Violence and power fit hand in glove. There are some with the privilege to be given the benefit of the doubt as perpetrators of one (Colt Gray) while there are significantly more others who are never, or only rarely believed, to be the victims of both (Casandra Ventura, Dawn Richard, et al.)

Yet we are not having a national conversation, or any conversation outside our respective social circles—family and friend group chats—about Americans’ penchant for gun violence, sexual assault, sex trafficking, or intimate partner violence. Even though we see, day in and day out, that while a privileged few will kill for power there are significantly more others who will be violently killed or irreparably harmed by and because of power. 

The second assassination attempt against former President Donald Trump, the school shooting in Georgia, and the flurry of lawsuits against disgraced music mogul Sean Combs that’s led to a federal indictment on charges of racketeering, conspiracy and sex trafficking are all symptoms of a much larger problem: the concentration of power. 

Politics, music, Hollywood, journalism, tech, even manufacturing (what’s left of it in America) — these industries are run in a way where power is siloed at the top, shared among very few, and the people most affected are consolidated out of a good life worth living. 

It is why we see people wrestling for freedom and wrenching against boundaries and barriers that seek to hold them to their place, their class, their caste. The Movement for Black Lives versus police and racist vigilantes. The electorate versus the government. Workers striking against a company or an entire industry. A lone wolf begrudged against a school, teacher, classmates or candidate. Women against a man believed unstoppable because of his contributions to culture. Weinstein. Cosby. Kelly. Combs.

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Violence and power fit hand in glove like O.J. Simpson’s defense. Like trigger fingers on assault rifles. We don’t question what violence does to people, to families, to victims and survivors because we don’t dare question how powerful violence makes us feel. What power it is that America is never a target for genocide. What power it is to live in a country with military supremacy that we don’t fear bombs falling from our sky and onto our schools and hospitals, shelters and safe places, decimating generations of an entire family in one blast. 

Unless of course it is we who’ve dropped or set the bombs against ourselves for some grievance, be it racial prosperity (Tulsa 1921), civil rights (Birmingham, nicknamed Bombingham in the 50s and 60s), integration (Jacksonville 1964) ,or perceived government overreach (Oklahoma City 1995). 

What a privilege it is not to fear the opposite sex. To walk out your door and not hear someone yell something vulgar and obscene at you because of how your body is built be it a former president keen to grab women by the p****, or an actor/comedian/philanthropist who preferred to dull a woman’s senses with quaaludes, or an R&B singer with a pedophilic predilection for underaged girls, or a hip-hop star with enough money to create a hedonistic pleasure house at the expense of sex workers, employees, and girlfriends both living and deceased. 

Violence and power fit hand in glove and never was that fact more clear to me than in the case of Tampa teens Angelia Ella Mangum and Tjhisha Monique Ball, who were found hog-tied, bound, and thrown over an overpass in Jacksonville 10-years-ago this week. Their murders remain unsolved, and I’d wager any amount of money that until I wrote their names and resurrected the worst fragments of their young lives, many had not heard, thought about, or even cared about what happened to them. 

There is a power and a privilege to remain aloof, unaware, and unbothered by how the other half lives. Be it men toward women, whites toward Blacks, Indigenous, Latiné or other people of color, or cis-het individuals towards members of the LGBTQIA+ community. 

Depending upon where you fall in these intersections, threats abound, just as threats abound for the most well-protected people on the planet: U.S. presidents, former presidents and presidential candidates. There is a privilege to be able to harness the scent of violence and weaponize it as a threat against an adversary, real or imagined. And too often when we don’t want to reckon with the benefits our privilege affords us, we beg questions that blame victims. 

Why did they stay? Why didn’t they leave? Why don’t they have more security? Why don’t they have armed guards, ID’s, metal detectors in schools? Why don’t they arm teachers? Why didn’t they run? Why didn’t they come forward sooner? Why didn’t they say something? Where was the Secret Service?

These are the questions of cowards when solutions have always and remain in our reach. Easy access to weapons of mass destruction, and I don’t mean of the nuclear variety, as mass shootings in America are as common as curly fries, is a problem we are actively refusing to fix. So shootings or attempted shootings happen, we send thoughts and prayers, the Governor launches a state investigation, but no one questions whether the gun show scheduled for this weekend should go on as planned or be canceled in light of recent events. 

Movements like #meToo are birthed to give survivors of sexual violence a voice as long as those survivors don’t target the powerful few who lead industries that make money and produce art and culture on a global stage. 

Violence and power fit hand in glove and it’s obvious that many of us prefer the benefits of our privileges, even when we face threats, than we desire to dismantle structures that keep many people oppressed or threatened within an inch of their lives or even to the death. 

It is much easier to ignore, remain aloof and unaware, so unbothered that victims’ names run together, we confuse one mass shooting with another, shake our head at the downfall of the latest rapper, actor, anchor, chef, mogul, and carry on with our daily lives as if power and violence have no impact . . . until they do.