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Arman Sharif: Checking ourselves before scapegoating others in post-Orlando America

Harish Balasubramani/Daily Bruin

By Arman Sharif

June 19, 2016 9:47 p.m.

The Bruin community was under national spotlight three weeks ago as we tried to heal from a lockdown and murder-suicide on our campus. Gun violence had officially come to our home, and we lamented becoming the 186th school shooting since Sandy Hook in 2012. Wracked with fear, we attempted to move onward from the senseless murder of a professor by studying for finals, looking forward to summer, holding a vigil or celebrating commencement.

Instead, we soon watched our country experience the deadliest terrorist attack on its soil since 9/11.

To wrap their heads around the motives behind the tragedy that occurred at Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida, Americans have blamed anything and everything. Political polarization quickly ensued, as is routine with Congress. Right-wing politicians contend that threats of terrorism are imported from abroad, while the left pushes gun reform.

But what many fail to see is that perpetrator Omar Mateen’s aggression – namely, his homophobia, racism and gun violence – is an all-American, homegrown strain that has been with our society for a long time. Mateen did not exist as a lone-wolf, isolated “lunatic.” He lived in a country with a social climate conducive to perpetuating his same hateful ideologies every day.

Many politicians have still yet to even acknowledge the massacre as an anti-LGBTQ, anti-people of color act. Offering meager condolences, they erase the identities of those lost: overwhelmingly Latino and black victims, at a gay club, on a Latin-themed night. Talk is cheap, and certain members of our government will always express more solidarity with the National Rifle Association than they will with these communities in their constituencies.

Some have tried to blame Islamic extremism or Mateen’s ethnic background, but Mateen swore allegiance to a hodgepodge of rival terror groups, indicating a fundamental lack of knowledge of their relationships to one another. And to attribute his homophobia to Afghan, immigrant roots forsakes the millions of other non-Middle Easterners in this country who share that same sentiment.

Among other explanations, reports from past classmates and his ex-wife suggest that Mateen himself was gay, citing his reported use of gay dating apps and prior visits to the gay nightclub where the attack took place. However, on the topic of anti-gay hostility that originates in one’s own repressed sexuality, UC Davis psychology professor Greg Herek told New York Magazine, “That probably happens, but it seems to be very much not the way that prejudice gets expressed in most cases.”

While Herek thinks it’s unlikely that internalized homophobia alone is enough to beget full-scale terrorist attacks, this still attests to a mentality of toxic masculinity that pervades our society: You have to be macho, heteronormative and should never be too emotional. To uphold this masculinity in a patriarchal society means that gay will never be OK. It means that women like Mateen’s ex-wife can be assessed as property, subject to domestic violence.

As Middle Easterners or Muslims, we’re subject to xenophobia and apologizing for acts we’ve never committed, a broken-record apology that tells us the terrorists have already won in the fearmongering they were trying to achieve. To put Muslim-linked mass shootings into perspective, according to the Gun Violence Archive and the Washington Post, in a country that has suffered 517 mass shootings between 2015 and 2016, only four were attributed to self-proclaimed Muslims with extremist affiliations.

In the LGBTQ community, we reject “prayers” from conservative politicians, because these members of government tried to meddle in everything from our bathroom rights most recently, to our marital rights less than a year ago, to our sex lives in Lawrence v. Texas in 2003. Former president Ronald Reagan was silent on the AIDS epidemic in the ’80s until more than 20,000 of us perished, and only 29 years ago our identities were considered mental illnesses. This history is compounded by current discriminatory legislation: Those injured in the attacks on a Sunday can legally be fired on Monday because of their sexual orientation, and gay men can be denied from donating blood to their community members desperately in need.

As people of color, we push back against the media’s efforts to whitewash our stories. “Mexicans are criminals” and “stopping the Syrian refugee problem” – we condemn xenophobic political campaigns that demonize our ancestral lands and engender more aggravated assaults here at home. And at the intersections of these communities, 80 percent of LGBTQ people killed are minorities.

Amid all these systems of hatred in place, America is more than happy to sell you the assault rifles to act upon them. Mateen obtained his weapons 100 percent legally. According to CNN, although home to only 5 percent of the world’s population, America is victim to 31 percent of the world’s mass shootings and far exceeds any other country in gun ownership with nearly 89 guns for every 100 of us. Around 6,232 people have died from gun violence in the U.S. so far this year. That’s about the number of students who graduated from UCLA last week.

The New York Times found that the U.S. is such a dire anomaly from other developed countries that even if France, for example, endured a mass shooting at the magnitude of last year’s Paris attacks – 130 casualties – every month of the year, its annual rate of gun homicide would still lag behind that of America.

Washington is making some progress on gun control, but it’s slow. A recent filibuster to force a vote on firearm regulation in Congress signals some concessions on the horizon. California lawmakers also pledged $5 million Thursday to create a University of California gun violence research center.

It’s Pride month, as well as Gun Violence Awareness Month. During a month already mired in devastation – from UCLA to Orlando – the country has received a sore reminder that there is still a long road to liberation for its different marginalized groups, in which Mateen’s heinous crime is unfortunately just one of many roadblocks.

And instead of throwing the culpability to myriad issues and people, we need to address our own prejudices that we harbor personally before we can even begin to sit down and formulate any sort of solutions to these toxic components of American culture.

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