The Amerikan Disease - White Supremacy

It's a disease as old as the United States itself, probably older - white supremacy.

Georgia Southern University prof, Jared Yates Sexton, writes that it's now a full-blown epidemic.

It is an epidemic aided by the vast and inescapable twisted political propaganda that is aimed at mobilizing an aggrieved based of white voters, but this messaging has particularly struck a murderous cord with disturbed, young white men who are taught, from a very early age, that any encroachment on their wants and in inherent privilege must be answered with violence. 

This is fueled by the Republican Party, stoked by their propaganda wings in cable news, radio airwaves, and in websites both mainstream and on the fringes. It is an epidemic fostered by and triggered by Donald Trump, the president of the United States of America. 

This epidemic is blatant, and yet, the sickness continues undiagnosed. When the next inevitable massacre is committed and a community grieves, the networks will frame it as a singular tragedy and blame the latest lone nut. We’ll say, my god, how could this happen, while our impotent politicians copy and paste their public statements from the last tragedy, from the tragedy before that, from the tragedy before that.

...We don’t want to say the words. We don’t want to admit that America has festered with white supremacy for more than 240 years. We can’t confront the fact that, before it was mass shootings, it was mass lynchings. We don’t want to confront the fact that there is a direct line to be drawn from the murders in El Paso, Texas on Saturday to the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995 by white supremacist Timothy McVeigh, who killed 168 people. We can’t confront that our laws, our customs, and our actions are riddled through with this epidemic and have secured, for generations, a rigid and toxic racial hierarchy. 

But make no mistake, what we face is an epidemic that threaten the very foundation of free society. Every politician and gun salesman who hides behind support of the Second Amendment likes to beat their chest and trumpet the idea of freedom, but what gets lost in the defense is that America is founded on the idea of a free society, a place where Americans should be able to live lives in which they are secure to move about, think any thought they want, say anything they want, and realize the concept of relative safety. Every day that this epidemic goes unaddressed, every day that stepping into a public place amounts to risking your life, another shred of actual freedom, of a free society, slips away, possibly to never return.