Some Thoughts in the Aftermath of Seven Mass Shootings in Seven Days

Photo: Irving Schild

I have long wondered about the entire “hate crime” paradigm. While I have never revealed this in public, I have asked myself many times, what’s the point of classifying a murder as a “hate crime”? 

All murder is hateful. Is it worse when motivated by race, religion, gender or sexual orientation as opposed to the impulse to randomly kill? Mass shooters are motivated by all sorts of things. Was the Vegas mass shooter out for gamblers? I have no idea. Does it matter if a killer specifically targets women, Jews or Asians? Should it matter? 

It seems that we are more and more hunkered down with our identity group, even when it comes to mass shootings. Needless to say, if there is a conceivable racial or victim group angle to accentuate in regards to the recent Colorado tragedy, the media will run with it. But again, does it matter how many Blacks, gay men, or Sikhs were among the victims, or whether the shooter was inspired by White Supremacy, the Koran, or “Helter Skelter”?  

None of this is especially complicated. Mentally ill people have easy access to military grade weapons and shoot other people with frightening speed and precision. The last time I checked, we’re all people. That was Martin Luther King’s message. That was John Lennon’s message. Divisions are illusory. Accentuating them fosters further illusion. As a teenager in the 60s, I got this. 

But we now live in an age of hyper-alienation. Even White heterosexual Christian men with full-time jobs, excellent medical insurance and generous vacation pay feel victimized. Everyone has a claim, real or imagined, of being royally screwed by the government, the media or the man. Meanwhile, the deadly beat goes on. 

The Supreme Court has played a central role in exasperating this horrific problem with Justices Roberts, Scalia, Kennedy, Thomas and Alito ignobly leading the way. Remember, it was their disastrously short-sighted ruling in the District of Columbia v. Heller in 2008 that enshrined the individual right to possess firearms independent of service in a militia.  Chilling thought: Just days before the Colorado massacre, the Court met behind closed doors to discuss considering a case that would expand the Second Amendment by eliminating a New York law that places restrictions on carrying a concealed hand gun in public.

While the Court is complicit, despite what some gun control advocates would have us believe, there is no quick or easy fix. There are 300+ million firearms out there and record-breaking sales every year. Gun control laws, which I fully support, will not change that. We have traveled down a dark road for a long time and, unsurprisingly, have arrived in hell. 

The crisis at hand calls for nothing short of a radical shift in our consciousness which is clearly beyond us collectively. That being the case, it is up to us as individuals to make a decisive inward turn and get our own house in order. I am by no means advocating apathy or doubling down on tribalism. We already have plenty of that.

What I am suggesting is the imperative of coming to terms with the limits of social activism. Caring for the world starts with self-care. To find peace in the valley we have to find peace in ourselves. This is self-evident, but living as we do, in the midst of unending, digitally-turbo-charged chaos, we forget it. Finding our equanimity between news cycles is more important than maintaining our Twitter feeds. Shaking our fists at the moon does not qualify as a life strategy. And yet, there is so much suffering, shaking our fists at the moon sometimes feels like the beginning of wisdom, though we must remember: it is only the beginning.

Somehow, while continuing to work outwardly for a better world, we need to step outside of the cultural current. We need to understand that if we feel certain to have the answer to gun violence, racism, homelessness, or any of the deep-rooted problems that plague us, that is a sure sign that we don’t.  

Our best starting point is to meticulously practice self-compassion. From there, we can make the sincere effort to extend it to our family, friends, associates, neighbors and beyond. There is nothing new age, esoteric, religious or spiritual about this. Simply put, it is the essential and foundational work that must be done. 

There is no greater revolution or better solution than learning to love. 

After the death of a Filipino man killed by police kneeling on this neck, the silence of anti-racists is deafening

Note: This essay was first published in The Filipino Press on March 5, 2021.

When I saw the CNN headline of February 24, “Man dies after police kneel on his neck for nearly five minutes, family says in wrongful death suit,” I knew immediately that the man was not Black. 

If the man was Black, the CNN headline would have said so. 

If the man was Black, the story would have likely been the website’s headline. 

If the man were Black, hosts on MSNBC would already be talking about him. 

But none of that was happening. 

The man’s name was Angelo Quinto. Was he White? Hispanic? Should that even matter? 

I read the CNN story and to my surprise, Quinto’s race was not noted, no doubt because it could not yet be verified. After all, pretty much everything these days is seen through the prism of race, or if not race then gender, or sexual orientation, or some combination of the three. 

The very notion of color-blindness as championed by Martin Luther King is now widely regarded by the most prominent anti-racists as naïve and/or unattainable. “I look to a day when people will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character…” said King. However, we currently find ourselves in a social climate in which we are continually being told that the color of one’s skin is of primary importance in all aspects of life. 

Some questions: Is the merit of this essay in any way contingent on my race? What is the relationship between my skin color and the soundness of my arguments? Would knowing my race make you more or less likely to agree with my point of view? 

To get back to Angelo Quinto: The details of his death are disturbingly familiar. He died after a police officer (or officers) knelt on his neck for nearly five minutes. According to Quinto’s mother, who began shooting video after her son lost consciousness, he pleaded with the officers, “Please don’t kill me, please don’t kill me.” 

Quinto, a Navy vet, had reportedly been exhibiting signs of anxiety, depression and paranoia. On December 23, he suffered an especially acute episode which frightened his sister, Isabella. Out of concern for herself and her mother, she called the police. What happened next is unclear.

Isabella told Mother Jones that when officers from the Antioch police force arrived they found Quinto and his mother on the floor. She had him in a bear hug, “as much to comfort him as to restrain him,” according to Isabella. She accuses the officers of pulling Quinto from his mother and taking turns kneeling on his neck. Quinto died on December 26. Two months later we still do not know if the officers were wearing body cameras or had them turned on. While authorities have yet to announce an official cause of death, he obviously died in the same grisly manner as George Floyd. 

Nevertheless, there have been no protest marches inspired by the death of Angelo Quinto. There are no public memorials for him. There are no activists raising their fists and shouting, “Say his name.” Black Lives Matter has said not a word about Quinto, who was a Filipino-American. The death of an unarmed man who was not Black caused by police kneeling on his neck does not qualify for a mention on the Black Lives Matter website or in its Twitter feed. 

Arguably, I am holding Black Lives Matter to too high a standard. After all, the National Organization for Women does not issue press releases about the plight of men, nor does the Jewish Defense League call out discrimination against Scientologists. Everyone is looking out for themselves, which is just human nature. That said, given Black Lives Matter’s overwhelming reaction to the death of George Floyd, one would think that the Quinto incident would have inspired a meaningful response, or at least an empathetic acknowledgement. But since it hasn’t, I am asking: Why not?   

I fear the answer is that the Black Lives Matter movement is suffering from an acute case of tunnel vision by framing the killings of unarmed Blacks by police solely through the prism of race. Here are the facts: About half of the unarmed people killed by police officers in the past year or so were White, while Whites comprise about 60% of the population. About 35% of the unarmed people killed by police officers in the past year were Black, while Blacks comprise about 14% of the population. But that itself does not constitute proof of racially motivated killing by cops. 

Writer and podcaster Coleman Hughes is among the prominent Black voices pushing back against the ultra-woke anti-racist worldview. He notes that almost all of those unarmed killed by police in the past year were men, while men comprise about 50% of the population. Does that prove that cops have an anti-male bias? 

To reach a clearer and deeper understanding, Hughes writes, “You must do what all good social scientists do: control for confounding variables to isolate the effect that one variable has upon another (in this case, the effect of a suspect’s race on a cop’s decision to pull the trigger). At least four careful studies have done this…and none of these studies has found a racial bias in deadly shootings. Of course, that hardly settles the issue for all time; as always, more research is needed. But given the studies already done, it seems unlikely that future work will uncover anything close to the amount of racial bias that BLM protesters in America and around the world believe exists.”

Whether you agree with Hughes’ assessment or not, the fact is that it has been nearly universally accepted that racial bias was a motivating factor, if not the dominant factor, in the killing of Floyd. But there is no conclusive proof of that, any more than there is conclusive proof that racial bias was a motivating factor in Quinto’s death. Simply put, we don’t know. 

The common theme in both cases is bad policing that should concern us all. But the next George Floyd turning out to be Asian does not further Black Lives Matter’s preferred narrative. Ironically, according to the anti-racist paradigm that so many Black Lives Matter supporters embrace, the movement’s silence on Quinto could arguably be cited as evidence of unconscious racism toward Asian Americans. That is if you buy into the binary anti-racist worldview which claims there is no such thing as a non-racist and that anyone who isn’t actively anti-racist is a racist, or at the very least harbors racist views.  

For the record, I do not believe that Black Lives Matter is anti-Asian any more than I believe that all Whites harbor anti-Black resentment. What I do believe is that Angelo Quinto’s life was every bit as precious as George Floyd’s life and his death was every bit as tragic. Sadly, one would never know that from the media coverage or collective response. And so, it must be said: 

Asian lives matter. 

Of course, we all have a perspective colored by race and more. All of us, to one degree or another, suffer from tunnel vision. That being the case, the undeniable truth is this:  

We share a common humanity and are all in this mess together.