Happy Friday. Let’s talk about fear.
Within the past week, three shootings occurred, all tied to what appear to be simple mistakes. A group of high school cheerleaders stopped at a supermarket in Texas. A man shot two of them in the parking lot after one accidentally mistook his car for her own. Separately, a man shot and killed a 20-year-old woman after she and three friends turned into the wrong driveway in upstate New York. There's more. A 16-year-old boy rang the wrong doorbell in search of his siblings in Missouri. The homeowner shot him in the head, then again while he lay on the ground.
None of these young people were an actual threat. But this horrific trend exemplifies what happens when a culture of fear, entitlement, and a deadly disregard for gun violence turns the centuries-old “stand your ground” self-defense principle into a justification for aggression.
“What stand your ground laws have done is take this into the public sphere and tell anyone and everyone that if they feel the slightest provocation, they can use lethal force without retreating, even if they can do so safely without harm to anyone,” Allison Anderman, senior counsel and director of local policy at Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, tells NPR. Stand your ground laws also promote racist violence, she says. “There have been studies showing that when a white person kills a Black person, it is 281% more likely that the killing will be found justified than when a white person kills another white person.”
We now live in a world that has turned the fear of the other—Hispanic hordes at the border, Muslim terrorists, Black criminals, and Asians spreading disease—into a profitable form of political and media theater that stokes virulent racial resentment. In fact, a new study shows that just tuning into Fox News, the poster child for this form of coverage, might be enough to activate racial bias. It's racism and confirmation bias run amok.
Coincidentally, Fox News was the channel of choice for 84-year-old Andrew Lester, who shot Ralph Yarl, the Black teen who mistakenly rang his doorbell looking to fetch his younger twin brothers. Lester’s grandson, Klint Ludwig, says that in the last few years, his grandfather had become immersed in “a 24-hour news cycle of fear and paranoia.” Ludwig describes it as a lethal recipe of gun culture combined with “stock Fox News, conservative American stuff. It’s ‘anybody who gets an abortion is a murderer, and ‘fatherless Black families are the reason why crime exists in this country.’”
And then, a Black boy rang his doorbell.
Somehow, Yarl survived the attack. Lester was not initially charged, but police took him into custody after widespread local protests and wall-to-wall media coverage.
Yes, let’s talk about fear—because I promise you, your Black and brown colleagues are feeling it these days. But we all need to really think this through. Who do we fear and why? Who does it serve when we are afraid of the “other?”
Ellen McGirt
@ellmcgirt
Ellen.McGirt@fortune.com
This edition of raceAhead was edited by Ruth Umoh.
