From Georgia to Buffalo and Everywhere In Between: Racism and Pain
by Valerie Morales
When news broke of the Buffalo murders I remembered two months earlier when a mostly black lacrosse team was harassed by the police in Georgia. No one died in the racial profiling travesty on I-95 and the victims were decades younger than those in Buffalo, but trauma isn’t relegated to murder. Objectification, dehumanization, and damage are public tragedies black people withstand in a variety of spaces deemed safe: a grocery store. A church. A highway. Your front door. Online. In your car. On a bus.
In Georgia, without probable cause state troopers stopped an HBCU lacrosse team on I-95 and began terrorizing them. They opened their luggage, rifled through their personals, and hunted for drugs. A rheumy excuse of missing children and trafficking was tossed around while a K-9 dog slobbered through their belongings. It wrapped the whole experience in a racial profiling bow.
During the search, a white member of the lacrosse team was befuddled. Why was this happening? It was an affront to decency and fairness. Her innocence spoke of her freedom. Naïve about why HBCU’s exist in the first place, she was suddenly faced with blackness and oppression in a space where her whiteness didn’t matter.
Eventually, the bus went on its way reaching Delaware State but the damage wasn’t so easily erased. Dehumanization has a specific purpose. To destabilize and dishonor. To remind you that everything from how you look to how you behave and what you represent is inferior, and to drive home the point that you, my friend, are powerless.
The modernization of Jim Crow is just as paralyzing as it was in the 50s whereas a suffocating kind of mental anguish, then and now, is hard to shake off.
What happened to the lacrosse team stayed with me for a long while. I have lived in Georgia and so has my mother, and my friends still live there; all politics are local. And painfully, the lacrosse incident eerily felt like causation once the carnage in Buffalo, the sheer evil of it, saturated the news. Because mowing down elderly black people isn’t where it starts. It starts in the small interstices of dehumanization like stopping a mostly black lacrosse team and treating them as criminals. Or no-knock warrants and a dead Memphis woman. Or, calling the police on someone walking their dog. Or calling black women monkeys and whores.
Death by paper cuts racism creates all these tiny fissures beneath black people’s skin that you don’t really notice until Armageddon happens in your neighborhood and ten people are murdered by a white supremacist.
If you can’t go to church. And you can’t go to the grocery store. And you can’t walk your dog. And you can’t play a lacrosse game. And you can’t…
In the old days, there was such a thing as sundown towns and it caused black travelers to scramble before it got dark because their life was in jeopardy. While that extreme is mostly relegated to the past, racial profiling, racial hatred, and dehumanizing treatment is still vividly in place. Black people are scrambling for any bit of light that doesn’t include being murdered by white men who see our presence as foreign and disturbing.
The man who murdered 10 people is from a county in New York called Broome. I have a friend who moved there for a job and had a mixed experience. The older white people were friendly, kind, and often generous, particularly his landlord who rented to him without a credit check, just on his word because my friend was an employee of the local university. But younger whites were racist, demeaning, and despicable. My friend Hal, wasn’t the type to just turn the other cheek. In a bar one night, when a white 20-something intentionally bumped into him without apology Hal got in his face and demanded he apologize.
“Dude, my bad” the white guy said. “Sorry.”
He wasn’t. But without a video screen and white supremacists egging him on to give him courage he was laughingly pathetic.
2
Every Friday, I take my father grocery shopping because he cannot drive because of a stroke. The grocery stores are located in two black neighborhoods. One store is small, the other large. My father moves like he is walking on a patch of ice about to break and I’m usually sitting in the car waiting for him to buy six to seven things which takes about forty minutes. In front of both stores is a lot of activity. Someone wants you to sign their petition. Someone is selling candy. Or, a cobbler to take home for dinner. There are homeless who have decided to manipulate a slab of concrete into temporary housing. And beggars. Welcome to L.A.
If what happened in Buffalo happened in Los Angeles, my father would have been targeted and possibly killed. Most of the Buffalo dead were the elderly, those folk who have endured decades of racism, blight, and hatred and were also well-loved, impactful, important, and are already missed. According to the witnesses who ran for their lives, elderly shoppers were near the front of the store and sitting ducks for a white supremacist triggered by replacement theory, something the Klan thrived on in yesteryear which touts the erasure of a whole group of people because of white men's internal inadequacies, as if violence in small spaces like a Birmingham church and a Buffalo grocery store will somehow make a difference in white invisibility.
(After the white man shooter murdered 10 people he was treated by the local police with a level of respect those lacrosse players in Georgia were denied.) The truth is white men are as powerful as they have always been. What they are not is in the majority. What income inequality has done is marginalize their experience. What Donald Trump has done is liquefy the poison in their brain. And the pandemic made them a target.
The pandemic was a perfect opportunity to corral the minds of lonely, sad, and locked in white men and manipulate their grievances into romantic expressions of violence by convincing them they had the ability to adjust the population so they would have an advantage, so it would be 1950 all over again and white men wouldn’t have to work just as hard as everyone else. Their privilege would be restored.
For one sad sack of flesh, it was an intoxicating cocktail that worked as scripted. The Buffalo murders put on the public stage what those working on behalf of white supremacists in government offices and statehouses do in secret. If it’s poison as Joe Biden indicates, then it’s rat poison.
White supremacy is a very layered (and committed) community network of anti-black sycophants in political spaces. Republican politicians lost their moral identity long ago and have ferociously adapted to the new normal. They cry polarization yet are benefitting from the very polarization white supremacists- who put them in office- create, while treating the whole racist mess as an abstraction instead of owning it as their disgusting little truth.
The shock of Buffalo, sadly, isn’t really shocking. It’s a numbing sort of what the f*ck because black people’s lives have never been mourned appropriately. Not during slavery and certainly not after. Not much has been said about the Buffalo murders or anti-black violence from Ted Cruz or Josh Hawley or Mitch McConnell which can be interpreted as inattention, acceptance, or political attitude.
What has been said (by others) centers on the why of the shooter- like Tucker Carlson saying he was mentally ill without a corroborating diagnosis- instead of the trauma of the victims, the ones killed in Buffalo and the ones alive who many want to murder just for being alive. For those of us wary in a world that suddenly feels flat in the wake of such carnage and cruelty, it’s impossible to feel safe anywhere. Not on a bus in Georgia. Not in a supermarket. Not in a mall.
That racism is everywhere is a lived black person's experience from cradle to grave. While it is often traumatic and devastating the stakes have changed. The proliferation of guns and white supremacy language and free speech zealots mixed in with white politicians who don’t give a crap about black people but who take our money has created a cruel duality of black murder and white terrorists that are no longer on the fringe. It’s upfront. Centered. In the church.
And celebrated.
