Buffalo, Roe, & the Status Quo

Washington Plays Politics While the Republic Burns

Last Saturday, in a predominantly black neighborhood in East Buffalo, an eighteen-year-old white supremacist armed with an assault rifle walked into a crowded supermarket and savagely shot thirteen people, ten of whom died. It was later discovered that the attack had been motivated by what’s known in white nationalist circles as “replacement theory,” the nonsensical — and historically ironic — notion that white populations in Europe and America are being demographically and culturally replaced with non-white peoples.

Almost immediately, parallels were drawn to previous mass shootings, the first in 2019 at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas (in which 23 people, almost all Latino, were killed) and the other a 2015 shooting at the Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina (in which nine black parishioners lost their lives). Both gunmen specifically cited “replacement theory” as the motive for their unprovoked attacks on minority populations.

But the comparisons hardly stop there. Equally reminiscent of these earlier assaults has been the predictable nonresponse by politicians in the wake of the Buffalo shooting. Besides the perfunctory “thoughts and prayers” platitudes that always seem to echo these atrocities, precious little is being done either to combat…