Nate Monroe: The hate we knew and the reality we made
COMMENTARY | Once again, the unthinkable was thinkable, the unimaginable, imaginable, the hatred not some random cosmic wrinkle but a kind of logical, foreseeable end point, least of all because the tools necessary to actualize that hatred — a tactical vest, a Glock, and, god help us, an "AR-15 style rifle" — are absurdly couched as curios for hobbyists and thus readily available even to maniacs with demons in their heads. And it was predictable because of the conditions on the ground: the banners hung over interstates, the hateful images brazenly broadcast in light displays on our high-rises, the symbols we refuse to let go, the rhetoric, ever devolving — it was all there, right in front of our noses, that terrible tapestry we made.
Do not tell me the choices we make don't matter when that logical, foreseeable end point finally materializes in our own backyard.
This was an act of physical, racial and temporal terror: Five years to the day since Jacksonville's last high-profile mass shooting, and just one day before the 63rd anniversary of the city's most infamous episode of mass racial violence, Ax Handle Saturday, the killer, a white man from Clay County in his 20s, left multiple manifestos detailing his hatred of Black people, donned his tactical gear and wielded his swastika-covered rifle, and stalked the vicinity of Edward Waters University, Florida's oldest historically Black college. He ultimately entered a nearby Dollar General, killed two Black men and one Black woman, and then killed himself.
"It almost feels like we're moving backwards," a crestfallen Jacksonville Mayor Donna Deegan told me Sunday, in between multiple church services and memorials.
"We're just using different ax handles."
Police on Sunday identified the victims as 52-year-old Angela Michelle Carr, 19-year-old Anolt Joseph "A.J." Laguerre Jr., and 29-year-old Jerrald De'Shaun Gallion. I will not publish the name of the killer.
The killer acquired his terrible weapons even though he'd been Baker-Acted in 2017, according to the sheriff, a process by which someone can be temporarily detained for mental-health reasons, but apparently not a process that, in this state and in this country, renders one unable to obtain deadly weapons.
Not for the first time, in the wake of an awful act of violence, Jacksonville Sheriff T.K. Waters assured us this isn't who we are: "There is no place for hate in our community. This is not Jacksonville," he said.
And not for the first time, I've wondered: Isn't it?
Nazi creeps and racist goons have terrorized Jacksonville for well more than a year by hanging banners over interstates, projecting images on buildings and blanketing neighborhoods with ugly flyers. It was not always clear the city's response was forceful enough. And now those public demonstrations look like terrible harbingers of what was to come, not isolated incidents but all a piece of one frightening story that, on Saturday, became as big as life — or, rather, as death.
"The anger and rage I feel right now as many electeds in Florida throw up their hollow statements about the racist violence that occurred today," Jacksonville state Rep. Angie Nixon said early Sunday morning. "Your complicity is one of the factors that led to this. I am so angry and sad for those families."
The Dollar General killer left racist manifestos — one each for the media, his parents and for federal agents. His politics represented a violent extreme, but make no mistake, this act of racial terror was also a man acting on his politics. Confronting the consequences that his politics rendered will require no less than a political response. We are often told not to make such tragedies "political," but this is the demand of a damned fool. "That is the argument of people that don't want things to change," Deegan, who has been Jacksonville's mayor for about two months, told me.
It is true: No single thing can stop this mass shooting epidemic. And no single elected leader or any single policy breathed life into the devil inside that Clay County man's head and set him to carry out his evil deed. But this doesn't negate the need to try to prevent future violence and hate, nor does it absolve a city, a state and a nation from considering and reconsidering what messages it conveys to its own people and to the outside world. In fact, this compels it.
The Confederate monument in Springfield Park — which the Jacksonville City Council, at the urging of the last mayor and the current one, has refused to take down — did not cause the mass shooting Saturday. But it sends a message loud and clear: What little consideration we are sometimes willing to show for our own neighbors. The stories we tell ourselves in the wake of such tragedy about the places we live and who we are matter a great deal. We have a problem.
Wars on "woke" and villainizing "diversity, equity and inclusion" and peddling the fictitious chivalry of the nation's slave-holding founders — it is catnip for awful people with awful ideas. And these words sometimes become deeds. For the first time in decades, Jacksonville lacks a congressional district in which Black voters have the ability to elect the candidate of their choice. This was not an isolated policy choice but rather a deliberate political project by this state's governor to seek nullification of a provision in the state constitution that aims to protect such minority-choice districts. These things — all these choices, these words, these works — they matter in the end.
The governor fumed when the NAACP issued a travel advisory on Florida this spring, warning the state "devalues and marginalizes the contributions of, and the challenges faced by African Americans and other communities of color."
Today, that reads with eerie, gut-punching prescience.
Nate Monroe is a metro columnist whose work regularly appears every Thursday and Sunday. Follow him on Twitter @NateMonroeTU.
This article originally appeared on Florida Times-Union: Monroe: Jacksonville Dollar General shooting predictable given our choices
