America must confront racism to stem gun violence
Suppressing the truth only serves to cover for the hate that it breeds
The recent shooting deaths of 10 Black people in Buffalo at the hands of an 18-year-old white supremacist armed with an AR-15-style rifle underscored the centrality of truth and racial justice to our future as a nation. Days after the Buffalo massacre, the mass slaughter of 19 elementary school children and two teachers in Uvalde, Texas, struck an additional blow to our already-wounded nation.
Violence and hate are at crisis levels, but far from new phenomena in America. We have long held an ignoble global record for mass shootings. Black people are the leading targets for hate crimes in our country, an odious reflection of the ongoing legacy of anti-Black racism on which this country was founded and that infects nearly every aspect of American institutions and identity. Anti-Semitic attacks, as well as violence against the Latino, Asian, Muslim and LGBTQ+ communities are also on the rise.
Alongside guns, a common denominator of these heinous acts is that they are often motivated by the false narrative of white supremacy — the Achilles heel of our multi-racial, multi-ethnic democratic experiment. Ironically, this crisis moment in fact requires a “great replacement” — one toward which we were running headlong in 2020 when calcified falsehoods about historical and contemporary racial inequities were being replaced with fundamental truths about structural racism. We are seeing the consequences of our cultural reluctance to do the work necessary to fully realize the demands of a fair, functioning democracy. For a chance at ending these tides of horror, we must find the courage to say that our destinies are linked and that white supremacy is killing us all.
The Buffalo massacre prompted scrutiny into how public figures like Fox News’ Tucker Carlson and the House Republican conference chair, Elise Stefanik, R-Schuylerville, have helped mainstream the hateful “replacement theory” conspiracy the shooter referenced as justification for his attack. Shamefully, those who have peddled this falsehood — one that a disturbing 1 in 3 Americans believe is true — continue to despite the undeniable evidence that it results in bloodshed. The reported contents of the shooters’ manifesto reveal that the ongoing fearmongering around critical race theory is now also driving deadly violence. Anti-CRT mania has been fed by a cynical campaign aimed at censoring truthful dialogue about the history of racism in America, which includes the documented pattern of violence against Black communities. Perversely, due to the edicts of these broadly punitive truth bans, teachers are now reporting that they are afraid to speak honestly to students about the Buffalo shooting.
Suppressing the truth about systemic racism only serves to cover for the hate that it breeds. Officials say the 18-year-old picked Buffalo for attack because of its “high percentage of Blacks,” a statistic that reflects their systemic marginalization in a city that counts among the nation’s most severely segregated. Decades of racist laws and policies, including private and federal restrictive housing covenants, robbed generations of Black people in Buffalo of equal access to the resources and opportunities every human needs to thrive. The site of the attack was the only accessible grocery store and pharmacy for the majority Black community, further punctuating and extending the pain of the massacre.
Racist violence is an outgrowth of the deep-rooted injustice of our nation, and we can no longer afford to brook lies that this injustice does not exist. We must commit to abundant truth and unflinching confrontation with who we are, what we’ve become, how we got here, and what it will take to get us through.
The Reconstruction and civil rights eras, though significant points in the development of America’s multiracial democracy, fell short of excavating the rot that keeps the disease of hate in our body politic. And we continue to see how, by not doing the full work of reckoning, everything we have achieved is vulnerable to assault.
We have an opportunity to do differently now, seeing all that we stand to lose. Before we had no model of what was possible. Now we do, which means we have no excuse not to preserve what we’ve achieved and finish the project. This means urgent action from multiple corners.
The federal government must designate these hate crimes as what they are — acts of terrorism — to assure vulnerable communities that their fears are understood, and that white supremacy is recognized as a lethal threat to individual victims and national security at large.
Congress must also focus its oversight and appropriations authority on directing resources towards addressing this homegrown terror and holding law enforcement accountable for doing so. The Department of Justice, including the FBI, already has over 50 terrorismrelated statutes at its disposal to meaningfully investigate and prosecute racist violence.
Social media, implicated in both the Buffalo and Uvalde shootings, continues to be an unchecked public space for the fomenting of distorted narratives, hate speech, and inducements to violence. It is imperative that elected leaders enact concrete steps, such as strict, proactive and constitutional content regulation, to disrupt this cycle.
All of us have a role in the urgent work of saving our fissured democracy. We must explicitly reject and denounce racism and white supremacy, including when it comes in corrosive conspiracy theories and politically motivated lies. Any candidate who is silent on the scourge of white supremacy must be opposed and defeated at the ballot box. The inability to enact laws to protect our diverse electorate and tackle gun violence is a direct result of the spread of extremism within elected leadership at the state and federal levels.
These steps do not mean that our democracy will no longer require constant vigilance. But they are our only hope of surviving the path of fatal nihilism we are barreling down.