Florida shooting: How big is the problem of white supremacy in US?

The killing of three Black people in Florida at the hands of a white, 21-year-old shooter has once again shone the spotlight on a familiar problem in the United States – white supremacy. President Joe Biden, who has labelled white supremacy as poison and called on Americans to reject it throughout his term, denounced it as ‘having no place in America’ on Sunday. “We must refuse to live in a country where Black families going to the store or Black students going to school live in fear of being gunned down because of the colour of their skin.” Ironically, the shooting in Florida’s Jacksonville came on the same day that thousands converged on the National Mall for the 60th anniversary of the Reverand Martin Luther King Jr.’s historic March on Washington. But how worrying is the problem of white supremacy in the United States? Let’s take a closer look: What happened? The latest in a long history of American racist killings unfolded early Saturday afternoon after Palmeter first parked at Edward Waters University. The sheriff said a video posted on TikTok with no timestamp showed Palmeter donning a bullet-resistant vest. A university security guard spotted Palmeter and parked near him. Palmeter drove off and the security guard flagged down a Jacksonville sheriff’s officer who was about to send out an alert to other officers when the shooting began at the store. [caption id=“attachment_13049412” align=“alignnone” width=“640”] Graphic: Pranay Bhardwaj.[/caption] Palmeter used an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle and a Glock handgun in the shooting, Waters said. He had legally purchased the guns in recent months even though he had been involuntarily committed for a mental health examination in 2017. Because Palmeter was released after the examination, that would have not shown up on his background checks. Palmeter killed himself as police arrived, about 11 minutes after the shooting began. Palmeter lived with his parents in neighboring Clay County. He texted his father during the shooting and told him to break into his room, Waters said. The father then found a suicide note, a will and the racist writings Waters described as “quite frankly, the diary of a madman.” “He was just completely irrational,” Waters said. “But with irrational thoughts, he knew what he was doing. He was 100% lucid.” Domestic extremists double mass killings since 2010 According to The Economist, mass killings by domestic extremists were extremely rare from the 1970s to the early 2000s. However, since 2010, something irrevocably changed. Of the 46 ideologically inspired mass killings since 1970, well over half of such incidents (57 per cent) have occurred since that year. The piece in The Economist noted that far-right extremists comprise the bulk of the perpetrators, while violence by left-wing and Islamist extremists has ‘decreased significantly’.

It also pointed out that most attacks are of the ‘lone wolf’ variety.

“These are especially hard for law enforcement to trace and monitor. It is more difficult to prevent attacks by loners than it was to thwart the plans of the more organised right-wing groups and militias that were active in the 1980s and 1990s,” the piece noted. These past few years have seen white supremacy on the rise yet again in recent years – a fact which has alarmed human rights groups. According to the Anti-Defamation League, over 80 per cent of mass murders in the United States are committed by white supremacists. The advocacy group labeled 25 murders in 2022 as “extremist-related,” with 18 of those “committed in whole or part for ideological motives.” Two mass shootings – one in May in Buffalo, New York, wherein an avowed white supremacist fatally shot 10 Black people, and another in November in Colorado Springs wherein five people were killed in an LGBTQ nightclub – accounted for most of the extremist-related murders of 2022, the ADL report showed. [caption id=“attachment_11687401” align=“alignnone” width=“640”] 2022 could be the second worst ever for mass shootings in US history. AP[/caption] White supremacists commit the highest number of domestic extremist-related murders in most years, but in 2022 the percentage was unusually high: 21 of the 25 murders were linked to white supremacists, according to the ADL report. “All the extremist-related murders in 2022 were committed by right-wing extremists of various kinds,” the ADL report said. ADL’s Center on Extremism reported an overall decrease from 2021 when 33 extremist-related killings were documented. ADL had documented 22 extremist-related killings in 2020. FBI director Christopher Wray in 2020 told Congress that white supremacists and anti-government extremists have been responsible for most of the recent deadly attacks within the US. What do experts say? Some, like the Anti-Defamation League, argue that the election of Barack Obama as President of The United States in 2008 initially inflamed white supremacists. “As one might suspect, the election results made white supremacists very angry and helped increase their willingness to engage in violent acts,” the league noted in a previous report. However, there was also some good news with the bad. The stated that Obama’s election as president did not seemingly result in a flood of new white supremacist recruits. “The result was that, like the anti-government extremists, white supremacists increased their proclivity for violence but, unlike the anti-government extremists, they did not grow in numbers,” the piece noted. [caption id=“attachment_11562051” align=“alignnone” width=“640”] Some say the election of Barack Obama as first African-American president of the United States inflamed white supremacists. ANI[/caption] Others contend that the rise of Donald Trump – and his long history of winking at the far-right has emboldened white extremists – is to blame. Recall that the issue of white supremacy returned to the headlines late last year when the former president hosted white supremacist Nick Fuentes at his private club in Florida. Trump said the encounter with Fuentes happened inadvertently while he was having dinner with Ye, the musician formerly known as Kanye West. But it is to be noted that Trump has a long history of winking at far-right extremists. Trump in 2016, when running for president, refused to disavow David Duke of the Klu Klux Klan in an interview with CNN. “Just so you understand, I don’t know anything about David Duke, OK?” Trump said. “I don’t know anything about what you’re even talking about with white supremacy or white supremacists,” Trump said after repeatedly being asked to disavow Duke. “So I don’t know. I don’t know – did he endorse me, or what’s going on? Because I know nothing about David Duke; I know nothing about white supremacists.” In 2017, Trump, then president, said there were “very fine people, on both sides” at the white nationalist march in the Virginia college town of Charlottesville. The incident saw a violent fracas break out at the rally attended by members of organised neo-Nazi and so-called alt-right groups protesting the removal of a Confederate statue. One counter-protester was killed when a suspected Nazi sympathiser drove a car into a crowd. When then House Speaker Paul Ryan condemned Trump’s remarks, the then president furiously hit back. “These people love me. These are my people,” Trump told Ryan according to Huff Post. “I can’t backstab the people who support me.” At a September 2020 presidential debate with Biden, Trump refused to denounce the white supremacist group the Proud Boys. Trump, responding to a question from debate moderator Chris Wallace, who asked the president if he would condemn white supremacist and militia groups that have shown up at some protests, claimed that violence was a ‘left-wing problem’. Trump then told the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by” – which left some members of the extremist group celebrating what they saw as tacit approval. A piece in Vox, noting that Trump’s recent dinner with Fuentes came just days after he announced his bid for the presidency, argued that it should ‘dispel any doubts’ about where Trump stands with regard to white extremists. The piece also noted that Trump issued a statement saying he didn’t know who Fuentes is – but only after he was advised that being linked with him is ‘political suicide’. [caption id=“attachment_11694411” align=“alignnone” width=“640”] Former US president Donald Trump has a long history of winking at the far-right. AP[/caption] “What Trump has not done is make overt calls for a white nation. But his associations and statements align with white extremists and their goals. They have for some time, and his meeting with Ye and Fuentes only represents a continuation of that trend,” the piece concluded. Others say the US has much ground to cover. Arndrea Waters King, the president of progressive thinktank Drum Major Institute and the wife of Martin Luther King III, told CNN. “Yesterday, the same day when we had almost 200,000 people gathering together to stand for democracy in our country, we saw what happens with hate.” “And for a lot of people that question of why are we coming back together and how different are things from 1963, it unfortunately gave the demonstration of the work and why we are, and where we are, in 2023 compared to 1963, which is not far at all.” Biden in December, he established an inter-agency group to coordinate efforts to counter antisemitism, Islamophobia and related forms of bias and discrimination. With inputs from agencies