, even if the outcry against Brock Turner puts him in jail a bit longer.
We are gradually moving forward in dismantling the rape culture, but the fear of young black and brown men is still deeply entrenched, a pernicious cycle of criminalizing black and brown children and entitling their white counterparts that starts when those children are very young. The stories I hear from friends, family, and acquaintances reinforce the statistics: teachers discipline black children more quickly and harshly than white children, sometimes for the most minor infractions, or no real infraction at all. Conversely, a former student of mine, a black teacher in an integrated school, recently posted on Facebook about attempting to discipline a white female student of his, sending her to the principal only to have her reappear five minutes later, with a smirk on her face. The message is clear: white skin grants authority, and impunity. This may not be the case every time, but it happens far too often to ignore.
White skin also confers individuality. As stated in a viral tweet made by Kumail Nanjiani in February of 2015, “It must be pretty cool to be white and just represent yourself and not your entire race.” The majority of mass shootings and “deranged fan” incidents, such as the tragic death of Youtube star Christina Grimmie, involve white men. In light of this, how do we justify lumping Muslim boys, black boys and Hispanic boys together, while giving white boys a chance to prove themselves, positively or negatively?
Love, not hatred or indifference
Maybe it's because the opposite of love is indifference, and the people with the most power don't care. Ever noticed that the media routinely ignore tragedies that happen in Africa? The week of the Orlando shooting, there was a deadly flood in Ghana, and Boko Haram, who have sworn allegiance to ISIS, killed 18 people at a funeral. People superimposed flags over their Facebook profile pictures when there were mass shootings in Paris, but only my black friends seemed to even react to an even more horrific event that took place around the same time in Kenya. Is it because people in some parts of the world are expected to die violently, but in the so-called First World, such a thing is unthinkable, except in the inner city? Why do we accept this?
Sadly, what I just described is accepted as a fact of life in the inner city, too. This brings me to hatred, the rich soil that nourishes the weeds. When we are treated with indifference, disrespect, or open hostility, we start to feel that we must deserve it. Self-hatred is a virulent cancer, unique in its ability to kill people other than the primary victim. How many people act out by repressing, injuring, or killing themselves and others because of a toxic sense of shame, or rage at the society that inspired it?
Maybe it's time for a new paradigm, where ALL of us realize, once and for all, that race, gender, and sexuality aren't the determining factors in personal worth. If all people have worth, we can't randomly kill, rape, or oppress them. If all people, including us, have worth, we can finally do unto others as we would have them do unto us, regardless of the religious beliefs we hold, or lack. What the world needs now, to quote Hal David, is love, sweet love.
Love doesn't have to mean spontaneous attraction. I'm defining love as choosing to behave in loving ways, even if we don't feel like it. This includes loving ourselves, something every group of people can strive to achieve; I would be remiss not to mention that there are many in all of the groups I've mentioned, both majority and minority, who have chosen the positive path of self-love without attaching it to contempt for the "other." Can't we join them? It may sound simplistic, but really, humanity has tried hatred and indifference. If we keep doing what we've been doing, we'll end up where we are headed, and that destination isn't pretty. Let's stop rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.