Credit: Turning Point USA

By James Peterson

Charlie Kirk is dead.

The 31-year-old founder of Turning Point USA was shot dead this week, allegedly by a 22-year-old white man from Utah, according to reports from the FBI and Utah officials. While details are still emerging, one thing is clear: Charlie Kirk is gone from this plane, but his ideas and the reaction to his death are very much alive.

Most Black people probably never heard his name before this week. This is especially true for those not deeply plugged into right-wing college politics or the culture wars of Turning Point USA. Some of these people may be asking: So what?

It’s a fair question. Charlie Kirk’s political ideology, his views on race, gender, history, and democracy, were often in direct opposition to the lived experiences and freedoms that Black communities have fought and died for in this country. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t care.

How Kirk influenced the right

We live in a political moment where how someone dies, why they die, and who benefits from that death, matter deeply. Charlie Kirk’s assassination will not be the end of the story. Instead, it’s the beginning of his deification among those already committed to an anti-democratic, anti-feminist, anti-Black political agenda. His movement will seize this moment to reframe him as a martyr, a truth-teller silenced by “the left,” regardless of the real circumstances.

His death may have been used to instigate bomb threats against HBCUs in an ugly, coordinated backlash against Black spaces that had nothing to do with the incident. Several historically Black colleges received threats in the days following Kirk’s death, requiring evacuations, lockdowns, and investigations. It’s an absurd and terrifying development after a white-on-white crime in one of the whitest states in the country. But it fits a pattern.

When the mythology of white victimhood needs fuel, it is often Black communities that become targeted sites for hatred – even in the form of a cruel hoax.

Charlie Kirk was not the architect of modern conservatism, but he was one of its most effective recent marketers. He simplified dangerous ideologies — anti-Blackness, transphobia, misogyny, and anti-democracy — into catchy slogans and viral clips aimed directly at young white audiences.

He was an apologist for Trump’s authoritarianism. He also pushed the idea that modern feminism was just “man-hating,” that America isn’t a democracy (and shouldn’t be), that trans athletes are somehow an existential threat to women’s sports, and that systemic racism is a myth invented to make white kids feel bad.

And in a chilling and ironic coincidence, he said in 2023 that he thought some gun deaths were worthwhile in order to preserve Americans’ Second Amendment rights to gun ownership.

He had a knack for turning deeply flawed arguments into accessible talking points, giving the worst ideas in our political culture a slick, youthful veneer. That’s why his death, tragic though it may be, will be twisted into a rallying cry.

What this violence means

Political violence has long shaped the Black experience in America. We know what it means to lose visionary leaders because of their visions. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated for calling out the triple evils of racism, militarism, and capitalism. Malcolm X, known for telling Black folks to defend themselves “by any means necessary,” was gunned down. Medgar Evers was shot in his driveway for organizing voter registration drives in Mississippi.

But violence didn’t stop with leaders. The bombs that incinerated Black Wall Street in Tulsa. The white supremacist mobs that burned Rosewood to the ground. White racist terror stalked the footsteps of Civil Rights Movement activists and their families. The state-sanctioned destruction of Black lives, homes, churches, schools, and businesses was par for the course of this nation’s history.

We know political violence. We live with its aftermath every day. When an act of political violence erupts,  it’s worth our attention.

Black folks have a long tradition of using humor to metabolize trauma. It’s part of our survival strategy. So yes, some Black people online have made jokes in the wake of Kirk’s death. One post declared that instead of saying someone got “murked,” or killed, we might now say that they got “Kirked.” Another said, “I love that for Black people.”

This humor is not necessarily about making light of death. It’s about making sense of a nation that often seems senseless. It’s about reclaiming agency in a political moment where we are constantly targeted by policy, propaganda, and, yes, sometimes, bombs.

Black folks aren’t laughing because we don’t understand the gravity of political violence. We’re laughing because we do. And we rarely let our laughter elide the gravity of a critical situation. When the social contract breaks down, when ideas become weapons, when disagreements become death sentences, the most vulnerable communities are always the first to suffer.

Even if you didn’t agree with Charlie Kirk, even if his death feels like the self-destruction of an ideology that never had our best interests in mind, this moment is not a victory. It’s a warning. Once political violence becomes conventional, no one is safe.

We should mourn this moment. We should mourn the way this nation continues to inch toward fascism, justified by conspiracy, energized by martyrdom, and reinforced by hate. We should mourn the fact that our democracy is so fragile, so frayed, that even a murder becomes political fuel.

We should care that Charlie Kirk was murdered because we cannot afford to live in a society where political violence becomes normalized. That normalization does not begin or end with Charlie Kirk. It continues. 

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