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.

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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!