What are our values?
“We are not urged to create a more human society here in response to the ones we are taught to hate and dread." - Adrienne Rich
Donations to the survivors and families of the Buffalo massacre can be made here. Donations to the survivors and families of the Uvalde shooting can be made here. Donations to local abortion funds around the country can be made here. Donations to Everytown for Gun Safety can be made here. Donations are important but so is our collective action. We, myself included, need to show up consistently to stop this violence.
Americans desperately want to believe that this isn't "who we are" as a country in times of crisis. We keep hearing or thinking we're living in unprecedented times, but the more I expand my knowledge of American history to correct for the whitewashed version I was taught, I can no longer believe that idea.
To believe violence and dehumanization are new, whether it is the prevalence of gun violence or the negligence of COVID, resulting in 1 million deaths, is to dismiss the violence that the United States was founded. The attempted genocide of Indigenous people and society, the enslavement of kidnapped African people, and settler colonialism by white European colonizers are our foundation. Black Queer Feminist cultural/memory worker, curator, and organizer, Cara Page, refers to genocide, white supremacy, and settler colonialism as our "original wounds". From these wounds, we, as a country, fail to heal and instead keep choosing violence and profit over people repeatedly.
In the aftermath of the Uvalde shooting, Texas Governor Abbott said in a press conference that "it could have been worse." Abbott, along with Texas Senator Ted Cruz, blamed mental illness and called for more guns, law enforcement, and arming teachers as solutions instead of gun control – even though there is much data and evidence that their proposed solutions do not work:
Mass shootings are not a result of a mental health crisis; they result from being the number one country with the most guns. The US isn't a particular outlier for mental illness, but we are an outlier with the number of guns and gun violence.
We've had more than 200 mass shootings in 2022 alone.
We know guns and law enforcement were on the scene, and neither prevented or stopped the tragedies.
Parents and people present at the Uvalde shooting begged police officers to go into the school, and the police did nothing.
In Buffalo, an armed security guard, Aaron Salter, tried to stop the gunman's killing spree, but he couldn't, and ultimately his life was taken.
It was recently released that a retired federal agent knew about the Buffalo attack 30 minutes prior. He did nothing to stop it.
These false solutions are intentionally proposed so nothing will fundamentally change. Once considered an extraordinary event, mass shootings are now diminished and framed as something unpreventable. Dismissal, inaction, and failure to address the root cause of issues are how violence becomes normalized. Just looking through the most recent headlines:
18-year-old boys carried out the Buffalo and Uvalde massacres. Almost every mass shooting in the US, about 98%, has been carried out by cisgender men. Why?
68.2% of mass shooters in the US have killed at least one partner or family member or have a history of domestic violence. Why?
White supremacists are the top domestic terror threat, and yet, our Senate fails to pass a bill to combat domestic, white supremacist, neo-Nazi terrorism. Why?
Anti-abortion laws strip pregnant people from having control of their bodies and healthcare and criminalize doctors. Why are we doing this?
Republicans blame immigrant children for the formula shortage and then overwhelmingly vote against a bill to address the shortage. Why?
The attack on education: blocking education and banning books about racism, Black identity and experience, and LGBTQ+ identity and experience. Why?
Anti-trans bills are ripping children away from their families, criminalizing parents and healthcare for trans youth. Why?
The racist comment from Lousiana Senator Bill Cassidy, when discussing the exceptionally high Black maternal mortality rate, "if you correct our population for race, we're not as much of an outlier as it'd otherwise appear…Now, I say that not to minimize the issue but to focus the issue as to where it would be. For whatever reason, people of color have a higher incidence of maternal mortality." What does “correct for race” mean? How do you not know the “reason” for the disparity?
Every example here is framed as a one-off crisis rather than a pattern of power and oppression shaped by the legacy of white supremacy, racism, heteronormative patriarchy, and capitalism. These systems create our political order and work in tandem to justify their physical, emotional, verbal, economic, or spiritual violence. The examples are symptoms of a sickness, they are not the illness itself. The illness lies in our values and our culture needs a significant shift, immediately.
When I think about the values I would like to see in our society, I am grateful to have learned about abolition (thank you, Dr. Priscilla Ferreira). If you're unfamiliar with abolition, at its most basic framework, it is about alternatives, creating and building in abundance, having resources, questioning how society functions, and thinking about why it functions in its current manner. Abolition pushes us to break away from the seemingly fixed conditions that tell us violence and scarcity are normal. Americans must remember that active shooter drills and mass shootings are not normal.
In We Do This' Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice, organizer Mariame Kaba explains how Americans have been "conditioned to simply look away from profound harms" (63). Structures of power and oppression, across white supremacy, cisheteropatriarchy, classism, and ableism, led us to capitalist ethics that taught us to believe everything, including people, basic care, and earth, are commodities. In our current political system, the billions produced from gun sales are more valuable than the lives of 19 children, two teachers, and 10 grandmothers, uncles, and people in a grocery store. Our current society shows us it is normal for millions of people to be houseless, not afford healthcare, be locked in solitary confinement for months at a time, and be afraid of losing their life because of hate crimes. These things aren’t normal! Nor are they natural or fixed.
If more of us continue to pull at the various violent threads across our society, we will unravel them. By not acknowledging violence, from AR-15s to not calling out our friends and family for racist or sexist comments, the power structures do not change. We each have a role to play - and it varies depending on what privileges and access to power you hold.
The only way things will change is if we demand it. We have to stop playing by the rules because the rules were always broken. Everyday violence has been masquerading as normal for just too long. The most powerful way to honor the victims and survivors is to turn our rage, sadness, and love, into action. Things do not have to be this way.
Sending you peace and love,
Adriana