Buffalo

On a Saturday in May in Buffalo, ten people died trying to buy groceries. Survivors told us how it happened: Blacks hunted down in the aisles and blasted with what was essentially a weapon of war, a young guy with curly brown hair carrying out his grisly mission. As Ta-Nehisi Coates has told us, Latinate phrases like white supremacy and white privilege fail to convey the violence at racism’s core. In his book, Between the World and Me, he lays it out:

“racism … dislodges brains, blocks airways, rips muscle, extracts organs, cracks bones, breaks teeth…”

In Chicago, in the sixties, when my soon-to-be husband Emmon and I loved each other across the color line, I could feel the edge of violence everywhere we went. It crackled in the air around us with such consistency that if another white woman had fallen in love with someone black and then asked me what to do, I would have yelled “Duck! Get down! Get behind something substantial!” The cops were everywhere. We were pulled over for offenses such as turning left from a foot too far over to the right on a quiet, empty residential street. How long had they been following us?

A few months after we left Chicago – I should say fled Chicago – Fred Hampton, leader of the city’s Black Panther Party, was murdered. When I saw the headline, I felt a clutch of panic. The news story said that the cops fired in self-defense. I knew that was a lie and I was convinced they would get away with it. I thought Fred Hampton would be forgotten, that his story would be folded into all the lies that ruled Chicago. Fortunately, I was later proven wrong. But as I read the news story on that day in 1969, the dread I’d felt while living in Chicago, that I’d had to bury inside myself in order to put one foot in front of another, came flying back.

In Chicago, no one ever threatened me when I was alone. A petite Irish/French Canadian American in matching shoes and bag is not a target. But when Emmon and I were together, I saw fury rise off the backs of white guys hunched over a bar; I saw bone-breaking hate when street patrolmen glared at us and put their hands on their night sticks. When I tried telling my white office co-workers what was happening, they just figured my negro boyfriend was brainwashing me. I could see the pity in their eyes.

By live streaming, Buffalo’s assailant thoroughly demonstrated Ta-Nehisi Coates’ point about racism. I guess the 18-year-old gunman wanted to make sure we knew what white supremacy really means. But Florida now has a law to guarantee that white children are never made uncomfortable by the truth. White. Blanca. Blank. No information. White — we Euro-Americans should disavow that word.