In the Wake of the Buffalo Massacre, Is It Time for Blacks to Pursue 1960’s-Style Armed Resistance?

To America’s demise, racism and segregation is woven into its very existence. The daily repetition (normalization) of white supremacist viewpoints by Fox News, Newsmax, talk radio, and political elites in the Republican Party like former president Donald Trump and Mark Meadows is a well-organized campaign and backlash to racial progress and equality. It justifies police and institutional violence against people of color to the extent that groups such as Black Lives Matter are demonized and repressed. Any alternative view or discussion like “critical race theory” is automatically attacked, denigrated, and censored.

Payton Gendron, 18, shot 13 people at an East Buffalo store on May 14, killing 11. He targeted the store and community due to their racial makeup (78 percent Black), one of many Black communities segregated by design and denied equal rights. The white on Black massacre came after hundreds of other racially-motivated attacks targeting minorities. The mass shooter wrote that he wanted to kill as many Blacks as possible, a statement that has become common on the Internet. The killer did not belong to a white supremacist organization, seeing himself as a larger, mainstream movement filled with white rage and victimology.

The arrest of the active shooter revealed a double standard regarding how police deal with white active shooters. After killing 11 people, the police confronted Gendron who was the very poster boy for armed and dangerous, carrying an AR-15 rifle and cloaked in body armor and hatred. Yet officers talked to him, convinced him to put down his weapons, and arrested him without firing a single shot. In a country where Black people have been shot to death or suffocated in encounters with police over minor traffic infractions, or no infractions at all, the crippling poison of racism still persists. The struggle for freedom and equality continues.

The 1960’s witnessed similar events that just unfolded in East Buffalo. As a result, different Black Panther groups formed across the country to protect their communities against institutional racism, bombings, and white-on-Black attacks. Along with promoting self-determination, the group supported pride for African American culture and demanded full employment, decent housing and education, an end to capitalist exploitation and police brutality, the release of all Blacks in jail, and a United Nations-supervised plebiscite so that Blacks held as “colonial subjects” in the US and who had no power could finally be given power to determine their own destiny.

Armed with guns, the Panthers established and protected various self-help programs in the ghettos, ran candidates for political office, and prepared for a revolution to end political and economic oppression. Alongside radical whites, they pursued self-defense and reform rather than violent revolution, focusing on community organizing and tactics such as economic boycotts. Consequently, governmental and police harassment committed illegal actions such as raids, unreasonable searches and seizures, and excessive punishment. An attack by Chicago police in 1969 killed two prominent Panther leaders all but crushing the movement.

Black Power, another reform group, stimulated controversy and hatred among whites just by its name: “Black Power.” Black Power meant that African Americans should unite, learn their heritage, form their “own” identity, define their own goals, lead their own organizations, and reject white racism. It meant putting “power” in Black people’s hands, something that required changing society’s values and political institutions while rejecting any desire to be like the bigoted and materialistic white classes which bought into white victimology. For many whites, Black Power insinuated a race war-something white supremacists repeatedly used to justify violence.

In the next few weeks, there will be a lot of news about the shooter’s manifesto, gun laws, and the information on certain television programs and social media which spread the kind of ideas the Buffalo shooter displayed. It will include hate speech that has been normalized and psychological profiles warning about the radicalization of “lone wolves.” But Gendron was no lone wolf. He was normal, simply living out the environment that has produced an alarming string of racist mass shooters in recent years. In other words, babies are not born with racism, hatred, and revenge. Is it time for Blacks to pursue self-defense?

Dallas Darling (darling@wn.com)