Racism part of our national character

It will be a while before we get a full picture of the motives behind the shootings at three spas in the Atlanta area, which police allege were committed by a 21-year-old white man. Police said the gunman may have been propelled by sexual addiction and his desire to, in effect, eliminate temptation. Yet the targeted businesses employed a high number of Asian workers so even if the motive sprang from another darkness, the result still left at least six people of Asian descent dead.

If it turns out the spark for this particular mass shooting arose from a tortured mind and libido, Asian Americans still are right to worry about possible connections between the killings and a surge of violence targeting them. There’s a lot at play here, but more broadly, racial animosity, misogyny and easy access to firearms are a disturbingly routine confluence of three of the ugliest aspects of US society. Racism, from the colonial-era genocide of Native Americans to the new nation’s constitutional embrace of race-based slavery to our present de facto segregated schools and institutional biases, is not just our history, but part of our national character.

But after the anguish of the moment, the mouthing of the right words of rejection of racism and violence and the need for tolerance, we’ll still be a society in which racism festers, guns are ubiquitous, misogyny persists, violence seems inevitable, and lessons refuse to be learned.