Why Am I Not Surprised?

Am I the only one who is not surprised by the shooting of Renisha McBride? An African American woman knocks on the door of a white man living in Dearborn Heights, he assumes the worst and shoots her. Oh my word, all of us nice folk in our rockers opine. How could it happen? An innocent girl shot to death just for seeking help? What has happened to our humanity?

We set it up this way. That’s how it happened. We crafted a perfect storm of entrenched racism, residential hyper-segregation, exaggerated application of the 2nd Amendment, and wholesale endorsement of the castle doctrine. Then, just to be coy, we overlay it all with teeny little ‘let’s all get along’ messages like the interracial family on the Cheerios commercial a few months ago. How cute, how disingenuous.

If the shooter, Theodore Wafer, grew up in Dearborn Hts. or Dearborn, he matured in a racist stew stirred for years by Mayor Orville Hubbard, a man who took pride in the designation of Dearborn as the most racist city in the country. As late as 1986, Dearborn’s residents passed an ordinance banning non-residents (read black people from neighboring Detroit) from its parks. If the town could have built its own Berlin Wall or moved en masse to an island in the middle of Lake Erie, it would have done so, anything to avoid having to deal with ‘those people.’

But does one’s cultural and social context define a person’s morality? No. There are still absolutes, right and wrong. But does this context shape reflexes, attitudes, the instantaneous reflex to assume the worst about a person of another race. Yes. I think so.

Now we add guns to Mr. Wafer’s life. So not only does he have an automatic suspicion, dislike and fear of black people, honed by decades of living in a racist environment (which, one could argue, any white person living anywhere in the United States can claim), he is armed and ready to defend himself, his family and his property from these fearsome intruders. He feels all protected and cozy in his interpretation of the U.S. Constitution. The founders said he could bear arms so he’s going to bear arms. To me, it’s a slogan gone awry in the worst possible way.

The 2nd Amendment lovers seem always able to walk the world’s tiniest tightrope of protection vs. aggression. I don’t buy that. I think owning a gun is on its face an aggressive move; one does not get a gun for the sole pleasure of polishing it on Sundays and admiring it in its glass case. People with guns mean to shoot things.

Oh sure, they say that they would only shoot in self-defense, and that, otherwise, they lock up their guns and hide the bullets in a triple combination safe with six keys. I don’t buy it. Some bad guy comes knocking on my door, I’m calling the police. I’m not going to shoot the bad guy. Because I don’t have a gun. And I haven’t been trained to discern when a bad guy ought to be shot and when he should be talked to; I’m not able to call for back-up, use my Taser, or identify someone as inebriated or suffering a mental health crisis. In other words, I am not qualified to shoot somebody and neither is anyone else who is not a police officer. Sorry, take the 2nd Amendment and visit it at the Smithsonian.

So now we have an historically racist community, a man bearing arms, and we add the perfect poison of the castle doctrine. We are basically saying to Mr. Wafer that he has a right to shoot someone he considers to be an intruder or a threat to his safety. The castle doctrine doesn’t need to be legislated to be in effect; it is a way of thinking, a perversion of the concept of self-defense that justifies what would otherwise be immediately defined as acts of aggression if they did not occur on someone’s front porch.

Yes, the Wayne County prosecutor has decided to file 2nd degree murder charges against Mr. Wafer. This means that we haven’t completely lost touch with what constitutes a civilized society. At the same time, I wonder about the concept of culpability and how fair it is to leave Mr. Wafer standing alone in front of the judge when we placed him in the very center of a perfect storm of hatred and violence and expected him to be a better man, to rise above everything he knew and believed and felt in his gut to call 911 and report a woman in distress on his front porch.

Mr. Wafer fired the gun but he is not the only one to blame.