Grassroots/Hank Kalet

In Buffalo, a Familiar Tune

There has been a torrent of details that have flowed forth in the days since a White Supremacist teen shot up a Buffalo supermarket in an area populated mostly by African Americans, killing 10 and wounding three.

We’ve learned about his parents, his schooling, whether he had friends. We’ve learned of likely mental health issues, and that he’d bought his weapons legally. We’ve learned that he planned the shooting for months, that he lied to his parents about it, that he had additional targets selected.

Politicians have decried the hate at the center of the attack, with conservatives offering the same warmed-over cliches in support of the victims and calling him a “lone wolf,” and Democrats amping up calls for gun control and turning their critiques toward former President Donald Trump and his followers.

All of this is too familiar — starting with the shooting itself, but including the coverage and political response. This familiarity is a central aspect of the problem. We insist that we as Americans are better than we are, that our better angels always prevail, even as we can recite the litany of rightwing attacks on African Americans, Jews, Latinos, Muslims, Asians, the LGBTQ+ community, women.

The shooter left behind a manifesto — which I have consciously chosen not to read — that makes all of this clear, points to the links connecting Buffalo with earlier massacres, to the synagogue shootings in Pittsburgh and California, to the attack on an Atlanta spa with a largely Asian workforce, to shootings in Lexington and El Paso. This reaches back farther — to the Charlottesville rally, Charleston church shooting, and the attack on a Sikh temple in Wisconsin.

Still, we speak about these attacks in ways that minimize their connections, that allow the politicians and TV pundits to continue plying their own bigoted arguments, using rhetoric that seeps into the mainstream and helps normalize extremist thinking and, ultimately, behavior.

Let’s be clear, the pundits and politicians did not pull the trigger in Buffalo, or in any of the other cities that have been targeted. But they speak of “replacement theory,” claiming that elites (usually Jews) are encouraging immigration by non-whites in an effort to “darken” the population and reduce the power of Whites. They speak of Jewish conspiracies, Muslim terrorists, and an invading horde of Latinos and Haitians and Africans. They point to “shit-hole countries” sending inferior people, even criminals. They speak of hidden agendas — gay and trans indoctrination, for instance — and describe doctors who perform abortions as murderers, while empowering neighbors to sue all involved.

They did not pull the trigger in Buffalo, but they helped create the environment in which Buffalo could happen, they and all of their predecessors, including the mostly Republican presidents who trafficked in this language and the party acolytes who have turned “culture” into a battlefield.

These things pose an existential threat, they say repeatedly, and have become more and more open to declaring how we should respond to existential threats.

So, we can call the Buffalo shooter mentally ill, a lone wolf, but we have to acknowledge that doing so obscures how his actions connect to larger threads in the culture.

We can blame American gun culture — it is a central element and contributing factor — but we need to acknowledge that this was about more than the guns.

We can call the kid a racist, but we have to understand that his racism was not individual in nature, that it is systemic and in many ways communal. The Buffalo shooting was part of a longer-standing White supremacist assault on Black Americans going about their business, an attack on a community by a man caught up in a widespread ideological fever dream.

We can trace this through the recent mass shootings to Reagan’s rise and to Nixon’s Southern Strategy, though the John Birch Society, the Southern Dixiecrats and the Jim Crow regime, to the xenophobia that ruled (and still rules) the American political response to immigration, to the various anti-Black pogroms, the anti-Italian riots (New Orleans), to assaults on Jews, Muslims, immigrants of all stripes. We should not talk about Buffalo without also talking about Jim Crow, without understanding historic anti-Asian and anti-Mexican violence and its re-emergence today, without understanding the German-American Bund or the shocking virulence of hoax texts like The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion.

It’s the same argument we’ve been hearing for decades. We need to acknowledge that. This is not new, and it is not enough to pretend otherwise. This is who we are and our only hope, only chance to defeat this deeply rooted White supremacy, is to admit who we are and take it on directly.

Hank Kalet is a poet and journalist in New Jersey. Email, hankkalet@gmail.com; Twitter, @newspoet41; Instagram, @kaletwrites; See columns at hankkalet.substack.com.

From The Progressive Populist, June 15, 2022

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