Terrorism is a label for only people of color, it seems. The Las Vegas shooter, a middle class White male, who killed 58 people, doesn’t qualify. The search for mental illness spun its wheels for him with no trail of such bread crumbs to emerge. Did it occur to anyone other than me that the Uzbekistan man who killed eight people this afternoon could be mentally ill? Maybe he isn’t. Probably he isn’t. But it bothers me, these automatic assumptions, these automatic privileges of not being labelled terrorist for some.
The highly promulgated notion that 911 was the first act of terrorism on U.S. soil is another snapshot of American life that erases the experiences of Black people and the KKK, the burning of Tulsa, the erasure of the town of Rosewood. We have the organization Black Lives Matter precisely because they don’t.
It is a sad day in NYC today, the sudden and unretrievable losses some families will sleep or not sleep with tonight. And if by some good fortune they do find sleep, there is the awakening in the morning, the punch of re-awakening to their world with a gaping hole that will not go away. The media pimps will be out scavenging the stories, the mayor says “it was a particularly cowardly act,” words I hear men say at times like these, empty macho name calling, ego leading when heart is needed.
Woud it help if we called ourselves cowards when we bomb unarmed civilians in another part of the world, people erased by the term collateral damage? No, but perhaps the recognition that other lives matter besides our own, and that we are and have been murderers too would bring more humility, honesty and clarity to how we respond.
It is a sad day in so many places in the world, in so many places in this City, on a would be lovely fall day, the end of October.