White supremacy continues to rear its ugly head in the US

A white man in Jacksonville, Florida, shot and killed three Black people at a store before killing himself with the same gun on Saturday. Local police said at a news conference that this was a racially motivated crime.

After the shooting, US President Joe Biden condemned white supremacy, declaring that it had no place to hide in the United States. However, the fact is white supremacy has intensified in the country in recent years. Statistics show that more than 80 percent of mass killings in the US so far this year were committed by white supremacists.

After combing through mass killings in the US in 2022, the Anti-Defamation League, a civil rights organization based in New York, characterized 25 of them as "extremist-related," 21 of which — accounting for 84 percent of the total — were linked to white supremacists. The organization reported in March that it recorded more than 6,700 white supremacist propaganda events in the US last year, an "all-time high."

Federal Bureau of Investigation data show that hate crimes against African Americans and other minority groups in the US have also been on the rise in recent years. According to its report, hate crimes against African Americans rose 49 percent in 2020 compared to 2019, and another 14 percent in 2021 compared to 2020. Hate crimes against Asian Americans, too, have gone up, 167 percent year-on-year in 2021.

Systemic racism has actually been around for a long time in the country, the reason why hate crimes are on the rise in the US. What happened in Jacksonville on the weekend is only the tip of an iceberg.

Notably, some people believe that a recent reform in the teaching of African American history in Florida has encouraged the racist attack in Jacksonville. The Florida education authorities approved a new set of standards last month on how African American history should be taught in the state's public schools. The students are now taught that not everything was bad during slavery, that Black slaves could learn some skills that, in some cases, helped them benefit personally. This is being seen as an effort to whitewash anything negative about the dark period of slavery.

And when high school students in the state learn about genocides such as the 1920 Ocoee Massacre of African Americans, the new standards require that the teaching should not only mention acts of violence against African Americans but also those by them.

The new teaching standards have been met with widespread skepticism and criticism, being called a step backward in history. Some Florida educators believe that the series of education reforms promoted by Florida governor and Republican presidential candidate Ronald Dion DeSantis are serving his own "political purposes."

It should never be forgotten that hate crimes have often been incited by individual politicians. The few bad apples need to behave themselves and stop attacking people of African descent, as the US society has never been as dangerously divided as it is today.