Last Saturday,10 Black people were shot dead in Buffalo in an apparent white supremacist terror attack. The alleged shooter, 18-year-old Payton Gendron, specifically targeted a busy supermarket in a majority Black community.
Gendron's apparent goal was to kill as many Black people as possible in order to intimidate, terrorize and dehumanize not just the Black community in Buffalo but Black America more generally. His attack can also be understood as an assault on the very idea of multiracial democracy, and a brutal rejection of the premise that nonwhites should have the same rights and freedoms in the United States as white people.
