Buffalo and Post-Traumatic Clarity
In the wake of the Buffalo Massacre, rethink what you know about this country and racism.
Since the end of the Civil War, America has nursed a quiet, genocidal death wish against Black Americans. Its similar suppressed desires concerning poor whites are older but vary in intensity. Only Native Americans have sustained more harm from actual genocidal effort.
The recent events in Buffalo and the national response to it bring in focus the ways that America at large continues to downplay the pervasiveness of its own ideological corruption. Don’t miss this moment of clarity.
Black Americans are vulnerable, very vulnerable. The fact that the assailant was able to locate a majority Black area by ZIP code is courtesy of past federal policy that created segregated neighborhoods. The result is that Black Americans as a population can be easily located almost anywhere in the nation, down to the street level. When they want to avoid us, they can. When they wanted to come for us, they did.
To prove the point, one need not look far. This neighborhood was already targeted for commercial abandonment. Not long ago, the grocery store where the attack took place was not even there at one point. This was a food desert — and has become one again. Now that Tops Friendly Market is the scene of a crime, it is shut down, leaving the neighborhood again without any nearby grocery store.
America just can’t seem to say “anti-Black hate.” Let’s put this in perspective. Individual attacks against Asian Americans rose during the pandemic and were followed by legislation, funding, a whole campaign tailored to #StopAsianHate.
But this time, when a young man came to kill Black people and had the n-word written on his gun? A “hate crime” and “racially motivated.”
A massacre of mostly Black people is apparently an opportunity to call out other kinds of hatred without specifically naming this kind of hatred, which is a horribly honest admission that anti-Black racism is America’s default racism.
Americans protect ignorance. The reticence to call out anti-Black racism specifically is not new, but why? We have come to expect hemming and hawing from the usual suspects, but there is clearly a larger pattern of being slow to call out harm aimed at Black Americans, to pretend it may not be, or just isn’t, what it looks like.
The fact is, the longer Americans are ignorant about what racism actually is, the more likely they will be to perpetuate it. The lack of immediate recognition of this massacre as an attack against black people means that working in media and holding print news, phones, and tablets are Americans who could see this possibly being something other than anti-Black racism.
It must be nice, to have one’s ignorance coddled, protected, monetized even. To be in denial about anti-Black killings, firings, loan denials, history, etc. To not hear the stupidity of asking for video of every anti-Black offense in real-time for reality to hit home:
I sincerely believe there is a real interest — a conspiracy of desires, if you will — not to dismantle racism. As long as the United States is willing to keep black people vulnerable and unwilling to be full-throated about anti-Black racism, we’ll be here again.
Peace and healing, fam. ✌🏿
