Understanding Buffalo Through the Lens of White Supremacy

A remembrance of the ten victims of the Buffalo supermarket shooting

A mis-guided white teenager. Armed with white supremacist ideology and an assault weapon, he took ten innocent lives. His mental illness definitely played a role, along with an environment where violence makes you an instant celebrity on social media. He had used white-out to etch the names of other mass shooters on his weapon.

Prior to driving 200 miles to carry out the attack in a Buffalo supermarket, the shooter posted “humanity will cease to develop if the White race is eliminated.”

I would like to take this moment to go beyond the horror of this incident to try to understand what we can learn and what we can do. From white supremacist ideology that drives a few to violence to white supremacy as a disease that affects and infects us all. As a white person, I benefit unfairly from this system. I am writing to my white colleagues primarily in this piece; we must make addressing this disease our mission. Conversely, without the activism of white people, white supremacy has no chance of being defeated.

I will share a piece I wrote in the early months of Writing to Heal (May 2020) in light of George Floyd's murder.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

White supremacy.

I look at those two words and breathe deep.

Can I find healing in those words and what they represent?

Here goes.

Two initial thoughts to help frame this conversation.

As a physician, I know the importance of distinguishing diseases from symptoms. For example, pneumonia is the disease that causes symptoms of cough, fever, and shortness of breath. We know in medicine that treating the downstream symptoms without addressing the disease causing those symptoms is not effective. We don’t treat the cough, we treat the pneumonia causing the cough. 

White supremacy is the disease, racism is the symptom of the disease.

Second, a concept from systems theory: Every system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets. This reminds us that moments like this week are not about who is “racist” and who is not. It isn’t about the police officers that brutally murdered George Floyd (RIP) or the deranged duo that attacked and killed Ahmaud Arbery (RIP). It is about the system that is perfectly designed for events like these to happen over and over in a systemic way.

Back to white supremacy.

White supremacy is the disease we still do not talk about. Especially as white people.

Racism is a symptom of this disease. It pervades our societies and globe where white supremacy thrives.

Allow me to define white supremacy. It is not goons in white hooded robes burning crosses and terrorizing communities of color as most of us have been led to believe, a convenient way of letting the rest of us white folks off the hook. White supremacy is the belief that white people are superior to those of all other races and should therefore dominate society. It is behind such concepts as manifest destiny and the genocide inflicted on brown and black populations of the globe as white Europeans decided in some pseudo-religious hallucination that the world was theirs for the taking. 

They didn’t need to state as they pillaged and raped people and their lands that this quest was “in the name of white supremacy.” Look at the results, so clearly divided along the lines of skin color and it becomes crystal clear that the system here is white supremacy, perfectly designed to get the results it gets.

White supremacy, through its symptom of racism, leads blacks being killed by police at a rate three times that of whites. It is why the shootings of black men and cases of missing and murdered Indigenous women, in a repeated and predictable way, seem less important to investigate.

In this pandemic, white supremacy is behind communities of color bearing the biggest burden of death during COVID. American Indians make up 11% of New Mexico but account for an astounding 57% of our COVID cases. When we look at factors leading to this high rate, white people seem suddenly appalled to learn about sub-standard housing and rampant poverty and unemployment in our Indigenous Nations. They feign shock and dismay at hearing that 30% of houses on the Navajo Nation lack running water.

White supremacy places these communities, these brown lives as less important. As a white person, I am responsible for these conditions that lead to a very predictable outcome when a pandemic or other natural disaster hits.

Look at our prisons, look at our communities with the worst schools and least job prospects, look at our communities who live sickest and die youngest, look at places where the toxic waste dumps are put. We all know too well the color of those populations and it ain’t white.

As a white person, I must own my complicity in this being our current reality.

My healing begins here, in owning white supremacy as something that has gotten me into doors and places I didn’t deserve and as something I inflict through my whiteness and through my actions on people of color around me. As a person whose whiteness has given me un-earned privilege each day of my life, this moment gives me and people like me a chance to truly work for a cure to white supremacy. Forget support groups and self-help books about how to be less racist – I want to be a part in curing the white supremacy disease that causes racism.

I challenge my white colleagues to join me in having tough conversations with ourselves and our inner circle of family and friends. RobinDiAngelo, a scholar who coined a term white fragility proposes that whites are “socialized into a deeply internalized sense of superiority and entitlement that we are either not consciously aware of or can never admit to ourselves, we become highly fragile in conversations about race.” Let’s break out of that paralyzing place and start thinking and talking about white supremacy.

But that improved insight will change exactly nothing. Turning that into actions that over-turn white supremacy in our workplaces, in our neighborhoods, in our systems. This needs to be our commitment. No more asking people of color to cure the disease that whites created and need to fix.

White supremacy.

I am still trying to get comfortable with saying it and acknowledging my part in its devilish, racist plot.

But if we, white people, begin there, it is a great start.

If we start to understand, we can begin to act.

And in understanding and acting, that is where, my brothers and sisters, healing begins.

Note: I want to credit and thank one of my mentors in all things social justice, Tonya Covington, who gave me needed insight on white supremacy that led to this piece. Thank you Tonya!

Thank You for Making the Book a Reality!

The book has arrived!

Writing to Heal – A Pandemic Journey to Healing includes the pieces written in 2020, with “Action/Reflection” prompts after each one.

And this week, the 87^th time I have written in the 26 months since the pandemic began, I wanted to pause and give thanks for the many people who have supported the journey. That, and to invite you to come out to our 1^st two book release parties – Wed, 5/18 at Netherwood Park 6-8pm and Thurs, 5/26 at Altura Park 7-9pm.

Writing to Heal, beginning in the first weeks of the project where it was word documents being sent by email to folks, has been about a community healing together.

Thank you to everyone that has supported me in your email responses, your reflections, your posts on the blog, and for your ways of supporting me to keep writing.

A few people deserve special recognition in this realm.

Thank you, Shannon, for sharing life with me and supporting this endeavor. Thank you, kids! You gave daddy so much wisdom and humor to inspire me to write. Thank you mom and dad for your constant feedback and encouragement on the pieces.

Then there are the folks who have supported this Writing to Heal project from day 1. Without you all, I might have stopped a long time ago. Thank you Amy, Valerie, Ted, Allan, Tonya, Michael, Ali, Solomon, Christine, Michael, Debie and Tionna.

This book gave me the chance to share space with many creative people and for them I give thanks. Mallery Quetawki, one of my favorite artists who did the front cover. Hakim Bellamy, my brother whose poetry has a permanent place in my heart. David Rakel who has always supported me. One of my life mentors Freeman Hrabowski – you are a guide for my life.

Then there are beautiful people who contributed material for the book. Christian Gering, Joe Romero, Shannon Fleg, Tonya Covington, Randy Sabaque, Nehemiah Cionelo, Emelia Pino, Leah Lewis, Danielle Hopkins, Michael Nuttall, Amy Robinson, Shannon Fleg, Veronica Hutchison and the Paint for Peace artists – thank you!

To Alex Paramo and Community Publishing, thank you for believing in me and supporting the book wholeheartedly. Buy local, including your publisher!

Writing to Heal is the product of a community of beautiful people. Each of them, each of you should feel pride in seeing the book become a reality.

Speaking Truth

It was a moment of truth-telling.

It was a moment of moral and historical reckoning.

NHI was presenting on the Abya Yala mural project at the film festival of the Southwestern Anthropology Association’s (SWAA) annual conference. Abya Yala is a beautiful piece that was envisioned by Leah Lewis and Votan Henriquez. With input from youth and a community effort to paint the wall under Leah and Votan’s direction, it became a part of our city’s landscape this time last year.

Votan, proudly an Angeleno (from Los Angeles) starting talking to anthropology students from California in our SWAA presentation and began to teach. Here is how I heard it:

“We were told to assimilate. We were told to talk White, act White, pray White. This was the only way to survive in a White society that didn’t recognize us as human and wanted us wiped off the face of this land.

Then they brought some of you all into the Los Angeles, anthropologists working with the U.S. Government. You found us talking White, acting White, praying White and determined that we did not meet your criteria for being Indigenous people. That meant we had no right to the land.

Anthropologists essentially said that my people didn’t exist.”

I listened and saw the conversation that ensued, the students absorbing what they were hearing, asking questions. Votan had become their professor and his lecture was called “Speaking Truth.” He wasn’t looking for an apology, but wanted these budding academics to see the power that their work has not only for knowledge-building but for harm.

I was the student as well – no longer University professor, I was being schooled. Ivory tower institutions and our academic disciplines have so much to learn from the activists, artists, and knowledge keepers that exist beyond our campuses. Votan was an agitator who spoke a needed truth, unconcerned with academic speak, unconcerned with who might feel uncomfortable in the room.

It was a moment of truth-telling.

It was a moment of moral and historical reckoning.

It was a moment that offered healing.

 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

More on the U.S. Termination Policy 

In the 1940s-1960s the U.S. had a termination policy whose goal was assimilation of Indigenous people and termination of Tribes. Ben Nighthorse Campbell (Northern Cheyenne), a former U.S. Senator summed up the approach in a speech in 2007:

“If you can't change them, absorb them until they simply disappear into the mainstream culture.... In Washington's infinite wisdom, it was decided that Tribes should no longer be Tribes, never mind that they had been Tribes for thousands of years…It is analogous to the federal government mandating that black Americans can no longer be black. Many Tribes are still trying to be re-instated as a federally recognized entity. The reason is that the federal government has a contractual obligation through treaties to perform “trust responsibility” to Tribes – not individuals – rather an ingenious manner of avoiding responsibility. If we get rid of “Tribes” we can avoid responsibility to individual Indians.”