Domestic terrorists must be stopped
15th July 2019 · 0 Comments
The July 4, senseless killing of Arizona teen Elijah Al-Amin by Michael Adams, a white man with a rap sheet dating back to 2016, is the latest incident of domestic terrorism against Black boys and men in the U.S.
Adams had only been released from jail two days, where he had completed a sentence for aggravated assault and theft, before walking up to Elijah, 17, in a convenience store and slitting the teen’s throat.
Adams’ excuse was that he felt threatened by Elijah, because the youth had been listening to rap music in a car in the store’s parking lot. Really? Like all white supremacists, Adams lied about his real motive. Even Stevie Wonder can see that Adams hates Black people and thought nothing of killing Elijah Al-Amin.
Adams was charged with premeditated first-degree murder and appeared in a Maricopa County court the same day as the stabbing.
While we weep over brown children in cages on the U.S. southern border and the overwhelming, tragic humanitarian crisis caused by the openly racist policies of Donald Trump, we must boldly face another humanitarian crisis that is being escalated by Trump’s racist rants and dehumanization of Black people: The prevalence of a white supremacist mentality that justifies taking human life based on skin color.
Brian Levin, director of the University of California, San Bernardino Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism, parses hate crimes data and the social conditions which seem to feed them. Some of the patterns that Levin has spotted in hate crime in the past add some weight to the theory that Trump’s rhetoric and the rise of white nationalist behavior are driving all sorts of hate crimes in the present.
FBI statistics show the number of hate crime incidents increased about 17 percent in 2017 when compared to the year before. Ironically, the FBI’s annual Hate Crimes Report hasn’t been published since 2017.
We’re at a point now where prayers, condolences, outrage, protests, and fighting for justice is commonplace. But it is not enough.
The time for wringing hands and having a “national dialogue” is over. Elected officials who purport to care about American values and morals, must now legislate and demand the swiftest, harshest punishment for those who act on racist tendencies and take the lives of innocent people and/or harass people of color for breathing while Black.
Would-be murderers who kill in the name of white superiority must be stopped before they can take more innocent lives. The senseless killings of Black people in the U.S. has reached crisis proportions.
The Department of Justice, FBI, and the CIA need to get off their butts and investigate white supremacist websites, organizations, white paramilitary groups, and members of far right-wing confederates, and work with social media providers to track down these would-be murderers, put them on notice, and arrest those who are plotting and planning to do harm to people of color.
But that won’t happen because the FBI’s leadership is full of undercover racists, as evidenced by a 2017 FBI report, in which the counterterrorism unit declared “black identity extremists” are a violent threat. And the Department of Justice, which should be called the Department of Injustice, is lead by people who think it’s ok to lock up brown children and adults in cages for daring to apply for asylum in the United States.
What is needed now is a campaign of shock and awe that pulls the hoods off racists in power, call them out, and declare them mentally unstable due to extreme racism, to lead the highest offices in the United States. Congress should pass laws that stipulate if a person is assessed to be extremely racist, that would disqualify them for public service positions.
Additionally, the American Psychiatric Association must finally designate extreme racism as a mental illness. Dr. Alvin F Poussaint, Professor of Psychiatry and Faculty Associate Dean for Student Affairs at Harvard Medical School, has been advocating for this diagnosis for decades.
After several racist killings in the civil rights era, a group of Black psychiatrists sought to have extreme bigotry classified as a mental disorder. The association’s officials rejected the recommendation, arguing that because so many Americans are racist, even extreme racism in this country is normative—a cultural problem rather than an indication of psychopathology.
“To continue perceiving extreme racism as normative and not pathologic is to lend it legitimacy. Clearly, anyone who scapegoats a whole group of people and seeks to eliminate them to resolve his or her internal conflicts meets the criteria for a delusional disorder, a major psychiatric illness,” Poussaint wrote in a clinical white paper on the subject. “It’s time for mental health professionals to examine their resistance to accepting extreme racism as a symptom of serious mental illness. Such a focus in the future may prevent tragedies like the Charleston massacre.”
The British get it, though. Oxford psychiatrists did include “pathological bias” in their own version, the Oxford Handbook of Personality Disorders, last revised in 2012. Pathological bias is defined as extreme racist and supremacist views that could lead one to commit acts of violence against a person or persons of another race.
Unfortunately, while we are waiting for U.S. psychiatrists to stand up and uncover this virulent psyche disorder that is apparently widespread in America, we will have to continue to weep, offer condolences and prayers and fight for justice for slain innocents, who are being gunned down simply because of their skin color.
This article originally published in the July 15, 2019 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
