At 2:30 pm on Saturday, May 14, 18-year-old Payton Gendron opened fire outside Tops Friendly Market, a grocery store in Buffalo, New York. The gunman shot four people while making his way through the store’s parking lot, killing three of them. Once inside, he shot nine others, with seven of them suffering fatal wounds. Out of the 13 victims, 11 of them were Black. Every single one of the 10 victims killed on Saturday were Black.
Aaron Salter, 55. Ruth Whitfield, 86. Pearly Young, 77. Katherin “Kat” Massey, 72. Heyward Patterson, 67. Celestine Chaney, 65. Roberta Drury, 32. Margus D. Morrison, 52. Andre Mackneil, 53. Geraldine Talley, 62. Zaire Goodman, 20, Jennifer Washington, 50, and Christopher Braden, 55, sustained injuries.
“This is an absolute racist hate crime and will be prosecuted as a hate crime,” said Buffalo Police Commissioner Joseph Gramaglia, according to NPR News.
Gendron posted a 180-page document on the anonymous message board 4chan prior to the attack that included the time and place of the attack, detailing as much as the route he planned to take through the store. The document also outlined white supremacist ideology and subscribed to “the great replacement,” an antisemetic and anti-immigrant conspiracy theory asserting that, in order to reduce white power, white people are being systematically replaced across the globe by people of color.
The gunman live-streamed his attack on the streaming platform Twitch, but according to a Twitch spokesperson, the stream ended less than two minutes into the shooting. While only 22 users joined the livestream at the time, copies of the video had been seen by at least 3 million people within two days of the attack.
The lives lost in Buffalo will never be returned and the damage created by the 50 shots fired that day is irreversible. To many, this is a tragic and devastating event, yet there is nothing new about the nature of such an attack. We have seen mass shootings, specifically those targeting key markers of identity, such as race, religion, or sexuality, manifest time and time again. The Atlanta spa, Christchurch mosques, the Orlando nightclub, the Pittsburg synagogue, and now, the Buffalo supermarket.
We cannot simply move on and forget until the headlines scream at us to pay attention again. Because, whether it be a year, month, or even week from now, this will happen again. So what do we do? It’s a difficult question to answer, and maybe no one really can, but what we can do is learn.
This shooting tells us so much about the escalation of white supremacist ideals. It is no longer, and never has been, enough to simply not be racist. Instead, we must actively fight even the smallest hints of racist ideation. We must do our best to educate every individual in this country to ensure that the next generation is less susceptible to theories like “the great replacement” that Gendron subscribed to. This means ensuring that our textbooks and curriculums do not brush over, but instead dive into the areas of American history in which people of color have played integral roles in bringing the country to prosperity in order to combat sentiments that solely white people contributed to America’s current success.
We at Deerfield may not sense the effect of such ignorance and vitriolic hatred to the same extent on campus, but events like the Buffalo shooting should be enough for us to see that ignoring, or even passively interacting with, the state of our world is becoming increasingly deadly.
It is long past time we stop merely acknowledging the everpresent bubble we live in and instead begin to break it.