This weekend, a racist white man opened fire on a Jacksonville Dollar General, fatally wounding three people and then ultimately ending his life by turning the gun on himself.
Before opening fire on the unsuspecting Black people who were just living their lives before they were abruptly ended, the shooter, Ryan Christopher Palmeter, stopped by the campus of Edward Waters College, just a few minutes away, where he was immediately confronted by security and changed into tactical gear preparing to be a cowardice murderer. He drove two minutes down Kings Road to destroy innocent lives. As I type this, it is extremely hard not to be overwhelmed because I know exactly where that Dollar General is because I have driven back and forth down Kings Road more times than I can count. It is hard, even an entire state away, to not feel closer to it than comfort allows. While HBCUs like Edward Waters are in jeopardy of existing due to the despotic rule of Ronald DeSantis, the history DeSantis is attempting to erase will continue to repeat itself.
I wish I could be hurt by the novelty, but racist white people have always committed unprovoked acts of violence against Black people. Whether they had the absolute unbridled authority to do so or whether they were not under the law, it has never stopped. Since the FBI began tracking hate crimes in 1991, Black people have been the most frequent victims, but we are consistently gaslighted that it is a figment of the collective Black imagination when it is not. In fact, lynching did not become a federal offense until 2022. Yes, that 2022, the one that occurred last year.
While white people opine about Black-on-Black crime, they are much more silent about violence in their own communities and the violence that they perpetrate against others. The absence of intraracial crime, which is what Black-on-Black crime is, does not have an impact on hate crimes. Bubba is not going to stop hating Black people because the Black community, on the other side of town, has a low crime rate. In fact, Black people minding their business and living regular lives are clearly not immune to targeted violence. Black people grocery shopping does not provide immunity. Black people going to the dollar store does not provide immunity. Black people going to church does not provide immunity. These are not even the Black people of their most racist nightmares, either. In the Buffalo supermarket shooting, as well as the church shooting in South Carolina, most of the victims were elderly.
Targeting Black people has never needed a raison d’être.
At a vigil for the victims, Ronald DeSantis, the governor of Florida, showed up and was rightfully and promptly heckled. His incitement of far-right ideologies and erasure of Black history makes it easy to view Black people as some sort of human residue, a figment, a living apparition, a nothingness beyond bones and brawn. It is easy to perpetrate crimes against individuals whom you don’t even consider to be humans, and DeSantis is partially responsible for the continuation of that narrative.
So, while history books attempt to erase the oppression and targeted racism of the past, a new subset of racist garbage will gladly fill in the blanks.
