Tuesday's postcard, and a couple things I didn't have to worry about today because I'm white

August 29, 2023

August sunset, north of Deer Park, WA

A shooting in Jacksonville

I do most of my writing early, usually beginning in the dark. When I’m finished I usually open a link to a news channel and turn to tasks that require less focus. And it was this way on Saturday, toward the noon hour, when I heard the “breaking news out of Florida” that there’d been a shooting with multiple victims in Jacksonville.

My brother lives in Jacksonville. Naturally, I was anxious.

Earlier than is usually the case— before there were names assigned to the victims and the shooter—the Jacksonville sheriff, T.K. Waters, told the press that the killings were a hate crime.

“I know for a fact that he did not like Black people,” Sheriff Waters said about the young, white male assassin with the assault rifle marked with swastikas. “He made that very clear.”

Until then I had been thinking of calling my brother, just to be sure he and his wife were okay. Now I didn’t have to worry. About my white brother.

It didn’t take long for the weight of my reaction to start sinking in. We so often think about “white privilege” in economic terms. But my whiteness and straightness also give me a degree of physical safety in society that others can’t take for granted. It’s all too easy not to be aware of that, to be asleep about it.

For example, I don’t worry about my white son being pulled over by police. I’ve not given him “the talk” that so many Black fathers feel they have to give their sons about how to avoid escalating encounters with the police. Just because I don’t worry about it doesn’t mean it’s a little thing. I can easily imagine how it must feel—in the hundreds of nights we are the parents or grandparents of teenagers out for a good time—to pile on an extra fear for their lives. As a rule, white people are spared the indignities of being pulled over for “driving while black.”

Saturday was a little different. The instant syllogism that my brother wouldn’t have been a target for a racist killer leapt from the part of my brain that loves my brother. But, as the weight of news sunk in, it only added to the horror that this was yet another bloody hate crime in America committed by a white male targetting people only by the color of their skin.

Granted, we have a long and ugly history of this especially—but not exclusively—in the south. But there is a contemporary trend here as well, one that the Washington Post’s Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Eugene Robinson writes about in his column this morning—Black people are Being killed for being Black. Again.

Robinson focuses on the Jacksonville shooting, but references other recent mass shootings. He writes:

“We saw it in May 2022, when a hate-filled White man killed 10 Black shoppers at a Tops supermarket in Buffalo. We saw it in February 2020, when Ahmaud Arbery, a 25-year-old Black man was cornered and killed by White assailants for having the temerity to jog through a White neighborhood. We saw it in June 2015, when a White supremacist killed nine Black worshipers at Mother Emmanuel A.M.E. Church in Charleston, S.C. We’ve seen it in police shooting after police shooting, where offenses as trivial a broken taillight have led to encounters that left African Americans dead, their families grieving and their communities enraged.”

It should be hard to overlook the long root of racism attached to this tragedy. It was in my lifetime that the non-violent movement to end segregation at Jacksonville’s lunch counters led to “Ax handle Saturday,” on August 27, 1960. Also known as the Jacksonville Riot, “Ax handle Saturday” was a Ku Klux Klan-organized assault on non-violent African Americans (largely students in their teens) to try to end sit-ins at the city’s “whites only” lunch counters. It was called “Ax handle Saturday” because the more than 200 marauding white Klansmen used ax handles and baseball bats to club any African American in sight, not just those at the lunch counters.

As the melee unfolded, the police were slow to arrive and when they did arrive they arrested those who were trying to defend the protestors, not the Klansmen. The city’s white establishment, including its daily newspaper, the Florida Times Union, looked the other way.

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