We Can’t Talk About the Racist Massacre in Buffalo Without Talking About Capitalism
We are not being honest about the horrific racist violence that took place in Buffalo this weekend and the racial inequality throughout the United States if we ignore how capitalism brought us here.
People light candles at a memorial near the Tops Grocery store in Buffalo, New York where a gunman fatally shot ten people. (Usman Khan / AFP via Getty Images)
I was going to sit down and finish up some longer writing projects this weekend. But then the shooting in Buffalo happened, where it appears that a white supremacist eighteen-year-old drove two hundred miles to kill Black people in one of the most African-American neighborhoods in New York State.
It’s a horrifying tragedy, immediately harkening back to the 2015 mass murder at Reverend Clementa Pinckney’s church in Charleston, South Carolina. Law enforcement officials say that the murderer had researched the mass murder of fifty-one Muslims in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2018.
As a Black person, I have the biggest news-generated pit in my stomach since George Floyd’s murder. It feels as if American society is becoming unmoored from its foundations and we don’t have any coordinated approach — as people on the Left, as workers, and as Black people and people of color — for how to respond.
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