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About nine months after the horrific Buffalo grocery store mass shooting in May, the perpetrator, Payton Gendron, 19, apologized for mercilessly murdering 10 people in that racially-motivated killing spree.
Gendron dressed in tactical gear and armed with an assault rifle opened fire at the Tops Friendly Markets grocery store in a historically Black neighborhood, killing 10 and wounding three.
After an emotional scene at a courtroom hearing on Wednesday, February 15, where some of the victims’ families tearfully told Gendron how his actions not only destroyed lives of their family members but also their lives and the community and nation at large.
“I’m very sorry for all the pain I forced the victims and their families to suffer through. I’m very sorry for stealing the lives of your loved ones. I cannot express how much I regret all the decisions I made leading up to my actions on May 14,” a shackled Gendron said in court, CNN reported.
“I did a terrible thing that day. I shot and killed people because they were Black. Looking back now, I can’t believe I actually did it. I believed what I read online and acted out of hate. I know I can’t take it back, but I wish I could, and I don’t want anyone to be inspired by me and what I did.”
Gendron pleaded guilty last November on one count of a domestic act of terrorism motivated by hate, 10 counts of first-degree murder, three counts of attempted murder and a weapons possession charge for the mass shooting at Tops.
Erie County New York Judge Susan Eagan sentenced Gendron to life in prison on each of the murder and terrorism allegations against him and delivered a scathing condemnation.
“There is no place for you or your ignorant, hateful and evil ideologies in a civilized society,” she said in the courtroom. “There can be no mercy for you, no understanding, no second chances. The damage you have caused is too great, and the people you have hurt are too valuable to this community. You will never see the light of day as a free man ever again.”
New York Attorney John J. Flynn told CNN after the sentence that while justice was served, it only scratched the surface.
“It certainly does not put any closure on what we need to do as a society and a community going forward,” Flynn said in the article. “Justice was done with a small ‘j’ today, but we still have a big ‘J’ of Justice to do.”
According to FBI data, hate crimes rose 23 percent between 2016 and 2020, and hate crimes targeting race and ethnicity made up 65 percent of hate crimes in 2020, rising 42 percent during that period. There were nearly 3,000 hate crimes committed across the nation targeting the Black community in 2020; hate crimes targeting the same community rose nearly 60 percent between 2016-2020 and rose more than 40 percent between 2019-2020. And those figures are likely undercounts, according to Giffords.
“I don’t think you need to be a statistician to make the correlation between the Trump era and a rise in racially motivated violence and intimidation,” Attorney General Dana Nessel said previously. “We all saw President Trump go on TV in 2017 and defend the actions of torch-bearing extremists in Charlottesville, who chanted ‘You will not replace us’ and mowed down and killed a counter-protestor. Tucker Carlson, who currently hosts the most popular talk show on cable, often discusses the so-called Great Replacement, a boogeyman of a conspiracy theory designed to gin up exactly the kind of hate and fear on display in Buffalo. However, as long as I’m Michigan’s Attorney General, those who perpetrate these kinds of threats, intimidation, and violence will be held accountable.”
White supremacy can come in many forms from racially motivated mass shootings and other blatant forms of terrorism to insidious, across-the-board attempts at silencing a people through ideologies like the Florida Department of Education blocking the implementation of an AP African American Studies. The move to take legal action against the state comes after the Florida Department of Education blocked the implementation of an AP African American Studies course in public high schools, citing that it “lacked educational value” in a letter to the College Board.
“Black history is American history,” Attorney Ben Crump said in late January.
While steps are being taken to revisit that decision, more examples of white supremacy are evident throughout American history that is interwoven with the mistreatment of Blacks and other systemically oppressed groups.
Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Texas, recently reintroduced a bill that would punish white nationalists whose rhetoric instigates violent actions.
The proposed legislation from Jackson Lee, which she also filed last summer, would “expand the scope” to persons whose acts of violence are directly related to white supremacist discourse and should be included in the definition of hate crimes, MSNBC reported.
Rev. Dr. Wendell Anthony, president of Detroit Branch NAACP, noted in a Michigan Chronicle op-ed that there is a “critical racial issue in America.”
“We still have not crossed over the color line,” Anthony said. “This line represents the problem of indifference, apathy, negative acceptance of violent behavior and a dedicated ignorance to disregard the truth. I’m reminded of the words of Dr. Du Bois who said very clearly, ‘Either America will destroy ignorance or ignorance will destroy the United States.’ Let us work together so that our nation will not be destroyed.”
Dr. Kalfani Ture, an assistant professor of Sociology, Criminal Justice and Human Services at Mount Saint Mary’s University in Maryland told the Michigan Chronicle that white supremacy stems from an idea that white people (and those who approximate whiteness) are superior to all others.
“It is a lazy ideology that calls for simplicity by constructing simply binaries — dichotomies that are formed around antithetical opposites,” he said. “It collapses those identities most opposite to the category of black – Blackness. Whiteness and Blackness have linguistically served as a metaphor to shape valuations of the resulting two social categories, namely Blackness, and whiteness. To be clear, white supremacy holds that Blackness is inferior.”
He adds that as it holds that white people are not only fit for power, freedom, and citizenship, it conversely holds that Blackness is suited for “powerlessness, bondage and provisional citizenship at best.”
“Interestingly enough, if we understand white supremacy fully then we can then explain the high homicide rates and violence in Black and brown communities alongside discussing racialized police violence for example,” he said. “White supremacy is the progenitor of Black-on-Black violence and white-on-Black violence.”
He adds that people should not be surprised that “white supremacy still reigns,” particularly in policing.
“America has invested billions of dollars in police retraining. It doesn’t work because this as a solution is being applied to a skill set,” Ture said. “Racialized police violence is a result of the way whiteness affects, in fact reorients, an officer’s field of vision.”
The resolution, though complicated, is there, Ture said.
“My immediate answer is to educate both police and regular citizens around whiteness, white supremacy, racism,” he said among other things. “By the way, white supremacy manifests in classism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, ableism, ageism, regionalism, and not only racism.”
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