It was no accident that a shooter who wanted to gun down Black Americans had to travel 200 miles to find them.
The victims of the gunman who opened fire in a Buffalo grocery store were shopping on what should have been an ordinary, sunny Saturday afternoon, enjoying the sweet rituals of preparing for Sunday dinner with family. Celestine Chaney was buying strawberries to complete the shortcake she savored. Andre Mackniel wanted to buy a birthday cake for his 3-year-old son. They were among the 10 Black Americans who died in that grocery store because they were so easy to target.
It was no accident that the gunman chose Buffalo’s East Side for his attack, since it is still dense with descendants of Great Migrants who fled the South beginning in the early 20th century to escape Jim Crow and find gainful employment. The 6 million odd Great Migrants who had moved north and west by 1970 were themselves descendants of enslaved people. For about a century, especially in northern and midwestern cities, many of those Black Americans have been intentionally concentrated in communities like East Buffalo.
The 18-year-old white male shooter was radicalized by the “great replacement” theory that nearly half of Republicans and a quarter of Democrats now believe to some extent — the conspiratorial idea that elites are trying to increase immigration to replace native-born white Americans. He self-identified as a white supremacist and apparently wrote a lengthy manifesto in a pattern followed by several mass killers. The manifesto parroted common anti-Semitic and racist ideas and internet memes. Among his written goals: murdering as many Black people as possible. Though most Black Americans are native-born U.S. citizens, he viewed them (alongside immigrants of color) as “replacers” of white Americans who needed to be killed or chased out of the United States so that whites would remain dominant.
But the fact that he had to travel more than 200 miles from his nearly all-white hometown to find a Black community concentrated enough to kill en masse proves that Blacks aren’t “replacing” whites; in fact, Black Americans in Buffalo are still struggling to escape deliberate disinvestment and segregation.
Buffalo is among the most segregated Black communities in America — a legacy of the peculiar, Black-subordinating institution once called the ghetto, until that noun became a pejorative.