Chris Murphy - The Violence Inside Us: A Brief History of an Ongoing American Tragedy

For the life of me, I cant remember what my first-grade classmate Paul did to prompt me to challenge him to a fight after school. I vaguely recall that an exchange of mean words in the classroom immediately brought to mind an instruction from my mother to stand up for myself if bullied. So I told Paul to meet me after school at the bottom of the hill, next to the woods behind Emerson-Williams Elementary School. I probably overreacted to whatever slight I perceived, but it soon became the buzz of our classroom, and a hive of kids followed us down the short incline to watch us square off. The bout lasted all of ten seconds. Before I could get in a swing, Paul leveled me with an open hand, right across my mouth, knocking out one of my loose front teeth.

Though the details of my first fistfight are fuzzy, I do have a strong recollection of the adrenaline surge that raced through my body as I readied for the fight, and my desire to seek revenge once I had been embarrassed. I was rail thin, the skinniest kid in my class, but at that moment I felt like I was hardwired to fight. Of course, I was wrong about my pugilistic skills, but what I felt that day was real. What I connected to was an instinct for violence, created by a complicated intersection of genetics, biology, and neurology, that is buried deep inside all of us.

Our bodies are fighting machines, and our minds are wired to use violence as needed to protect ourselves from danger and advance our own interests. Human beings have a trigger for violence that is virtually unmatched in the animal kingdom, prompting both pint-sized tantrums and adolescent brawls, all the way to world wars. Maybe once or twice in your life youve sensed an uncomfortable desire to put your hands on someone who has harmed someone you loved or done something to send you into a momentary rage. Maybe youve even acted on this instinct. If you have, youre not alone. Violence is unquestionably inside us, whether we want it or not.

This American land, dating all the way back to before Europeans ever set foot on this soil, has always been particularly fertile ground for violence. Pre-Columbian America, according to some estimates, was one of the most violent places on earth, as many Native Americans used violence and the threat of it to settle disputes over living, hunting, and fishing space. European settlement did nothing to help. A relatively new technology, firearms, allowed the settlers to brutally take from the Native Americans the same living, hunting, and fishing space that had been the subject of intertribal conflict for centuries.

Then the original settlers were joined by waves of new migrants from Ireland, Scotland, Italy, Germany, Poland, and Russia. The same friction that had sparked conflict between colonists and Native Americans now brought these new Americans, vying for economic and political space, to blows at abnormally high rates. Weapons innovators Samuel Colt and Oliver Winchester were there to exploit these tensions and provide both sides with increasingly efficient guns to turn ordinary arguments deadly in an instant.

But the defining violence of early Americathe violence that propped up our nations economy; that inspired a nation-altering civil war; that led to the creation of a caste system that exits to this daywas the quotidian violence necessary to compel enslaved people from Africa to work the New Worlds land for free. America became a nation anesthetized to physical harm because the entire countrys economic, political, and social structure was predicated on the brutal subjugation of black Americans. Guns, of course, were an obvious mechanism for white oppressors to maintain the social and economic order.

A predilection to violence exists inside every human, but Americas practice of violence is unique. It is definitional. And it is persistent. How else can one explain why a white police officer, after questioning an African American man about a report of a simple counterfeit twenty-dollar bill, would feel justified pressing a knee to the mans neck for eight and a half minutes, unconcerned that the man might be unable to breathe, unmoved by his dying cries for his mother? How else can we understand why a young African American man could choose to go out for a jog in his neighborhood and within minutes find his path obstructed by shotgun-wielding vigilantes intent on administering private justice?

Right now, following the killings of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, and others, America is convulsed by a moral reckoning over our nations systematic use of violence by white Americans against African Americans and other people of color. This is a long overdue and vitally necessary exercise, and I endeavor in this book to tell the story of Americas long history of white majorities using violence for repression and control. If you come to this book freshly heartbroken over the murder of Floyd or Arbery or Breonna Taylor or Trayvon Martin, you will find here a map of how America arrived at this moment of reckoning.

But American violence also takes many other forms, and its roots stretch far beyond the realm of racial division. At this critical moment in our nations history, our duty as citizensand the mission of this bookis to examine the long, tangled roots of American violence. We must ask why humans of all races and creeds, in America and all over the world, are drawn to violence, instinctively, as a way to protect ourselves or settle grudges or advance our interests. We must figure out why young men in this country, robed in military-style clothing and carrying wildly lethal weapons, walk into schools and churches with the goal of killing as many people in as short a time as possible. We must reckon with the systemic oppression that still denies so many African American men legitimate pathways to success, forcing them to resort to violence as a means of survival in blighted neighborhoods. Its time to figure out why more Americans than ever are killing themselves quickly with guns, and more slowly with illegal drugs and alcohol. And no discussion of violence can conclude without questions about our nations insistence on exporting American violence to the rest of the world, through the sale of arms and the dispatch of our armies.