A white male in Jacksonville, Florida killed three black people at a Dollar General Store before killing himself which the law enforcement agency of the region described as a racially motivated crime. The man had Nazi symbols engraved on his guns and had posted several manifestos online expressing his hatred for the Black people.
History of Racism in USA
The history of Racism has origins in the religious text of Bible where Noah curses his son Ham’s grandson, Canaan who is of black origin and says that his black descendants will be “servants unto servants”.
With the coming of the Renaissance then the Europeans starting coming in contact with the darker skinned people of Asia, Africa and America and with their derived ideology from religious texts employed, them as slaves. In America in particular, slavery began when in 1619, twenty Africans were forced into indentured servitude in Virginia.
The Civil War in America of 1865, while it recognised Blacks as citizens, the federal troops of the South regrouped as Ku Klux Khan and as Knights of the White Camellia tried to regain control over the blacks through terror, violence and voter suppression.
In 1954, another attempt was made to integrate the Black people in the society by the Supreme Court in Brown vs. Board of Education which struck down the provision of racially segregating black and white students. The mid 1960s saw passing of critical legislations due to efforts of Martin Luther King, Jr. and administration of Kennedy and Johnson.
These legislations followed by President Barrack Obama’s election in 2008 and re-election in 2012 the seemed to become the markers of American Progress.
Gun Laws in the USA
Gun ownership in America finds itself situated in the 2nd Amendment of the American Constitution which says “A well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” While it has only 5% of global population, 46% of civilian owned guns are in the US. However, the right to gun ownership is not absolute as the Congress and the State legislatures have passed Acts curbing ownership of certain types of guns and for certain types of people.
However, the success of these legislations has been limited due to big corporations and judicial interventions in some cases. A comparative essay by the Council of Foreign Relations mentions that since mid 2022 “there were no federal laws banning semiautomatic assault weapons, military-style .50 caliber rifles, handguns, or large-capacity magazines. There was also no federal requirement for those purchasing a gun to have any firearm safety training. There was a federal prohibition on assault weapons and on large-capacity magazines between 1994 and 2004, but Congress allowed these restrictions to expire.”
Intersectional Dangers for the Black People
The most recent data from the year 2021 by Statista mentions that 8,488 Blacks were victims of racial killing in America. While the killings are no less for other ethnic groups including the Whites themselves, the gap between their numbers is impressionable. A report by the FBI stated that 64.5% if hate crimes were a result of ethnic or racial reasons.
The statistics mentioned above show that even though decades have passed since progressive legislations for the betterment of the Black community in the USA have been passed, they remain deprived of safety, physical and emotional. The absence of protection that the constitution guarantees them has a multiplier effect further depriving them of exercising their other rights with full potential.
This is because the American ethnocentrism has not undergone modernisation. The mindset of the people remains embedded in religious and historical narratives about the blacks and even the educational institutions deprive the future generations of complete knowledge.
In such a case, the legislations in America will have no impact if the mindset of people remains enveloped by supremacist and privileged ideologies.
Such ideologies when coupled with gun ownership then creates dual suppression for the Blacks as they find themselves in a constant state of threat. In such a scenario, civil, political and social rights have no meaning as they remain deprived of a safe environment to develop, a basic human right.
