Throw Your Guns In The Air and Wave Em Like You Just Don't Care: White Folks and Gun Violence

Chatting in twitter recently, again the issue of gun violence comes to mind. Nearly a month post Sandy Hook, I'm still annoyed at the break neck speed to the now immediate rush to gun control in America. How many countless Black and Brown babies had to die before our politicians got the clue? Do you have to have the right complexion to have the political connection? If I had an opportunity to tell the powers that be what was on my mind I would tell them, gun violence is nothing more than a manifestation of the larger issue we have yet to deal with, race. What this rush to legislative action tells me is that still Black and Brown lives are expendable in matters of violence and vice, especially in matters of the hegemonic hierarchy. In one of my favorite movies, The Godfather, the analogy is vivid... I also don't believe in drugs. For years I paid my people extra so they wouldn't do that kind of business. Somebody comes to them and says, "I have powders; if you put up three, four thousand dollar investment -- we can make fifty thousand distributing." So they can't resist. I want to control it as a business, to keep it respectable. I don't want it near schools -- I don't want it sold to children! That's an infamia. In my city, we would keep the traffic in the dark people -- the colored. They're animals anyway, so let them lose their souls. If you look at the scene, you see White Italians plotting strategically, how and to whom they will distribute drugs in New York. At the risk of using Malcolm X's words, the chickens have come home to roost. I don't think the mainstream populous like the harvest of these epidemic proportions of violence and death. You see, as long as there was death isolated to the "Boyz in da Hood," the problem was nullified. In this social contract of violence, it is tolerated under the unwritten proviso it stayed in the communities of color. Politically, the solution was to build more jails, increase sentencing, and of course, make it easier for everyone to legally get their hands on a gun to "stand their ground," ergo living out their neo-conservative "Dirty Harry" fantasies. (Do I hear the echoes of Trayvon Martin or Jordan Davis?) On the flip side though, Wally and Beaver, Eddie Haskel, Opie Taylor, Richie Cunningham, along with Ralph and Potsey are throwing lead in Mayberry and not just regular lead; military lead taking down schools and colleges, the very targets which were forbidden by the crime-lords in The Godfather. In the aftermath, there is always some remote control psychologist who will offer some "DSM V" analysis saying the assailant (who is White and male for the most part) was maladjusted, psychologically disturbed, and then we move on to the next case. To be frank about it, to knowingly dispatch a person's life with reckless disregard (even their own), in my opinion, warrants some level of pathological maladjustment. So when "Doughboy" goes on a rampage because his "codes of the street" have been violated, where are his psychologists? Why are we (as intellectuals, politicians, health care providers, sociologists, etc) not Socraticlly analyzing his modus operandi? I take the position that "Doughboy" operates as an unwilling agent in what hooks coins as the white capitalist patriarchal power structure. I take a quote from one of HipHop cinema's most notorious; Tony Montana. He says, You need people like me. You need people like me so you can point your fuckin' fingers and say, "That's the bad guy." So... what that make you? Good? You're not good. You just know how to hide, how to lie. In short, "Doughboy" dose society a service by operating as the "bad guy." Yet if we think about it, the bad guy really operates in a well structured embryo that organically reinvents itself to fulfill its own need. Politically, this hydra has taken the guise of gun violence. Other days, it's called entitlement spending. The bottom line reality though is that the hydra is today what it was the day before yesterday: the problem of the color line. Until America begins to have a real serious dialogue on the problem of color, class, and gender, the hydra will grow bigger until it consumes us.