How the Buffalo massacre is part of US tradition: 'We'll continue to see killings'

[Nevilledog]

Link to tweet

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/may/18/buffalo-shooting-us-tradition-history-white-supremacist-violence

No paywall
https://archive.ph/9kywd


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What was your initial reaction to the news?

You’re just horrified to see the community’s pain. But I also think about the things we could have done as a society for us not to be here. It’s incredibly disturbing, distressing and frustrating that we’re still here after so many different episodes throughout history and in the last 30 years.

I also think about the fact that this grocery store in a Black community became a target of violence and how that will have traumatizing implications for many. I live in Baltimore, and the day after the massacre, I went grocery shopping in a white area. I didn’t feel safe going into my normal grocery store.

What should we take away from this happening in upstate New York?

As a country, we still seem stuck on this idea that systems of racism and economic segregation are southern or rural things or tied to specific places. But what we see in Buffalo and what we’ve seen in Syracuse – where my family is from – and what we’ll continue to see is that there isn’t a geographic confinement to the systems of harm. There are individuals across regions invested in ideas of “extermination” who are willing to go to any means necessary to carry it out.

In Buffalo, I also think about all the systems that put members of the Black community in that particular grocery store at that time – how the highways were built, forms of economic segregation or how that area was a food desert for a long time before the community lobbied to get that store built.

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