White Supremacist Plans, Re-hearses, and Executes 10 Black people in Buffalo, NY Grocery Store
On Saturday, May 14th, 18-year-old Peyton Gendron opened fire in Tops supermarket in Buffalo New York killing ten and injuring three others. In hopes of “cleansing” the nation, 11 of the 13 victims are Black, two were white. The gunman drove 200 miles away from hometown of Conklin, N.Y. arriving in east Buffalo a day before to conduct “reconnaissance” on the grocery store, authorities said. Like San Antonio, the east side is the heart of the Black community in Buffalo and is still predominantly a black neighborhood. Marlene Brown, 58, resident of Buffalo and who lives blocks away from the grocery store for more than a decade said “We don’t want to be protected after the fact,” “We want to be protected like we matter,” and “without it taking a white supremacist shooting up our community.” She added, “Time and time again they’ve shown nobody cares about us here. It’s a pattern.”
President Biden called for a through investigation, expressing that there was no harbor for “hate-filled domestic terrorism.” The 18-year-old appeared in court hours after the shooting where he pleaded not guilty to first-degree murder where he faces life in prison without the possibility of parole.
To promote his sinister agenda Gendron live-streamed his attack on the Twitch platform and published a 180-page manifesto online detailing his white supremacist ideologies and his plan to target a Black community in New York. “Extreme boredom” during the pandemic supposedly led to Payton Gendron’s interest in carrying out such a disturbing massacre. What’s more is that the suspect had threatened a shooting at his high school last year and two months earlier in March, Gendron visited the Tops supermarket and was confronted by a security guard at the store during a trip on which he explained to the security guard that he was “collecting census data.” We live in a time where technological innovations have opened new doors to prevent any kind of unknown domestic terrorism in our country. We have the resources to track any threat against our national security. When it came to 9/11 and tragic events that struck after such as the Boston Marathon, the measures we took to prevent such terrorist acts to strike again were great so why are the measures taken against mass-shootings which are domestic terror events as well thrown to the wayside? Is it the color of the gun-mans skin? Or the beliefs they are sacrificing their freedoms for?
In 2018 a white man gunned down 11 Jewish people at a Pittsburgh synagogue, the next year another white man seeking to kill Mexicans in a “Hispanic invasion of Texas” opened fire at an El Paso Walmart killing 23 people, and yet another deadly mass shooting this past weekend has unfolded with an armed white man targeting Black people. Three shootings, three different targets, though all linked by one belief is now coming to fruition in showing the deep issues such extremist ideologies have on our democracy. Of the extremes of American life, the replacement theory — the notion that non-white individuals are being brought into the United States to “replace” white people to achieve a political agenda and disempower white Americans — has become an engine of racist terror and the engine of Gendron’s motives. It has incentivized right-wing extremists causing a wave of mass shootings linked to this replacement ideology in recent years.
Since there cannot be a law limiting our beliefs, these long-standing racist beliefs— from the Jim Crow state laws in the 1960’s to the extremist white supremacy beliefs today— integrating in our democratic systems and politics ought to be condemned at once amongst American society. A nation that has overcome many discriminatory issues in the past, it is a shame that we’re still enabling racist and terrorist mindsets as if they have any worth of recognizing our sympathy. The fact that the mainstream media and the GOP will not recognize such acts for what they are because of the color of the perpetrator’s skin is despicable. It is time to have a talk about the Second Amendment and its existence in the modern world today or this amendment we Americans love so-much will backfire.
Article by: Grace Jones
Grace Jones is a 2022 UTSA Political Science Graduate and resident of the East side of San Antonio. She enjoys writing, reading, and will be attending law school in the fall for Criminal Justice.
