Buffalo

It’s hard for me to fully imagine well enough what it must be like to be a Black person, in America.  

Yesterday an 18 year old boy armed with an automatic weapon and two more weapons, dressed in full body armor, drove three hours to kill Black people.  He referenced extremist anti-semitic, anti-immigrant, and racist groups. The white supremacy movement he cites is disgusting, scary, and deeply disturbing.

My heart and the hearts of everyone I speak to goes out to the victims, families, and the entire Black community for this horrible event and the hundreds like it that populate the history of what it is like to be Black in America.

These racist, anti semitic, and otherwise bigoted murderers like this one must be stopped.  The propaganda must be eliminated.  And the murderers and propagators of this doctrine need to be dealt with strongly and thoroughly by the justice system.  Free speech was never intended to protect hate speech or inciting violence. 

But Black people not only live everyday knowing there are violent racist groups out there; they live with the overt and subtle racism that exists outside these violent acts. And they live with widespread systemic racism that impedes progress toward equality and equity.

The violent racism, overt racism, and systemic racism aren’t the same in outcome, of course, but they flow directly from the same historical source:  a four hundred year history of violence, inequity, and unfairness.  Virtually everyone reading this finds the term “white superiority (or supremacy)” odious.  Its disturbed propaganda galvanizes fringe people like this murderer in buffalo. The 'white replacement' doctrine many related to this all have direct ties to these 'white superiority' movements.

Yet despite our own disgust with the idea itself or the term, white superiority principles definitely started with the original kidnappings in Africa four hundred years ago and flow sometimes obviously but often subtly through today’s society.  Even if the vast majority of us believe the "idea of white superiority" is completely repulsive, its legacy is the root of much of the systemic racism that remains in our organizations and institutions.  The murder of these people today is the most disturbing example of a history of racism in America but as we wake up in our homes, go to our jobs, and send our kids off to school, we all are part of a system that is scarred deeply by this historical white superiority doctrine. 

Our school systems offer diminished education quality through weak funding for predominantly Black and brown communities (Dr. Dre made a very generous donation last week, $100 million, to Compton that is really impressive, by the way); home ownership still reflects the echo of redlining and many other forms of financial and virtual blocks on access to acquisition of property and jobs leaving home ownership much lower; and so many other parts of our society still have the dna of racism woven into the fabric we live in everyday.  We don’t relate those normally to stemming from white superiority doctrine, but they clearly do. 

There is so much ground to make up.  No one has all the answers.  

I’m just so sorry that murders have happened, again.  The authorities must go deep and wide to find and jail those who are promoting, condoning, encouraging or participating in the sick and delusional violence against the Black community (and any under represented groups). 

But what can we do, if you’re a white white leader?  I’m not an expert, but I listen to them.  As Karine Bah Tahé of Blue Level Training and other experts said today in their posts, triple down on anti racism. We need to teach it, call it out, and eliminate it.   And we all need to understand the real effects of racism: it hurts 'the sum of us' both morally and in our quality of life (as Heather McGhee brilliantly documents in 'The Sum of Us').

My prayers go out to the victims of Buffalo and their families.