By Janet Ekstract
NEW YORK – On Tuesday, U.S. President Joe Biden expressed what many decent, open-minded Americans were thinking when he told a press conference in Buffalo that “white supremacy has no place in America” and that “silence is complicity.” Biden’s touching and compassionate speech to victims’ families, the mayor of Buffalo, law enforcement and the American people was in stark contrast to his predecessor Donald Trump whose attitude when mass shootings occurred during his presidency was nothing if not downright lame and insensitive.
What America so desperately needs is a Congress that is willing to act to pass a law to get assault rifles off the streets and out of the hands of ordinary citizens especially those with mental disorders. This begs the question as to why anyone needs to own more than one or two guns let alone 20 or more firearms and for what purpose? The Second Amendment to the American Constitution keeps being used as a convenient excuse by diehard gun owners and proponents of the National Rifle Association (NRA), an organization whose reputation has long since fallen by the wayside due to infighting, fraud and other sordid activities but one supported by huge backers with political agendas.
It was revealed by a media investigation during Trump’s presidential reign that a majority of those in Congress receive hefty payouts for supporting the NRA point of view. If voters want change, then they should be heavily questioning America’s Republican party, asking them why after repeated multiple mass shootings year in and year out that Congress still does nothing. Former presidents Obama, Clinton and Jimmy Carter all made valiant attempts to introduce serious gun control legislation as the current president would like to do.
As commentators on NBC News pointed out, no matter how many mass shootings occur and how diligent and determined democrats are to get such legislation passed in Congress – it has been those Republicans – a majority of them who steadfastly refuse to budge on gun legislation even if it means many more American citizens becoming victims of mass shootings across the U.S.
What is wrong with this picture because clearly two plus two does not equal four in this malfunctioning equation.
As President Biden so eloquently stated, it is time for every concerned American citizen to come together and say enough is enough to the gun violence, the mass shootings and to being held hostage by a Congress that would rather play politics than resolve a longstanding serious social issue. The raw, unadulterated truth is that there WILL be more mass shootings until as Biden said, social media as well as some TV channels stop pedaling disinformation that emboldens white supremacists. As Biden highlighted, white supremacist rhetoric has spilled over into mainstream politics and mainstream social media to the point that Republican politicians are embracing it to serve their specific political purpose.
If there is one thing we know for sure as Americans, it’s that overall, the majority of Republicans in the Republican party and in Congress will stop at nothing to move forward on their ultra-conservative agenda, seemingly leaning toward the far right to capture votes while stoking racial hatred and ethnocentricity as a means to their own very devious end. If what President Biden said is true that “white supremacy has no place in America,” then it is the job of all decent Americans to stand up for all the ethnicities who live side by side in America’s melting pot. That means that African-Americans, Hispanics, Jews, Hindus, Indians, Armenians, Turks, Africans and every other ethnicity living peacefully in America must make their voices heard in protest against the rhetoric of white supremacists as well as other groups that spread hate online and throughout secret platforms.
To stop mass shooters and mass killings, there must be a plan to construct massive security at schools and shopping malls with the same type of machines used at airports to detect weapons. This type of security has been in place at shopping malls in Turkey for decades, what is America waiting for? But what is more crucial is educating the minds of the new generation to cultivate a sense of global citizenship, global responsibility as well as an openness to all people of all ethnic backgrounds, races and cultures. Children in America must be taught that just because you’re white doesn’t make you better and that it was the indigenous native Americans that were truly the first citizens of America, not the white settlers from Europe
As Biden warned, the scourge of white supremacy has effectively crept into unseen nooks and crannies of people’s thoughts as well as the mouths of some white, male politicians and some female ones too, who espouse a set of beliefs not based in reality that excludes anyone but their version of who they deem to be the ‘average American’ If we are being realistic in the 21st century then the ‘average American’ will be the baker from Pakistan, the pide café owner from Turkey, the Russian student from NYU or the lawyer whose parents were originally from India.
We cannot let America slip back into its racist past where lynchings in the South were the order of the day and where the ‘N’ word was all too prevalent among whites when they referred to blacks. All the subtle and not so subtle trappings of racism like the Confederate flag, the little black mamy statues outside southern homes and the concept that nannies, maids, and housekeepers could only be black, still persist. Just visit any ultra-rich family in New York City or the south to see evidence of that. What perpetuates this myth is that the concept that still remains in the majority of white people’s minds (Aunt Jemima). White people who have been fed a history that is only partially the truth, white people who have not insisted that text books be inclusive to a wider cultural perspective than that of the past.
America will be a true democracy when there is freedom in public and private schools to discuss, debate and argue about the truth of what really happened in history not just for blacks but for all ethnic groups who now make up the multiracial and multi-diverse fabric of the United States of America whose constitution enshrines the term “freedom and justice for all.” Until that becomes a reality, Americans need to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and get down to the business of making inclusivity a reality for all, not just for a white, Anglo-Saxon majority.
