My anger and shame about the history of Black people at the hands of White people is always heightened during Black History month. Every year I learn of historical incidents of violence and utter depravity against Blacks that are new to me. This year, the one that had me reeling was a 1959 incident. Black teenagers who had been locked into their ramshackle dorm at a work farm in Arkansas were left to die when someone set the building on fire at 4 in the morning. Of the 48 children in the building, 21 were unable to escape the fire and died.
The same day that I had been reading and thinking about that incident, our local paper reported that a man threatened another man with a gun in a grocery store parking lot. It happened to be the grocery store where we and many of our friends shop every week. The man with the gun was waving it around and pointing it at the other man. He was angry the man had passed him on a back road because he was going too slow. The man with this particular slow-going vehicle sped up and followed the other driver all the way to the store.
Because it could have been me or any of my loved ones threatened by that gun, this story made me anxious and afraid. Then I became angry about having my intellectual and emotional immersion in Black history hijacked by this incident of gun violence and all the others that are reported day after day. Gun violence and Black history are not equally deserving of my attention. Gun violence is a story about attention-seeking people, most of them White males with a king-sized psychic illness that has gone undiagnosed and untreated because we are unwilling to see the madness behind the need to have a million guns and to carry those guns around. Those individuals should be getting help rather than occupying so much media attention and civic oxygen that we cannot attend with heart and soul to human concerns that are of greater value – poverty, hunger, the deteriorating mental health of this society and our awful mental health system, Black history, Native American history, public education, and the special needs of our adolescents.
This, too, is a valid reason for gun control. The daily onslaught of news about gun violence is always hijacking our attention ways from what matters. It robs us of the human experience of putting our anger and civic motivation where it properly belongs.
