Another Racially-Motivated Shooting: Another False Sense of Comfort from the "Lone Wolf" Narrative
This Saturday in Jacksonville, Florida, three more Black people were murdered by a young white man who left behind a racist manifesto.
This post interrupts my series on the Creation Museum to talk about the way today’s tragic murder of three Black people by a local white supremacist was described by the sheriff in a press conference soon after the event. This is part of my work in Narrative Nation to record and reflect on the ways our nation’s story is being told.
On Saturday, August 26th, a white man in his early twenties drove up to Jacksonville from Orange Park and murdered three Black people at the Dollar General store in the New Town Success Zone. My original version of this post did not include the names of those killed, but now that information has been released so I am including them here: Jarrald Gallion, Angela Carr, and AJ Laguerre, Jr.
The killer did not know them, but he hated them for being Black. Apparently he was seen suiting up in tactical vest and mask at our HBCU, Edward Waters University, and took his AR-15 to the store on Kings Road. The assault rifle was marked with swastikas. He also killed himself.
Details are still being released, but soon we will see the content of several versions of a manifesto he left to clarify his racial hatred. I might post about this again once I’m able to read that material.
Here I only want to capture my first response to what Jacksonville Sheriff T.K. Waters said in a press conference this afternoon, standing with law enforcement on one side and elected city officials on the other, including the new mayor Donna Deegan, Senator Tracie Davis, and Representative Angie Nixon. I’m happy to see these three women in office at the same time and have hopes for better things in Jacksonville.
But I also hope to see better information reaching the public about who these types of shooters are, which requires a recognition of the national white power community they are part of.
Here’s a 12-minute video of what Sheriff Waters said about the incident. The sheriff’s prepared remarks are in the first four minutes, followed by some words from a local FBI agent and a Q&A with local press. The video is also posted on Youtube.
My concern with Waters’s statement is that it furthers an outdated narrative about these violent white supremacists. I’ll note three comments that require more informed consideration:
Sheriff Waters assured the attending press that “There is absolutely no evidence that the shooter is part of any large group. We know that he acted completely alone.”
Sheriff Waters later referred to “the shooter’s personal ideology of hate.”
During the Q & A, Sheriff Waters stated, “This was quite frankly a maniac who decided he wanted to take lives.”
The reach and the severity of the national white supremacist problem is elided by suggesting such a person “acted completely alone,” or developed a “personal ideology,” or was simply being “a maniac.” This murderer may not have been connected to one of the neo-Nazi organizations operating in this state such as Atomwaffen Division or National Socialist Florida, but it’s no longer necessary to join a group. The ideas circulate independently of chapters, gatherings, and leaders.
Suggesting that racially-motivated acts of violence are perpetrated by “lone wolf” characters—mainly isolated weirdos and maniacs—has been a problematic tendency of American media and law enforcement for decades. It keeps us from developing an accurate narrative about the state of affairs in this nation regarding racial hatred and violence.
Part of the book I’m developing builds on some of historian Kathleen Belew’s work related to this problem. Her 2018 book Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America traces the rise of a “leaderless resistance” in which individuals contribute to the goals of a larger national movement without needing to join groups. But this is not the same as acting “completely alone,” to reflect again on Sheriff Waters’s choice of words.
Belew traces how Vietnam veteran Louis Beam transformed the American white power movement into an effective nationwide collection of loosely-allied cells. Defining “leaderless resistance” as “cell-driven revolutionary violence” (109), Belew explains that the concept combined guerilla warfare tactics (practiced by the Vietnam veterans who started these movements) with strategies practiced by their communist opponents and even by patriots in the American Revolutionary War.
By the 1980s and 90s, she explains,
Cell warfare without direction from movement leadership depended upon commonly held cultural narratives and values, and shared texts and symbols, to motivate and coordinate activity.
And many individuals constituted a one-man cell—this was in fact the ideal iteration of leaderless resistance. Timothy McVeigh blew up the Murrow Building in Oklahoma City without forming any relationships with existing white power or anti-government groups. This independent action to further the publicized goals of a larger movement is one reason he is still a hero to that community.
The political scientist Benedict Anderson would have described today’s American white power fabric as an “imagined” community not necessarily dependent on personal interaction.
Failure to recognize the existence of this community results in overusing the concept of the “lone wolf” by law enforcement, the FBI, and the media following their lead. Consequently, as a culture we fail to recognize the interconnected and ever-strengthening fabric of American white power ideology. This is what I believe we saw today in Sheriff Waters’s comments.
Belew’s book focuses on print media and the very earliest days of the Internet. Now white supremacists, white ethno-nationalists, and race war proponents are radicalized online and can take their cues independently from current events.
As several media outlets have already noted, this shooting comes on the five-year anniversary of another local mass shooting not far from there at the former Jacksonville Landing. That incident was not, to my knowledge, understood to be a racially-motivated shooting, but it does speak to the problem of gun control and the connection can’t be overlooked.
Perhaps more significant are a couple of other anniversaries. The Dollar General murders happened this weekend on Saturday, August 26th. The notorious Ax Handle Saturday occurred here in Jacksonville on August 27, 1960. And nationally, this Saturday was chosen to commemorate the 60-year anniversary of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom that occurred on August 28, 1963.
Sheriff Waters also said “this is not Jacksonville” and, during the Q&A, “that’s an outlier” and “that doesn’t represent who we are as a city.”
But it is Jacksonville. It happened today in Jacksonville. People perpetrating hate crimes, racial violence, and verbal and written threats are not that uncommon in Jacksonville. This particular shooter appears to have been living with his parents nearby in the neighboring county, but I don’t think it’s very helpful—in terms of educating and informing the public—to maintain a soft narrative in which Jacksonville is “a unified community” where such things keep coming as a surprise. Holding these incidents out as uncharacteristic and emphasizing the fact that this is what happens “when someone comes into our city” is not helpful.
I know the sheriff means to provide a voice of unity and optimism in the face of this tragedy. The public needs realism and deeper information right alongside that.
Thanks for writing this -- a proper perspective isn’t commonly found through the usual channels. It’s perplexing to imagine such a deeply segregated city being “unified,” and to also consider the circular role that segregation plays in fomenting this hate and violence. I hope this new administration has some clever way to integrate the diversity that exists here so that we can imagine a truly unified community and the poor white kids can learn experientially to transcend the right wing nonsense they’ve been fed generationally.
Excellent. I'm absolutely shocked that people still fall back on lazy responses like "one bad apple" and, in Waters's case, "This is not [every town in which these things continue to happen]. Thanks also for pointing out the need to retire the "lone wolf" cliche. I thought it was interesting that Waters said, "This is not Jacksonville" and that Deegan said, "This is a community that has suffered again and again. So many times this is where we end up." Totally opposite responses.