Buffalo shooting raises question about racial hatred
My reaction to news of the mass shooting in Buffalo, New York, was more than emotional; my heart raced and my stomach churned. My hands are shaking as I write this nearly a week later.
My first thought, in the moment after I heard about the attack, was the same as it always is after every mass shooting: Dear God, please don’t let the shooter be Black. Because in the eyes of white America — consciously or not — the rest of us would be held to account.
The air cleared as the truth came out — a hate-filled young white supremacist, prosecutors say, meticulously planned to annihilate as many Black people as he could while they shopped for groceries on a Saturday afternoon. Ten people died — all of them Black — and three were hospitalized.
As irrational as it seems, I felt a brief flash of relief; the shooter allegedly was, once again, a white man beholden to hate and enamored with guns, whose carnage would be his legacy. But that relief was instantly dispatched by blinding rage, wrenching heartbreak, inchoate fear — and the isolating feeling of being a potential target in a violent and hateful land, carrying a load that few of my colleagues and neighbors can understand.
I have lived in that land for more than six decades now. And I can still remember when I first began to feel the weight of that burden, when it dawned on me that my brown skin could make me a pariah. Except I didn’t know that word back then, at Miles Elementary School in Cleveland, where almost all of the other students were white.
I was in fifth grade and we were learning about the history of “our great country,” as my teacher always called it. I tried to laugh it off when I was mocked by white classmates, who thought images of crowded slave ships and Black men being whipped were cartoonishly funny. I was grateful then that my brown skin hid the red flush of shame. Some of these were people I’d considered friends.
The torment didn’t stop when the school day ended. At a New Year’s Eve sleepover at the YWCA, which I’d begged for permission to attend, my younger sister and I were terrorized by a cabal of white girls who pelted us with the N-word, then laughed uproariously as others joined in. We suffered in silence; there were two of us, dozens of them.
When my mother picked us up the next day, we squirmed as we insisted we had fun — then we never spoke of it again. But the shame didn’t fade. And the question that was stuck in my head eventually found its way out:
Mommy, why do they hate us so much?
I wish I could tell you what her answer was. I can only remember pain contorting her face and tears welling up in her eyes. Years later I learned that she’d asked her own mother that same question, when she was a child growing up in Alabama under the yoke of Jim Crow laws.
When my own daughter came to me as a teenager — humiliated by the way everyone stared at her when racist tropes were the subject of their history class — I braced myself for what I knew she would ask; the question generations of progress had not nullified: Mommy, why do they hate us so much? And now I’m forced to imagine my granddaughter, with her beloved coterie of brown Barbies and baby dolls, asking that same awful question when she’s old enough to recognize that people like us are not universally loved.
My mother was born more than a century ago, when the Ku Klux Klan ruled rural Alabama, torturing and murdering any Black person who didn’t toe their line. One by one, she and her siblings migrated north to Cleveland in the 1940s and built new lives. I remember how hopeful she felt when we were growing up, at the apex of the civil rights movement, in a city known then for progression activism. The future looked limitless and bountiful for our generation then.
Now I am glad she is not here to see this. Our country is moving back toward its nakedly racist past, fueled by shameless politicians, coarse public dialogue and fictional social media conspiracies. The danger now is not only from white-hooded goons, but random misfits and losers; ordinary racists and fascists, with massive arsenals and a growing list of enemies they’ve targeted by race, religion, ethnicity, gender and nonconformist identities.
We need to stop feigning shock and innocence about how and why these massacres keep happening. We have shamefully lax gun laws, centuries-old racist and nativist proclivities, an education system stuck in the 20th century, and a growing unwillingness to care about anyone other than me, me, me.
The blow of this particular tragedy may hit Black people harder and hurt longer. But every targeted group is likely to wrestle with the same sense of fear, anger and grief when haters violently intrude on their community.