On White Domestic Terrorism and More of the Usual
A white supremacist took Black lives this weekend in Buffalo, New York, in a predominantly Black area in a food desert. This murder spree was live-streamed by a white man in tactical gear that he shouldn’t be able to buy with an assault rifle he shouldn’t have been able to purchase. This white man had been talking about wanting to do something like this for months, going as far as posting a manifesto online about his hatred for Black people and the harm he wanted to inflict. He shared that his murder spree was influenced by terrorist attacks at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, North Carolina, and the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida.
More white people killing Black people just because they feel their hatred for people of color, for marginalized folx, trumps human life.
Just another Saturday.
More of the usual.
More collective momentary outrage from white people across the United States, saying they feel for Black communities and that “America is better than this.”
More positing white people who go out of their way to harm and murder melanated bodies as victims. White folx will claim this young white man was “troubled” and that he is an outlier. Hurt people hurt people, but white hurt people hurt non-white people. Precedent shows this, but this will not be a part of the narrative when discussing this situation. Neither will the fact that white people are the largest culprit of non-white mass killings in the United States.
There will be more calls for gun safety.
There will be more calls for mental health funding, believing that “if someone would’ve reached the shooter, this might not have happened.”
More of the usual.
Black folx will be expected to be at work tomorrow, smiling and unaffected by the mass murder of their people this weekend. We’ll be expected to be present at work, giving 110% effort this week. And if anyone believes we aren’t, even if our track record is us always giving more of ourselves? We’ll hear about it. Meanwhile, our white colleagues will “offer their condolences” and go out of their way to prove they are our “allies.”
By Wednesday, the events of this weekend will be an afterthought. Black folx will still be sitting with this weight in their brains and bodies, but most white folx will have moved on to trying to get that spreadsheet done by Friday’s team meeting. They’ll ask Black folx why we’re so down by Thursday afternoon when they finally notice we aren’t our “usual perky selves.” We’ll opt not to get into it with them because we’ll be able to see how little the ongoing harm of white supremacy impacts them. We know how unwilling they are to be human with us in those moments, empathetic and honest, so we’ll say we’re just having a rough week. They will say some polite nonsense while we pine for another weekend to be away from whiteness so that we can try to heal something almost unhealable.
More of the usual.
What I wouldn’t give for a bit of something f----g unusual for once, y’all. The shock on my face if the mass murder of melanated bodies wasn’t a blip in the news cycle, something that happens with such regularity that white people don’t even bat an eyelash.
I know better than that, though. I know whiteness better than that.
They won’t admit it, but most white people expect this level of constant hatred and harm from their people. They expect this of the culture they created because that culture has led to white people harming and killing other white people in the name of bigotry and hatred. Yet whiteness will never take ownership. Most white people will always make excuses and view centuries of systemic abuse, enslavement, and murder as isolated incidents so they can sleep at night and feel like “good” people. This situation will not prompt profound change or deep conversation for white people.
This mass murder, this terrorist act, will be out of white consciousness by mid-week. And Black folx will be the ones who are told we “need to get over it” or that we are being “reverse racists.”
More of the usual.
What I wouldn’t give for a bit of something f----g unusual, though.