Here in the United States, we’re talking about another mass shooting.

It doesn’t matter what day you read this post on; that opening sentence will still be true. We have a lot of them here. We talk about them a lot. We typically don’t do anything beyond talking, but that part may change one day.

That day probably isn’t today. Today we’re still talking. And I’m a translator, so I’m meta. I want to talk about the conversation.

The specific mass shooting we’re talking about today was an act of racially motivated terrorism committed by a white supremacist man. That’s not unusual, either. Racially motivated violence has been a specialty of ours since back when we were still a British colony, and white supremacy is on the rise, here and around the globe.

The national conversation about it has managed to hit on the usual questions: Should we officially agree that people of color have the same human rights as white people? Should we officially agree that women have the same human rights as men? Should we officially agree that immigrants have the same human rights as current US citizens?

You might not have heard those questions phrased exactly that way. Don’t worry; I’m a translator. Let me translate them into some other forms: Are white supremacists “terrorists,” or are they just “misguided”? Should we address the fact that most mass shooters are men with a history of violence against women, or would mentioning that be hurtful to the men who never shoot anybody? When people talk about mass shootings, are they really just distracting us from the more pressing immigration crisis?

Those are the questions I hear all around me.

As far as I can tell, what it all boils down to is this: We each have a circle in our mind where we put all the people whom we think should have human rights.

Whether by nature or nurture, some people’s circles seem to be bigger than others. Still, we all have to decide for ourselves which human beings should get human rights. So we either have to move people into the circle or draw the circle around the people.

All of those questions above definitely make the conversation about which people get to move into the circle.

 

In this conversation we’re having about gun violence (or is it about race? or is it about gender? or is it about nationality?), it seems implied that since all of us have finite circles, we need to decide for ourselves how best to fit people in there. Maybe we go with the “first come, first served” rule until the circle is full. Maybe we say people of a certain skin color get priority entry. Maybe we say cisgender people get priority entry. Maybe we say people whose families came to the United States during a certain date range get priority entry. Maybe everybody gets rated on some complex system of sexual attractiveness, educational level, reading speed, and physical fitness.

But whatever the system, whatever size the circle, eventually this happens…

The circle is looking pretty full. It doesn’t look like there’s room for that last person. Maybe they were the “brownest one,” or the “fattest one,” or the “slowest one,” or just the unluckiest one. For whatever reason, not everybody fit in the circle!

But wait.

Human rights don’t take up space.

I imagined this circle. This is all conceptual. This is me, introspecting about how big the “Who gets human rights?” circle is. This my neighbor, introspecting about the same thing.

Every time we wonder if a white supremacist is a terrorist in the same way a member of ISIS is, or question whether it’s “fair” to talk about how abusive men commit most mass shootings, or mention immigration and mass shootings at the same time like they are inherently connected issues, that’s us deciding that we don’t want everybody in the circle. That’s us deciding that human rights aren’t “human rights”; they’re rights we grant only to specific humans.

Because if we did want everybody in this imaginary circle…

We’d just imagine a bigger circle.

 

 

My vision is the “draw the circle around the people” one. Everybody is inside the circle by default. If someone looks like they might fall outside the circle, well, I control my vision, and I can choose to expand the circle. I might not like that person, but me choosing to exclude them would always be a choice, and never a necessity.

Your vision of humanity is your imagination at work.

The size of your circle is the size of your imagination.

And any failure to grant human rights to every single human being is a failure of imagination.