Immediately following the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, Malcolm X was asked by the media for his response. Malcolm was not surprised by this tragic event, because white America had long fostered violence and racism throughout society. Kennedy's murder, Malcolm believed, was an example of the "chickens coming home to roost": by promoting brutality and violence against racialised minorities, the white power system had created an environment that had struck down its president.
The America we live in today is in many respects a far more violent country than it was when Kennedy was assassinated back in 1963. Back then, most of us could sleep at night with our doors unlocked. Today, millions of Americans barricade themselves behind private guards and electronic security systems.
Nobody knows with certainty just how many firearms are in general circulation in the US. There are 192 million privately owned , registered firearms, about one for every adult citizen. Two million of these are military assault weapons, with automatic or semiautomatic firing power.
In recent years, there has been a seemingly endless series of violent public assaults involving firearms. First there were a number of high school shootings by white juveniles, mostly in suburban and rural predominantly white areas. In Littleton, Colorado, two white students dressed in black coats methodically killed 12 students, a teacher and finally themselves.
Inspired by the Littleton murders, a 15-year-old boy in Conyers, Georgia, walked into his high school one month later with a sawed-off .22 calibre rifle strapped to his leg and a .357 calibre hand gun at his waist. He opened fire in a crowded common area in the school, shooting six of his classmates.
In Buckhead, Georgia, an Atlanta suburb, a day trader upset by a number of losses in the stock market murdered his co-workers and family. A worker in Pelham, Alabama, began shooting over a simple grievance with his employers.
Most recently, white supremacist Buford O. Furrow, Jr., entered the Jewish Community Center in the Los Angeles suburb of Granada Hills, and fired over 70 rounds. Three young boys, a 16-year-old girl and a 68-year-old woman were hit. An hour later, Furrow brutally executed a part-time postman, Joseph Ileto, because he was both a person of colour and a government employee. The following day Furrow turned himself in, and it was found that he possessed several hand guns, a high-powered rifle and hand grenades. When asked to explain his actions, Furrow replied simply that the shooting was "to be a wake-up call to America to kill Jews".
This highly publicised series of shootings has generated an intense national debate over the social, political and psychological factors behind this wave of violence. Media "experts" have offered several explanations. One argument is that Americans have "lost their respect" for traditional institutions, such as churches, schools and hospitals. A day care centre is no longer "off limits" for armed violence.
Another thesis says that Hollywood is to blame for depicting in graphic detail thousands of murders that our children grow up seeing. The solution for these critics is the censorship of films and commercial television.
Some social psychologists have also argued that in our postmodern, globalised capitalist lives, many individuals feel overwhelmed and are unable to cope. A relatively minor event may cause a frustrated individual to "snap", suddenly becoming violent.
Furrow had received lengthy psychiatric evaluations at mental institutions in Washington state, and had served nearly six months in jail for trying to stab two workers at a mental hospital, but was released from custody. These experts thus attribute the shootings at the Los Angeles Jewish Community Center to the failures of the mental health system in Washington state.
The weakness of all these arguments is that they focus almost exclusively on individual behaviour, rather than examining what the social consequences are for the kind of society that has been developed in the US. Buford O. Furrow, Jr., did not fall out of the sky, or climb over the walls of his mental institution and magically appear at the Jewish Community Center one morning. He is part of a white racist "Christian Identity" movement that has, conservatively, 35,000 followers.
As Ron Sims, the King County Executive, Seattle's highest elected official, says, what Furrow did "was cowardly, repulsive and a very irrational act. But mental illness was not the cause. Hatred was. This guy came out of a culture of hatred."
The liberals generally present another interpretation for these shootings: the absence of adequate gun control legislation, and the refusal by Congress to outlaw dangerous military-style firearms from the general public. The New York Times, for example, discussed the Los Angeles shootings largely as a gun control problem. "It was not clear where or how Mr. Furrow had obtained his weapons", the Times declared. "But the point is that guns are far too readily available and that the time has plainly come to start closing off the avenue of access, especially for teenagers and people like Mr. Furrow with criminal records."
The New York Times simply doesn't get it. Guns kill thousands of people in the black community every year, and the National Rifle Association and the gun manufacturers are fundamentally responsible for these deaths. But even if you took literally every gun away from Furrow and his Christian Identity thugs, they'd still come after African-Americans and Jews with hammers, scissors and anything else they could lay their hands on. The fundamental issue here is not firearms, it's the ideology of white racism.
Buford O. Furrow, Jr., is a poster boy for white capitalist Americanism. He's a product of an economy based on profit making, where you are permitted to sell almost anything, no matter how deadly or destructive, as long as you can make money from it. That's why several hundred million guns are in circulation in the US today.
Buford O. Furrow, Jr., is a logical product of white supremacist history, raised in a nation constructed on the enslavement of Africans, the genocide of American Indians, the segregation of Jim Crow, and the forced resettlement of Japanese-Americans into internment camps during World War II. Furrow is a social consequence of a society that imprisons nearly 2 million of its own citizens, and permits millions more to live in poverty.
You could take violent scenes out of every Hollywood movie, increase public expenditures for mental health-care facilities, and pass stronger gun control regulations, and you would still have a problem: the day-to-day violence of white supremacy.
Malcolm was right. The chickens are coming home to roost.
[The author is Professor of History and Political Science and Director of the Institute for Research in African-American Studies at Columbia University. This article, one of the author's regular columns titled "Along the Color Line", was originally published in September 1999.]