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The Allen, TX Shooter Was A White Supremacist
American racecraft allows all other races, save for Black people, to audition for white supremacy. A shocking amount of them chooses an AR-15 as their tool.
On May 6th, 2023, a rifleman opened fire on a packed mall in Allen, Texas. He murdered eight people. He physically maimed seven others, and scarred countless hundreds psychologically with the echoing of his AR-15 fire, their crouching from finding cover, and their stampeding away from danger.
I struggle with the ethics of not using the shooter’s name. Many folks and media outlets try to avoid giving mass shooters the notoriety in death that they have always craved in life. These murderers, often finding succor and inspiration behind avatars on 4Chan and other sites, mark their coming out into society with .223 Remington rounds and funerals. But this shooter’s name is important. His parents named him Mauricio Garcia.
His given name and surname indicate Latinx ancestry. Describing his physical appearance — and thus, his race — would invoke all the illogical complexities of American racecraft. I will try for the broader part of the argument I am making.
Let me show you how race is a fiction, and yet remains the organizing political principle of the West.
Garcia had black eyes and black hair. His hair was straight and his facial features symmetrical. He had full lips and an undistinctive nose. His skin tone is not white but light; it could be white if he spent a lot of time in the sun playing, or in physical labor. This is the work of American racecraft. There is nothing about Garcia’s physical appearance that marks him as distinctly Latinx unless you believe race is a scientific reality. Onlookers must focus on his first name and surname to determine he has ancestry from the global South. It is only then, by accessing the racecraft white supremacy affixes to his name, that his features become one of the people whose land white people conquered and who erected borders to repel. By the fiction of race and the reality of…
