During these lazy warm and welcoming summer days, I enjoy relaxing drives with my lovely wife. Following in my late father’s footsteps, I found it convenient to find a driveway to use as a turnaround in U-Turn-prohibitive Central Ohio. However, these driveway redirects occasionally take place to the chagrin of my best friend and passenger, and of course, I would accept that attitude with a subtle grain of salt. Turn the page, as these years fade into the past, along with my hairline, I find a surreal authenticity and intuitive insight; my wife’s concern could never be so clear as it is today. On April 19th, a 20-year-old young woman was shot and killed after her friend (the driver) entered the wrong driveway to search for a friend’s house.

Hands up Don’t Shoot: a slogan to protest police brutality after the August 9, 2014 Michael Brown Shooting by a police officer in Ferguson Missouri

Our nation finds itself navigating the gauntlet of gun control on one side and second amendment rights on the other. Racing ahead through this collapsing paradox goes terms such as “mental health is the problem”, “Guns don’t kill people, people do”, and “the way to stop a bad guy with a gun is by a good guy with a gun.”

The Late Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. foretold the extrapolated results lived out in today’s violence in what he called the Giant Triplets, i.e., “the giant triplets of Racism, Extreme Materialism, and Militarism. Against the backdrop of America’s history, racism must never be taken off the table when we examine extreme Materialism, which equates to the haves and the have-nots culture conceived in the chattel slavery womb of America. In Isabell Wilkerson’s book Caste, she compares America to an old house. “Like other old houses, America has an unseen skeleton, a caste system that is as central to its operation as are the studs and joists that we cannot see in the physical buildings we call home. Caste is the infrastructure of our divisions. It is the architecture of human hierarchy, the subconscious code of instructions for maintaining, in our case, a four-hundred-year-old social order. Looking at caste is like holding the country’s X-ray up to the light.”

The weaponry that reinforces the division and inequities is comprehensive. Gun violence exists as a common denominator of reinforcement of the “caste.” Whether we speak of vigilantes, militias, flawed policing, or generationally manipulated redline-seeded urban violence, they give license to the bringing of heavily armed militarized crusades into these urban cores. It all goes to keeping the inhabitants divided and controlled. Gentrification offers a 21st-century version of cutting a 1950s interstate highway through the middle of an African American Neighborhood that destabilizes their human capital. Meanwhile, the political and economic pressure force policies to enshrine the Gun culture.

Scripture reminds us: ” (For the weapons of our warfare are not carnal, but mighty through God to the pulling down of strong holds;)”

Strongholds drive war and its weapons. Dr. King was an outspoken voice of opposition to the Vietnam War. However, America has declared war in diverse ways on the urban communities inhabited largely by marginalized communities of color, embodied in either the war on crime or the war on drugs. All of these sound like noble causes; however, these were largely race-driven and laid the foundation for the prison industrial complex and mass incarceration inflicted on men of color. From the Tulsa Massacre, the Red Summer of 1919 (riots of whites in fear of armed African Americans coming home after the war), to the Giant Triplets themselves, America is in the grips of a stronghold. America has the highest gun ownership of any nation in the world by far, leading developed (SDI) countries in gun fatalities by an equally wide margin. That is where the extreme materialism of the Giant Triplets appears in all of the financial power and influence that goes deeper than a constitutional debate. It is all about the bottom line, its impact on political figures and policies reinforcing an addictive American Stronghold.

On April 17th sixteen-year-old Ralph Yarl was shot on the porch for knocking on the wrong door. Eighteen-year-old African American Cheerleader Payton Washington was shot in the parking lot because her friend accidentally entered the wrong car. However, Kaylin Gillis, the girl that was shot and killed for being in the wrong driveway was white and a member of the current majority culture. Now what has so many in an uproar about the ongoing gun crisis is that it has moved out from Urban America and is now affecting all races, ethnicities, and economic levels, from movie theaters, grocery stores, churches, and elementary schools. There is a mass casualty shooting in America daily.

All of this shows that what affects one community eventually affects us all unless we employ agency to make a change. The Giant Triplets, the Stronghold of Systemic Racism, and all their effects must be eliminated.

By Kevin Robinson Founder/Editor, Publisher of Three-Fifths Magazine