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When I was a child, I loved going to the Dollar General. It was the one place I could pick out any toy I wanted, confident that my mother wouldn't turn me down because it was too expensive.
I would wander the aisles looking for the perfect item, often settling on a clear plastic water gun or the brown paddle with a red ball attached to a string. I was not particularly good at the game; the slippery little ball would careen this way and that, never quite hitting the sweet spot in the middle. It didn't matter, because the toys from Dollar General didn't usually last very long.
I do not know what took three African American people to the Dollar General in Jacksonville, Fla., on Saturday. It could have been toys, food, medicine, cleaning supplies or some other low-cost item. I do know they were brutally killed there, and I know that the suspect in their killing was a white man who reportedly had swastika markings on his AR-15-style rifle.
These three people didn't die because someone hated Dollar General any more than the Black people in Buffalo perished because some mad man had a beef with the produce department, nor any more than Ahmaud Arbery lost his life because of fury at runners. The three African American people at the Dollar General were killed for the same reason the Black churchgoers of Mother Emanuel were slain. They died because they were Black in a country that still produces white supremacists intent on hatred and death.
It is not a total mystery where this hate comes from. Anti-black racism and white supremacy are frequent topics of research in history, law, anthropology, economics, sociology and religion. Yet when the question is raised in classrooms across America, educators get labeled "woke" or "critical race theorists." If we let some politicians and pundits tell the tale, the study of racism is more dangerous to the Republic than the racism that keeps claiming Black lives.
I do not believe that we can educate ourselves out of racism, and I doubt that the person who attacked the Dollar General could have been diverted by any college course or book. Racism resides in the mind, the heart, twisted imaginations and long-festering resentments that surge in times of perceived loss of power. Racism persists because it is politically, socially and economically useful. It is a way of avoiding looking at one's own faults and struggles, and instead finding meaning in having someone below you, trapped underfoot. The loss of that perceived hierarchy is a fear that can be tapped into to gain political office, boost television ratings and make money. In a country with a ready supply of assault riffles and anti-Black animus, the results are too often deadly.
