From: Ronald Wilkinson
Edinburgh
A racist first spreads seeds of hate in the receptive minds of others; he uses lies and fears to fertilize its growth. He then waits for the hate to grow and spread before attacking his intended victims.
Symbols of racism, which fueled the mass killing last week by a white supremacist in Buffalo, N.Y., can also be found on flagpoles, vehicles and racist flyers distributed throughout Indiana by white nationalists peddling their racist ideology. The white nationalist shot 13 people at the store in Buffalo, 10 of whom died. His hate for Black people was such that he drove from his home in Conklin, N.Y., to the store in a predominantly Black neighborhood in Buffalo to carry out his murderous rampage. Using a camera attached to his helmet, he livestreamed his murderous rampage online, confident that there he would find a welcoming audience and be hailed a hero.
In a similar mass shooting, in 2015, another white nationalist shot and killed nine Blacks inside the Mother Emmanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina. Prior to the shooting, the killer had posted a picture of himself online holding a rifle and a Confederate flag and accompanied by the same replacement theory rantings as the Buffalo, N.Y., killer.
The demonstration that took place in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017 by a large crowd of whites, many of whom carried Confederate and Nazi flags — that’s right, Nazi flags — included marchers who chanted, “Blacks will not replace us. Jews will not replace us.” A young white woman, who was part of the counter-demonstration, was killed when someone drove a car into the crowd of counter-demonstrators. Then-President Donald Trump would later say that “there are fine people on both sides.”
It is hard to imagine a group of people so insecure in their own skin and the fear that their race would one day be replaced by Blacks and Jews they believe to be their inferior, that it drove some to murder those they see as a threat to their racial dominance.
The stories about the 10 Blacks who were killed in Buffalo, N.Y., by the white nationalist are very touching, but none more touching than that of one of the victims, a father, who went to the store to buy a birthday cake for his 3-year-old son. He never got to sing Happy Birthday to his son, or to watch his son’s face light up as he blows out the candles on his cake. The killer took all away from both of them.
