Browsing: National News

      Saturday’s massacre of ten people at a supermarket in a Black neighborhood in Buffalo is not an anomaly. The rhetoric and hate that informed the murderous rage of 18-year-old Payton S. Gendron is not an anomaly. Gendron is the product of generations of hate and fear. He is the product of a country that would prioritize civility and fake gestures on important days of reflection.  

     At least four elderly Black women and one former police officer are among the fatal victims in Saturday’s racist mass shooting at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York. Their names and others who were slain in the shooting apparently motivated by white supremacist hatred were slowly being made public in the hours after the massacre at Tops Friendly Market located in a low-income Black community.

“Hate always terrorizes. That’s the intention. As an African American woman who came of age during the Civil Rights era, I know at heart how hate works to harm some and paralyze or, at least, to immobilize others. But movement is life. It’s certainly the way forward if Democracy is to survive and its aspirational tenets of equality are to be actualized. This is why we must see hateful acts, and their progenitors, hate speech on all forms of media, as threats to our collective health, well-being and future existence.

      Last month was Second Chance Month, so I’ve been thinking a lot about the barriers facing justice-involved people and what having a second chance really means for a formerly incarcerated, first-generation, Black, male college student, like me. In fact, I ponder this question every day, since my reality as a Black man is complicated by a criminal record.

     One million dead: The U.S. death toll from the covid-19 pandemic will hit that unfathomable number this week, and yet there is a far larger number that reflects the true impact this virus has had on Americans over the past two years. That number is 9 million — the number of Americans who have lost spouses, parents, grandparents, siblings and children to covid.