America Isn't Ready to Truly Understand the Buffalo Shooting [View all]

[Nevilledog]

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https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/05/buffalo-shooting-white-supremacy-racial-violence/629908/

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https://archive.ph/54pux

One evening about seven years ago in St. Andrews, Scotland, I was walking home from a long day of doctoral research. Most people out that night were not concluding studies. A scattered few exited the ancient city’s meager collection of pubs and restaurants.

That ordinary night shifted when a drunken man stumbled out of one of those bars and spotted my Black body. He presented no manifesto. I have no access to the soul-distorting experiences that led him to look upon me with contempt, but seconds after he saw me, he blurted out that most famous of anti-Black racial slurs. I had never been verbally accosted in a British accent and didn’t know that word was international.

I performed the assessment that Black folks have performed for centuries. How much danger am I in? Then I remembered I was in Scotland, and therefore the person probably did not have a gun. So I gave him my best cold stare, ready to defend myself if needed. He apparently performed a similar assessment, thought better of it, and moved on. There was nothing particularly special about that day. I had done nothing to antagonize him. I had simply been Black on what may have been a Tuesday, and for that reason alone I was a target of someone else’s rage.

The 10 Black people in murdered in Buffalo, New York, lived in a country with a different set of laws than those of the United Kingdom: When the white supremacist Payton Gendron drove 200 miles from his home to a grocery store in a Black neighborhood in Buffalo, he was well armed. They died in a Tops grocery store because they were Black and wanted to buy food on a Saturday in America.

*snip*