The Whiteness of America’s Grief
The response to Charlie Kirk says one thing: our country's collective mourning is reserved for white faces.
I didn’t want to talk about Charlie Kirk’s murder anymore. Really. It was overwhelming to see the number of people I was connected to who outed themselves as his supporters in the span of a few days. I said my piece and I was going to shut up about it, at least after unfriending a bunch of folks on Facebook out of disgust for their full throated defense of his racist legacy. But a couple of days ago, I read a statistic that literally made me sick to my stomach:
680,000 Palestinians are estimated to have died in this two-year-long genocide, and 479,000 were children.
These estimates from Drs. Richard Hil and Gideon Polya were reported in the Australian publication Arena and are based on research published by medical journal The Lancet as well as historical data from past similar mass slaughter events. While critics will say these numbers are unrealistic, even one tenth of this estimate is enormous.
The mass outrage for Palestinian death is nowhere to be found among America's white "Christian" population. There are no prayer vigils being planned in towns across the country for the hundreds of thousands of lives that our tax dollars have violently stolen from this Earth. Flyers for prayer vigils, like the one you see below happening in the New York City exurb of Montgomery where I grew up, are plastered all over Facebook.
The people I know posting these flyers are folks I grew up with until I was a teenager and my family left New York for South Carolina. These are parents of childhood friends, old neighbors, former schoolmates, all extremely active online and not one of whom has ever, from what I can tell, posted a single thing about the genocide in Gaza. They post about their trauma from seeing the video of Mr. Kirk being shot in the neck, but they don't say they have trauma after the thousands upon thousands of videos of Palestinian children being slaughtered in Gaza have been plastered across ou screens for two years.
They rightfully post expressing devastation at the trauma Mr. Kirk's children will carry with them from the violent and public manner of his death, but they don't post about the countless Black women who are killed in this country due to gun violence. Women like Redaja Williams, a 23-year-old mother in Louisville, who was gunned down while walking her 7-year-old daughter to school last month. Ms. Williams' daughter will carry the trauma of witnessing her murder for the rest of her life, too.
I haven't seen one post grieving the loss of Silverio Villegas-Gonzalez, a husband and father who was shot and killed by ICE agents after dropping his children off at school just a few days ago.
When George Floyd was publicly executed and video of his murder was shared all over the internet, not only did I not see public expressions of grief by these people, but I saw ice cold takes debating whether or not his murder was justified. George Floyd, too, was a father.
You may think I'm pointing out the obvious, that anyone holding prayer vigils and publicly mourning Mr. Kirk's loss is politically conservative and would never express the same level of grief over the examples I gave above. But it's not just conservatives, and it's not just Christians. I've seen numerous white liberals who have displayed the same level of grief over Charlie Kirk's murder but haven't uttered a word about the genocide in Gaza. Maybe they posted a black square or attended a protest after George Floyd's death five years ago, but they've selectively chosen which "political violence" they publicly abhor in a moment when all lethal violence in this country is political.
I never saw this much public grief when 12-year-old Tamir Rice, 18-year-old Michael Brown, 17-year-old Trayvon Martin, 25-year-old Freddie Gray, 17-year-old Antwon Rose Jr., 26-year-old Botham Jean, 23-year-old Miles Hall, 23-year-old Elijah McClain, 19-year-old Marcellis Stinnette, 26-year-old Patrick Lyoya, 15-year-old Brett Rosenau, 20-year-old Donovan Lewis, 17-year-old Dhal Pothwi Apet, 15-year-old Lueth Mo, 22-year-old Messiah Nantwi, and 21-year-old William Bowen were murdered. None of these young Black boys and men had the chance to become husbands or fathers.
White Christian Americans will debate about whether the public execution of a 12-year-old Black boy was "justified" but will express outrage the moment anyone calls into question the legacy of a man who said that passing the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which ended Jim Crow laws and racial segregation, was a "mistake."
To reiterate what I have previously said now multiple times, Charlie Kirk did not deserve to die because of preventable gun violence, despite his own complicity. Charlie Kirk's children do not deserve to have to bear the trauma of losing their father in such a violent way, and as someone who experienced the traumatic death of my triplet brother when I was six years old, I am truly sad thinking about all they will have to go through. It's the same sadness I feel any time I learn of a child going through unthinkable trauma - especially the countless children who have been forced to live through endless mass shootings, or the countless children who have witnessed the worst kinds of deaths or have themselves had their bodies mangled and maimed in Gaza.
Still, it is unfortunate to see what appears to be a large portion of this country publicly mourn Charlie Kirk's death without calling into question the way he lived his life. I would say it was confusing to me, but frankly, it's not. We are talking about a nation that has forever whitewashed history to absolve its colonial settlers of the crimes of genocide, enslavement, internment, and apartheid. We are talking about a nation that honors a genocidal, white supremacist, rapist the second Monday of every October of every year. We are talking about a nation that elected one twice in the past decade.
The 680,000 people of Gaza slaughtered with our money deserve to be mourned, too. The countless Black people that have been and continue to be lynched in America deserve to be mourned, too. The immigrants, refugees, and asylum seekers whose lives are being destroyed in cities across the country deserve to be mourned, too.
There is enough space to grieve our whole world, if only white America would value non-white lives the way we worship white supremacy.