The Charleston massacre surprised some around the world who thought
an African American President meant the nation's days of racism were
history…
Reputation is the general opinion that people have about someone or
something, and although Americans have a very high opinion of
themselves, and this country, that is simply not the case around the
world. Even setting aside the event in Charleston this week, it is easy
to understand why, like a few astute Americans, people around the world
do not have a very high opinion of a nation they rightly describe as
structurally violent and racist.
If there is only one thing the world has learned
about Americans, it is that besides being inordinately racist, they
typically resort to violence to achieve their goals at home and abroad.
That being the case, there is nothing un-American about the Confederate
racist who gunned down nine innocent African Americans in a place they
considered a sanctuary; their church. Violence, particularly gun
violence, against people of color and to solve differences is explicitly
American, and as the world sees it, shameful.
Whether Americans believe it or not, people from
around the world and outside of America’s immediate sphere of influence
get a very accurate picture of this country because they are not fed by
America’s corporate conservative media. The latest race-driven attack on
a specific group of people was not so much a shock to other nations,
although it was shockingly brutal to many, but a reminder that Americans
as a group are gun-addicted and steeped in racism. In countries that
have strict gun laws in place, firearm violence is virtually “unheard
of,” and like this author’s colleagues from around the globe, they
wonder why, after so many mass shootings, there is a fanatical gun
culture panting for more firearm ownership.
Some of the assessments of the sad state of affairs
in America, affairs that stain the nation’s reputation, are not only
telling about the American people, they show just how backward and
savage this country really is. For example, people in China compared the
United States to lawless Somalia and cited racial discrimination as
fueling the level and frequency of violence.
Claire Taylor of Gun Free South Africa said, “The USA is completely out of step with the rest of the world. We’ve tightened our gun laws and have seen a reduction.”
Taylor is not entirely correct; America may be out of step with
civilized societies, but it is completely in step with lawless countries
like Somalia, Yemen, Afghanistan, and Iraq where gun proliferation and
prejudice have produced a nation that a neighboring country accurately
portrayed as a “structurally violent.”
That incredibly astute observation was courtesy of a Mexico City newspaper, La Jornada, that wrote that “the
U.S. has become a structurally violent state where force is frequently
used domestically and internationally to resolve differences. In this
context, the unchecked and even paranoid citizen armament is no
coincidence. Such a phenomenon reflects the feeling of extensive sectors
about the supposed legitimacy of violent methods.” The paper’s
editors mean extensive sectors such as Republicans in Congress, gun
fanatics in the racist Confederacy, the white supremacist and militia
movement, and much of the nation’s law enforcement community.
The La Jornada observation was particularly
prescient in describing Americans’ reliance on the use of force to
resolve differences both against other Americans who are not white, and
other nations (that are also not white). Even though President Barack
Obama changed the nation’s international relations by using diplomacy
instead of force to resolve its differences, he is virtually powerless
to stop white Americans with guns from killing African Americans due to
the prevalence of racial animus in the population. America is
structurally violent and if Republican warmongers had their way, it
would exude its violence all over the brown people in the Middle East.
American racism is not confined to animus toward African Americans, but
they are the primary victims of this country’s race-driven bigotry;
bigotry that confounds other people around the world.
An attorney in Tokyo, Hiroko Takimoto, said America’s “Racially motivated killings are simply something Japanese as a people cannot understand.” The Charleston killings “devastated”
a Tokyo University political science student, Yuka Christine Koshino,
who had previously participated in racism awareness campaigns while
studying at the University of California at Berkeley. Koshino said “those interactions had given her hope that the situation [in America] was improving. The shootings shocked me.”
Koshino was either shocked because she has not paid
attention to the news from America over the past six years, or she was
naïve to believe that “racism awareness campaigns” are of any
value in a deeply racist nation like America; obviously they hold no
value whatsoever. Teaching people that racism exists and how to identify
it is not now or ever going to make it disappear. In fact in a country
like America ‘racism awareness campaigns’ will only expose the high
level of racial animus plaguing the nation; particularly in the former
Confederacy, the conservative media, and of course the Republican Party
and all its iterations.
The Charleston racially-motivated massacre did
surprise some people around the world who, like many Americans, thought
an African American President meant the nation’s dark days of naked
racism were history. Ahmad Syafi’i Maarif, representing Indonesia’s
largest Muslim organization, said the church shooting shocked many. He
said, “People all over the world believed that racism had gone from
the U.S. when Barack Obama was elected to lead the superpower, twice.
But the Charleston shooting has reminded us that in fact, it still
remains… and can explode at any time, like a terrorist act by an
individual.”
American racism is not necessarily unique, and it is
true that other countries, such as Britain do struggle with racism and
prejudice against outsiders, but that racism does not result in
regularly occurring mass shootings. People around the world rightly
acknowledge that the massacres in America are a result of a Constitution
that protects the right to keep and bear arms, but not protect people
of color’s lives. A Canadian resident said, “Guns are in their
constitution. I’m pretty sure no one else has anything similar. I never
understand why they think gun violence is going to solve anything.”
It is simply because this is America and gun violence is as much a part
of the culture as the racism that pervades the former Confederacy.
The Charleston shootings reinforced the opinion of the British people that “America has too many guns and too many racists.” In fact in a British newspaper on the front page the headline read, “America’s shame.” The paper’s editors said that “America seems to have moved backward since Obama’s election” and that the “obscene proliferation of guns only magnifies tragedies like the racially-motivated church shooting.”
What the newspaper’s editors obviously fail to understand is that the
racism rearing its Confederate head of late never went away although
they are correct that the President’s election did incite racists to
come out of the closets with their guns locked and loaded looking for a
race war.
What the British people, and world community for
that matter, fail to comprehend is that Americans have no sense of shame
over the increasing frequency of mass and racially-motivated shootings.
It is just part of what it means to be American, and exceptional. It is
why law enforcement continues shooting unarmed African Americans with
veritable impunity and why conservatives are scrambling to explain away
the Charleston shooter as ‘disturbed.’
Dylann
Roof is not disturbed, he is a typical American gun fanatic and a
Confederate racist; a product of his American South upbringing. Except
for a relatively small segment of the population, most Americans think
his actions are nothing to be ashamed of no matter what the world thinks
because this is America and whatever happens here is exceptional.
***
The thing is most Americans agree with the rest of the world.
It is the very few loud mouthed ignorant assholes that are tarnishing our image.
It is long past time with threw those pieces of offal onto the waste dump and filled in the hole and make a golf course over top like we do to other landfills full of shit we don't want or need.
