Reparations Daily (ish) Vol. 81

The Buffalo Massacre Highlights the Urgency for Reparations

May 23, 2022

Happy Monday,

It’s been a little over a week since a self-avowed white supremacist murdered ten Black people in a grocery store in Buffalo, New York. Their names were:

Celestine Chaney, 52
Roberta A. Drury, 32
Andre Mackneil, 53
Katherine Massey, 72
Margus D. Morrison, 52
Heyward Patterson, 67
Aaron Salter Jr. 55
Geraldine Talley, 62

Two days after the murders, I was in Chicago to give a talk at the 2022 Grantmakers for Effective Organizations Conference alongside my colleague Aria Florant titled ‘Reparations are Coming: How Philanthropy Can Meet the Moment.” We, of course, had to rewrite our original speeches and dedicate space to the individuals and families who are still reeling from this disgusting attack.

For today’s Hot Takes section, I expand on my speech and discuss how the Buffalo massacre highlights the urgency for reparations.

As a reminder, I’m trying something new with the format and including the Hot Takes section above the clips. There has been a ton of reparations-related news over the past week. A few I would recommend checking out include:

The Washington Post had a series of great articles on the ‘Great Replacement theory. Philip Bump released this analysis , this opinion piece from Paul Waldman, and this article the day after the shooting.
The New York Times set off a firestorm across academic twitter yesterday after it dropped its investigation into how Haiti paid France reparations. In the aftermath, a French bank will study its role in the ecosystem of colonialism.
Kirsten Mullen, folklorist and co-author of From Here to Equality, published an analysis in the Washington Post critiquing HR 40.
Blavity kicked off a series on reparations with an interview with Dr. Tiffany Crutcher’s work in Tulsa for “repair, respect, and restitution” for racial violence.
The Debt Collective erased $1.7 million in unpaid tuition for 500 Black women who attended Bennet College.

In radical collaboration,
Trevor

Hot Takes

When the names and ages of the victims of the Buffalo massacre started to come out, I grabbed my phone, did some math, and tweeted this.

Reparations Daily (ish) @ReparationsIsh

The average age of those killed in Buffalo was 62. This wasn’t just an attack on the Black community. It was an attack on our Black elders. #BuffaloMassacre

The pain of the massacre hurts nonetheless, but knowing that the majority of those killed survived numerous wars, Jim Crow, and up until that point, COVID-19, makes the pain a little sharper. It also highlights the urgency of reparations for Black Americans.

Those born in the ‘Silent’ generation are between the ages of 76 and 92, and Baby Boomers are between the ages of 54 and 75. The average life expectancy in the U.S. is 77 years old, and for Black people, it is 71 years old.

In just 20 years, the number of Black people who would have lived through Jim Crow will have substantially decreased. This attack should serve as a reminder that the elder Black American community has lived through decades of racial terrorism without any respite.

India Walton, the organizer who defeated incumbent Mayor Bryon Brown in the 2021 Democratic primary (before he ran as a write-in candidate in the general election), said that “this is more than half a century of oppression, of systemic racism, and now is the time to renew the call for reparations. I think we need bold, reparative action at the forefront of all of these conversations. Prayers and thoughts are not enough.”

The 180-page document the shooter left behind is littered with anti-Black and antisemitic thoughts and ideologies. Everything from the heavily reported “great replacement” theory to “accelerationism.”

The Buffalo shooter directly plagiarizes the New Zealand Christchurch shooter throughout the 180-page document, asking himself “why did you carry out the attack,” to which he answers “to add momentum to the pendulum swings of history, further destabilizing and polarizing Western society to eventually destroy the current nihilistic, hedonistic, and individualistic insanity that has taken control of Western thought.”

His explanation of why he targeted Black people to him is “obvious.” “They are a visible, large group of replacers from a culture with a higher fertility rate and strong, robust traditions that seek to occupy my people’s lands and ethnically replace my own people.”

Just a few weeks before the massacre, The New York Times released an incredible analysis of 1150 episodes of the Tucker Carlson Tonight show, revealing how Carlson brings these extremist viewpoints to millions of Americans on a nightly basis.

While it would be easy to pinpoint Carlson as a significant contributing factor to the attack, the shooter himself explains that his radicalization was mainly through sites like 4chan and 8chan.

But, the most significant culprit is the culture of white supremacy and violence that the U.S. has nurtured.

A combination of Carlson’s normalizing of these fringe ideas, the reluctance to prosecute any of the January 6th rioters, the acquittal of Kyle Rittenhouse, four years of racist and anti-immigrant rhetoric from Donald Trump, our collective obsession with guns, and the demeaning stories we have always told about Blackness, led to Buffalo massacre.

The network of actors that uphold the culture of white supremacy is a loose network working across sectors, either explicitly or implicitly, to further a shared viewpoint that the power of whiteness must be protected.

As noted in ‘Beyond Privilege: Whiteness as the Center of Racial Marginalization,’ a “combination of laws, practices, and language, a small group of elite, powerful white individuals have been able to psychologically control and physically ensure allegiance from the larger majority of working-class whites who might otherwise be included to identify along socioeconomic lines and join with people of color of similar social standing.”

There’s a saying that when you’re accustomed to privilege, equity feels like oppression. So the best way to fight back against those who believe in the “Great Replacement” theory is to dismantle what bell hooks calls the “white supremacist capitalist patriarchy.”

This dismantling starts with a transformation of our racially hierarchal society, and that transformation must begin with reparations.