The 10 people murdered and three injured in Buffalo have become examples of the ongoing, systemic and collective violence against Black people in this country.
The names of those killed are Roberta A. Drury, age 32; Margus D. Morrison, age 52; Andre Mackneil, age 53; Aaron Salter, age 55; Geraldine Talley, age 62; Celestine Chaney, age 65; Heyward Patterson, age 67; Katherine Massey, age 72; Pearl Young, age 77; Ruth Whitefield, age 86. We hope that Zaire Goodman, age 20, Jennifer Warrington, age 50, and Christopher Braden, age 55, find their way to healing, body and soul.
While much attention has been focused on the gunman and the details of the shooting, Black residents gathered in East Buffalo on Sunday to protest their decadeslong history of systemic segregation and marginalization.
One resident, Marlene Brown, was quoted in the New York Times as saying, “We want to be protected and treated like we matter … without it taking a white supremacist shooting up our community … Time and again, they’ve shown nobody cares about us here. It’s a pattern.”
Another Buffalo resident, Earlene Patterson, 64, reflected that, “The pain is in our DNA at this point… It’s in my great-grandfather, my father. It’s in me.”
As a rabbi, my Jewish practice prompts me to try to understand and act upon the sources of Saturday’s violence and all it represents from a variety of vantage points: political, historical and ultimately, human. As Leviticus 19:16 commands us, we can not stand idly by while another human being’s blood is shed.
Professional journalists have already elucidated the political connection to Saturday’s murders and the ongoing realities exemplified by Buffalo’s Black community. The gunman espoused the odious replacement theory, long embraced and promoted by the far right and made legitimate by the mainstream GOP leadership. The political theory animating these murders has been promoted obsessively by the pundit Tucker Carlson as well as by GOP representatives such as Matt Gaetz and Elise Stefanik.
Other apologists endorse this murderous theory through their silence or by distancing themselves from the shooter who espoused it in their notes and on social media. But such equivocations are hollow, disingenuous, and worse, as it is a grave violation of the public trust to disavow the link between hate speech, its viral dissemination on social media, and the ensuing murders of people who are targeted as they were in Buffalo.
Even as this moment demands for the attention to the Black lives lost and the ongoing violence done to the Black community, we need to be aware of the functional role that antisemitism plays in these attacks. The community organizer and activist Eric Ward, in his seminal essay “Skin in the Game,” shows how white supremacists leverage antisemitism in their war against Black and brown people.
From a political perspective, this means that an event of hate speech, not to mention an act of racist or antisemitic violence, strikes at all people who are Black, brown and Jewish as well as at people who have some connection to these communities, which means all of us. So, we must see ourselves, our communities, and our destinies as all bound up with each other, even or especially because our histories and experiences of oppression and/or privilege will be different.
To apply this inclusive logic to Saturday’s murders means that, while a lone shooter was immediately responsible, we are all implicated in ongoing racial violence, even as we have an obligation to participate in ongoing restoration and healing.
While it may be deeply satisfying and cathartic to go after the injustice and violence “out there” in the world, it is perhaps more true and effective to look at the racism in our midst, even though doing so is undoubtedly painful, slow and uneven.
It is one of the great privileges of my life to have been the rabbi of Congregation B’nai Israel in Northampton for 20 years, but I am under no illusion that we are immune from the kind of systemic racism that the Black community in Buffalo and Black communities everywhere have endured.
I know, for example, that there are people of color who have experienced being “othered” in my beloved and welcoming synagogue, and so we have committed ourselves over several years to becoming an anti-racist congregation, even as we occasionally stumble in our work and still have much more to do.
When my sons attended Northampton schools, I always wondered why there was a police officer posted to their elementary school, and others posted to their middle school and high schools, especially when we know how Black and brown people are targeted in the school-to-prison pipeline.
When my sons were in high school, I wanted to know more about the thinking that prevented the Black and brown children they learned with in early grades from having the same kind of access to honors, AP’s and electives they had. None of these signs of public inequity, authoritarianism and racism are easy to remedy, but we need to address them in a constant and transparent way immediately and over time.
Rabbi Justin David of Congregation B’nai Israel in Northampton.