AMERICA IS A FASCIST STATE
Fascism is a far-right, authoritarian, and ultranationalist political ideology and movement, characterized by a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy, subordination of individual interests for the perceived good of the nation or race, and strong regimentation of society and the economy.
Opposed to anarchism, democracy, pluralism, egalitarianism, liberalism, socialism, and Marxism fascism is at the far right wing of the traditional left–right spectrum.
AMERICA IS A ROGUE STATE
A nation or state regarded as breaking international law and posing a threat to the security of other nations.
Fascism is a far-right, authoritarian, and ultranationalist political ideology and movement, characterized by a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy, subordination of individual interests for the perceived good of the nation or race, and strong regimentation of society and the economy.
Opposed to anarchism, democracy, pluralism, egalitarianism, liberalism, socialism, and Marxism fascism is at the far right wing of the traditional left–right spectrum.
AMERICA IS A ROGUE STATE
A nation or state regarded as breaking international law and posing a threat to the security of other nations.
https://www.anativeson.org/p/five-years-ago
Five Years Ago
Eddie
May 26, 2025
Substack
Yesterday was the fifth anniversary of the murder of George Floyd. Millions of Americans, locked away in their homes and struggling with the reality of Covid, watched the video of Derek Chauvin with his knee on the neck of Floyd for nine minutes and 29 seconds. We heard his cries. We saw the indifference of Chauvin and the other police officers. The nation convulsed.
People, from all walks of life, risked their lives to protest his death. Corporations committed millions. Government behaved as if it was serious about police reform in the country. The nation faced what I called a racial reckoning. We had to make a choice.
We could either continue to lie about what was happening in the country, or we could finally do the hard work of ridding ourselves of the assumptions of race that have stained this nation since its founding. Whatever happened next, I wrote in Begin Again, was up to us. I held on to the belief that we could be better and that we could work tirelessly to imagine the country anew. The majority of white American voters answered. They doubled down on their illusions and elected Donald Trump, again.
In what felt like a blink of an eye, everything changed or, more accurately, stayed the same. The questions about race and history were cast aside and the country, or at least a large portion of the country, retreated into the safety of its fantasies, reached for a politics and politicians that shamelessly denied the reality of racism, and sought redemption in the banishment of anything associated with Black Lives Matter.
This was the familiar whip of the whirlwind: where the sentimental embrace gives way to the rage of white innocence, revealing that racial justice was never the central concern. Charity stood in its stead. Wet-eyed sentimentality in the face of George Floyd’s murder announced one’s virtue. But when the demands kept coming and the cries for defunding the police grew louder, many grew tired. Their virtue denied. Rage replaced the philanthropic concern. The country had done enough, they said. White America had atoned. The inherent goodness of America had to be reasserted once again and that required our invisibility. The irksome question of race had to be denied, and the concern crushed to earth with the hope that it will never rise again.
According to the Pew Research Center, 49% of Americans today doubt that Black people will ever have equal rights to white people. It was 39% in 2020. 72% of Americans do not believe that the focus on racial inequality after George Floyd’s death changed or improved the lives of Black people in this country. More than half of the adults in the country hold the view that the United States remains the same as it was before George Floyd was killed, a third believe it worse, and only 11% say it's better.
Combined with the assault on DEI (whatever that means for these people), the Trump administration’s effort to destroy the infrastructure of civil rights protections (e.g., ending disparate impact liability, dismantling the civil rights division in the Justice Department, etc.) and the retracting of consent decrees for over two dozen police departments around the country, including the Minneapolis department, one can only conclude that five years ago, after the public lynching of George Floyd and the extraordinary outcry of so many, that the nation was not sincere.
Think about it. The significant shift in how Americans viewed policing in this country in just five years suggests that people were lying through their teeth. Nothing really changed except for the intensity of the racist vitriol. All the while police killings have increased since 2020.
James Baldwin was right: the true “horror is that America changes all the time, without ever changing at all.”
The other day I found myself engaged, once again, in an exchange with Christopher Rufo on X. I don’t know why. I guess his antics got to me. The specifics do not matter. Let’s just say he trafficked in his usual noxious nonsense. After a little back and forth, Rufo declared that “the BLM era is over.” I kept asking myself: what does such a declaration really mean?
Yesterday, I was interviewed for a segment on BBC Newshour about the fifth anniversary of George Floyd’s death. I cited the Pew Research Center study. Talked about the racist policies of the Trump administration. Owen Jones then asked me if this was an indication that Black Lives Matter failed. I balked at the formulation. He had it all wrong. Black Lives Matter did not fail. The country failed. Again.
And it only took a blink of the eye.
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“What’s Past is Prologue…”
WE ARE LIVING IN A WHITE SUPREMACIST POLICE STATE WHERE AS ALWAYS THE HOMICIDAL PRINCIPLE OF SOCIAL DEATH FOR BLACK PEOPLE RULES THROUGHOUT THE ENTIRE SOCIETY AND CULTURE…
WE ARE LIVING IN A WHITE SUPREMACIST POLICE STATE WHERE AS ALWAYS THE HOMICIDAL PRINCIPLE OF SOCIAL DEATH FOR BLACK PEOPLE RULES THROUGHOUT THE ENTIRE SOCIETY AND CULTURE…
WE ARE LIVING IN A WHITE SUPREMACIST POLICE STATE WHERE AS ALWAYS THE HOMICIDAL PRINCIPLE OF SOCIAL DEATH FOR BLACK PEOPLE RULES THROUGHOUT THE ENTIRE SOCIETY AND CULTURE…
WE ARE LIVING IN A WHITE SUPREMACIST POLICE STATE WHERE AS ALWAYS THE HOMICIDAL PRINCIPLE OF SOCIAL DEATH FOR BLACK PEOPLE RULES THROUGHOUT THE ENTIRE SOCIETY AND CULTURE…
WE ARE LIVING IN A WHITE SUPREMACIST POLICE STATE WHERE AS ALWAYS THE HOMICIDAL PRINCIPLE OF SOCIAL DEATH FOR BLACK PEOPLE RULES THROUGHOUT THE ENTIRE SOCIETY AND CULTURE…
WE ARE LIVING IN A WHITE SUPREMACIST POLICE STATE WHERE AS ALWAYS THE HOMICIDAL PRINCIPLE OF SOCIAL DEATH FOR BLACK PEOPLE RULES THROUGHOUT THE ENTIRE SOCIETY AND CULTURE…
WE ARE LIVING IN A WHITE SUPREMACIST POLICE STATE WHERE AS ALWAYS THE HOMICIDAL PRINCIPLE OF SOCIAL DEATH FOR BLACK PEOPLE RULES THROUGHOUT THE ENTIRE SOCIETY AND CULTURE…
WE ARE LIVING IN A WHITE SUPREMACIST POLICE STATE WHERE AS ALWAYS THE HOMICIDAL PRINCIPLE OF SOCIAL DEATH FOR BLACK PEOPLE RULES THROUGHOUT THE ENTIRE SOCIETY AND CULTURE…
WE ARE LIVING IN A WHITE SUPREMACIST POLICE STATE WHERE AS ALWAYS THE HOMICIDAL PRINCIPLE OF SOCIAL DEATH FOR BLACK PEOPLE RULES THROUGHOUT THE ENTIRE SOCIETY AND CULTURE…
WE ARE LIVING IN A WHITE SUPREMACIST POLICE STATE WHERE AS ALWAYS THE HOMICIDAL PRINCIPLE OF SOCIAL DEATH FOR BLACK PEOPLE RULES THROUGHOUT THE ENTIRE SOCIETY AND CULTURE…
WE ARE LIVING IN A WHITE SUPREMACIST POLICE STATE WHERE AS ALWAYS THE HOMICIDAL PRINCIPLE OF SOCIAL DEATH FOR BLACK PEOPLE RULES THROUGHOUT THE ENTIRE SOCIETY AND CULTURE…
WE ARE LIVING IN A WHITE SUPREMACIST POLICE STATE WHERE AS ALWAYS THE HOMICIDAL PRINCIPLE OF SOCIAL DEATH FOR BLACK PEOPLE RULES THROUGHOUT THE ENTIRE SOCIETY AND CULTURE…
WE ARE LIVING IN A WHITE SUPREMACIST POLICE STATE WHERE AS ALWAYS THE HOMICIDAL PRINCIPLE OF SOCIAL DEATH FOR BLACK PEOPLE RULES THROUGHOUT THE ENTIRE SOCIETY AND CULTURE…
WE ARE LIVING IN A WHITE SUPREMACIST POLICE STATE WHERE AS ALWAYS THE HOMICIDAL PRINCIPLE OF SOCIAL DEATH FOR BLACK PEOPLE RULES THROUGHOUT THE ENTIRE SOCIETY AND CULTURE…
WE ARE LIVING IN A WHITE SUPREMACIST POLICE STATE WHERE AS ALWAYS THE HOMICIDAL PRINCIPLE OF SOCIAL DEATH FOR BLACK PEOPLE RULES THROUGHOUT THE ENTIRE SOCIETY AND CULTURE…
WE ARE LIVING IN A WHITE SUPREMACIST POLICE STATE WHERE AS ALWAYS THE HOMICIDAL PRINCIPLE OF SOCIAL DEATH FOR BLACK PEOPLE RULES THROUGHOUT THE ENTIRE SOCIETY AND CULTURE…
WE ARE LIVING IN A WHITE SUPREMACIST POLICE STATE WHERE AS ALWAYS THE HOMICIDAL PRINCIPLE OF SOCIAL DEATH FOR BLACK PEOPLE RULES THROUGHOUT THE ENTIRE SOCIETY AND CULTURE…
WE ARE LIVING IN A WHITE SUPREMACIST POLICE STATE WHERE AS ALWAYS THE HOMICIDAL PRINCIPLE OF SOCIAL DEATH FOR BLACK PEOPLE RULES THROUGHOUT THE ENTIRE SOCIETY AND CULTURE…
WE ARE LIVING IN A WHITE SUPREMACIST POLICE STATE WHERE AS ALWAYS THE HOMICIDAL PRINCIPLE OF SOCIAL DEATH FOR BLACK PEOPLE RULES THROUGHOUT THE ENTIRE SOCIETY AND CULTURE…
WE ARE LIVING IN A WHITE SUPREMACIST POLICE STATE WHERE AS ALWAYS THE HOMICIDAL PRINCIPLE OF SOCIAL DEATH FOR BLACK PEOPLE RULES THROUGHOUT THE ENTIRE SOCIETY AND CULTURE…
5 Years After George Floyd’s Murder, the Backlash Takes Hold
The Black Lives Matter movement, kicked into high gear after Mr. Floyd’s murder on May 25, 2020, has given way to the politics of “white grievance” championed by President Trump.
Sunday is the fifth anniversary of George Floyd’s murder by Derek Chauvin, a Minneapolis police officer. Credit: Joshua Rashaad McFadden for The New York Times
Listen to this article · 10:02 minutes
Learn more
by Clyde McGrady
May 25, 2025
New York Times
[Clyde McGrady covers race from Washington, D.C.]
Black Lives Matter Plaza is gone from Washington, D.C. The bold yellow letters that once protested police violence are now paved over, though police killings nationally are actually up.
The Justice Department has abandoned oversight agreements for police forces accused of racial bias, even as it begins an investigation of Chicago after the city’s Black mayor praised the number of Black people in top city jobs. The U.S. refugee resettlement program is effectively shut down, but white South Africans have been granted an exception.
Sunday is the fifth anniversary of George Floyd’s murder by a Minneapolis police officer, a searing moment of brutality that ignited what may have been the largest social movement in U.S. history. Five years later, the movement that his death helped begin may feel like it’s in reverse.
There has always been a rhythm to American social movements: forward momentum followed by backlash. Abolitionism’s triumph gave way to the Ku Klux Klan and the end of Reconstruction. Civil rights marches dissipated, as Richard M. Nixon and his “silent majority” rose to power.
But even by historical standards, the current retrenchment feels swift and stark. Five years ago, Republicans and Democrats shared the nation’s streets to denounce police violence and proclaim that Black lives matter. Now, Donald J. Trump, a president who has long championed white grievance, is setting the tone of racial discourse.
To conservatives, the shift is a necessary course correction away from violence in the streets and crippling mandates that overburden police departments.
“President Trump is tirelessly enacting policies to ensure America’s safety, prosperity, and success for all Americans,” said Harrison Fields, a White House spokesman. “The Trump Administration is committed to stopping crime, upholding justice, protecting communities, and empowering federal, state, and local law enforcement.”
The killing of George Floyd five years ago incited Black Lives Matter protests across the country, like this one in New York City. Credit: Gabriela Bhaskar for The New York Times
Five years later, amid a fierce backlash, the words Black Lives Matter were removed from a street near the White House. Credit: Michael A. McCoy for The New York Times
But Manisha Sinha, who teaches American history at the University of Connecticut, sees the resurgence of old power structures as intentional though not inescapable.
“I don’t think that there’s something inevitable or cyclical about it,” Dr. Sinha said. “As historians, we know that things just don’t happen on their own.”
The Black Lives Matter movement well predated Mr. Floyd’s death, emerging from the acquittal of George Zimmerman in the shooting death of Trayvon Martin in 2013 and the 2014 deaths of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., and Eric Garner in New York, both of which happened at the hands of the police.
But it exploded after the killing of Mr. Floyd. A half million people turned out in nearly 550 communities across the United States on a single day, June 6, 2020. Between 15 million and 26 million people participated in demonstrations or showed their support in the weeks after May 25, 2020, including Republican mainstays such as Mitt Romney, the party’s 2012 presidential nominee, and Nikki Haley, Mr. Trump’s first ambassador to the United Nations.
Much has changed since then. Earlier this month, the Pew Research Center found that 72 percent of Americans say “the increased focus on race and racial inequality after Floyd’s killing did not lead to changes that improved the lives of Black people.” The popularity of the Black Lives Matter movement has dipped 15 percentage points from its June 2020 peak, though a slight majority of the public still voiced support.
The toll can be personal. Selwyn Jones, 59, still speaks out about the death of his nephew, Mr. Floyd, under the knee of a Minneapolis police officer, Derek Chauvin. But as one of a handful of Black people in his small South Dakota town, Mr. Jones said his activism had alienated some people he once considered close.
“Those people that I thought were my friends, that I’ve known for 20 plus years, I haven’t talked to any of them in about five years,” Mr. Jones said.
Ibram X. Kendi, a professorial proponent of “antiracism,” has seen his academic star dim since 2020, when he founded the Center for Antiracist Research at Boston University with $55 million in donations. But in an interview, he said he still was taking the long view. The “antiracist revolution” has slowed, he conceded, but it was never going to ascend unimpeded.
“I know it became particularly popular in recent decades that there’s this singular arc of racial progress,” said Dr. Kendi, who will lead the Institute for Advanced Study at Howard University. “It’s political rhetoric, but it’s actually not historical reality.”
Thousands celebrated at the Minneapolis memorial set up for George Floyd after a police officer was found guilty of his murder. Credit: Joshua Rashaad McFadden for The New York Times
By the end of 2020, “Back the Blue” rallies, like one in Hauppauge, N.Y., heralded the coming backlash against Black Lives Matter. Credit: Eduardo Munoz/Reuters
Still, it is difficult to ignore the headwinds facing racial justice activists, especially when those gusts seem to be blowing hardest from the highest levels of American power.
Mr. Trump may have vowed in his second inaugural address to “forge a society that is colorblind and merit-based,” but the president’s belief that “anti-white” discrimination has tilted society in favor of African Americans remains a driver of administration policy. Those policies include the dismantlement of “diversity, equity and inclusion” in government, the targeting of perceived racial preferences in academia and the private sector and the rooting out of what Mr. Trump called “improper ideology” at the Smithsonian Institution.
As far back as 1989, Mr. Trump said, “if I were starting off today, I would love to be a well-educated Black, because I really believe they do have an actual advantage.” In the 1990s, Mr. Trump expressed concern that white people losing majority status would lead to a revolution.
In an Oval Office exchange on Wednesday with President Cyril Ramaphosa of South Africa, Mr. Trump accused the leader of not doing enough to protect the white South Africans who he said were “being executed.” He also has falsely claimed a genocide against white people was taking place. During the meeting Mr. Trump referred repeatedly to “dead white people.”
For some who achieved a new level of fame after Mr. Floyd’s death, to only later receive recriminations and scorn, the last five years have been disorienting.
“I’ve tried not to take it personally,” said Dr. Kendi, whose scholarship has been impugned by Mr. Trump’s supporters and whose tenure at Boston University included charges of mismanagement that were later dismissed. “I know it has less to do with me and more to do with this attempt to make people like me, or the people who are doing the type of work that I’m doing, into these scary, harmful characters.”
But Dr. Kendi has also faced criticism from his ostensible allies that his framework for antiracist activism is unworkable and counterproductive. Dr. Kendi has said that most of his critics “either haven’t read my work or willfully misrepresent it.”
In a heated meeting with Cyril Ramaphosa, the president of South Africa, President Trump exemplified his concern for white people. Credit: Eric Lee/The New York Times
Five years ago, congressional leaders donned the trappings of Black liberation to join the Black Lives Matter protests. Credit: Anna Moneymaker/The New York Times
In the wake of Mr. Floyd’s murder, the Black Lives Matter Foundation Inc. raised a staggering $79.6 million in fiscal year 2021. The next year, that figure was down to almost $8.5 million. By 2023, it was about $4.7 million, with expenses of $10.8 million, according to records tracked by the nonprofit journalism organization ProPublica. Allegations of mismanagement have ricocheted between the foundation and its funders, which harmed the reputation of the movement’s leaders.
Historians note that even when social movements are met with backlash, change is never fully rolled back. Despite the violence and terror used by southern states to suppress full Black citizenship in the post-Reconstruction era, slavery was not reinstituted.
And Black activism is American activism, said Dr. Steven Hahn, a professor at New York University, even if some of the white allies who once stood shoulder to shoulder with Black protesters have turned away,
“You wouldn’t have democracy in this country, or at least a sense of a robust democracy without Black people and their own struggles,” he said. “They were the most committed to real democracy that was not bound by exceptions and exclusions.”
But Professor Hahn expressed real worry.
“People get silenced, and then before you know it,” he said, “we’re really back at a really bad square one.”
The police reform movement that was sparked by Mr. Floyd’s murder has had lasting impacts. Many police departments still require officers to wear body cameras. No-knock warrants are banned in some areas. Data collection on police brutality has been enhanced.
Mr. Trump’s efforts to eradicate D.E.I., which has increasingly become a catchall term to describe policies that benefit anyone who is not white and male, is beginning to meet grass roots resistance. On Wednesday, the big-box retailer Target reported a drop in foot traffic and sales, a response in part to its retreat from diversity policies, in part to tariff anxiety. The company’s sales fell 3.8 percent last quarter compared with the same quarter a year ago.
On the flip side of that is Michael Green, who like many was moved by the protests of 2020. A self-described “flag nerd,” Mr. Green thought marchers should have proper banners that could match the iconography of Mr. Trump’s movement, so he started Flags for Good, which makes signage for progressive causes, including Black Lives Matter.
A company once run out of a spare bedroom has now become a career. Items in the Black Lives Matter section in particular have seen a huge leap in sales that, he said, was driven by Mr. Trump’s re-election.
Listen to this article · 10:02 minutes
Learn more
by Clyde McGrady
May 25, 2025
New York Times
[Clyde McGrady covers race from Washington, D.C.]
Black Lives Matter Plaza is gone from Washington, D.C. The bold yellow letters that once protested police violence are now paved over, though police killings nationally are actually up.
The Justice Department has abandoned oversight agreements for police forces accused of racial bias, even as it begins an investigation of Chicago after the city’s Black mayor praised the number of Black people in top city jobs. The U.S. refugee resettlement program is effectively shut down, but white South Africans have been granted an exception.
Sunday is the fifth anniversary of George Floyd’s murder by a Minneapolis police officer, a searing moment of brutality that ignited what may have been the largest social movement in U.S. history. Five years later, the movement that his death helped begin may feel like it’s in reverse.
There has always been a rhythm to American social movements: forward momentum followed by backlash. Abolitionism’s triumph gave way to the Ku Klux Klan and the end of Reconstruction. Civil rights marches dissipated, as Richard M. Nixon and his “silent majority” rose to power.
But even by historical standards, the current retrenchment feels swift and stark. Five years ago, Republicans and Democrats shared the nation’s streets to denounce police violence and proclaim that Black lives matter. Now, Donald J. Trump, a president who has long championed white grievance, is setting the tone of racial discourse.
To conservatives, the shift is a necessary course correction away from violence in the streets and crippling mandates that overburden police departments.
“President Trump is tirelessly enacting policies to ensure America’s safety, prosperity, and success for all Americans,” said Harrison Fields, a White House spokesman. “The Trump Administration is committed to stopping crime, upholding justice, protecting communities, and empowering federal, state, and local law enforcement.”
The killing of George Floyd five years ago incited Black Lives Matter protests across the country, like this one in New York City. Credit: Gabriela Bhaskar for The New York Times
Five years later, amid a fierce backlash, the words Black Lives Matter were removed from a street near the White House. Credit: Michael A. McCoy for The New York Times
But Manisha Sinha, who teaches American history at the University of Connecticut, sees the resurgence of old power structures as intentional though not inescapable.
“I don’t think that there’s something inevitable or cyclical about it,” Dr. Sinha said. “As historians, we know that things just don’t happen on their own.”
The Black Lives Matter movement well predated Mr. Floyd’s death, emerging from the acquittal of George Zimmerman in the shooting death of Trayvon Martin in 2013 and the 2014 deaths of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., and Eric Garner in New York, both of which happened at the hands of the police.
But it exploded after the killing of Mr. Floyd. A half million people turned out in nearly 550 communities across the United States on a single day, June 6, 2020. Between 15 million and 26 million people participated in demonstrations or showed their support in the weeks after May 25, 2020, including Republican mainstays such as Mitt Romney, the party’s 2012 presidential nominee, and Nikki Haley, Mr. Trump’s first ambassador to the United Nations.
Much has changed since then. Earlier this month, the Pew Research Center found that 72 percent of Americans say “the increased focus on race and racial inequality after Floyd’s killing did not lead to changes that improved the lives of Black people.” The popularity of the Black Lives Matter movement has dipped 15 percentage points from its June 2020 peak, though a slight majority of the public still voiced support.
The toll can be personal. Selwyn Jones, 59, still speaks out about the death of his nephew, Mr. Floyd, under the knee of a Minneapolis police officer, Derek Chauvin. But as one of a handful of Black people in his small South Dakota town, Mr. Jones said his activism had alienated some people he once considered close.
“Those people that I thought were my friends, that I’ve known for 20 plus years, I haven’t talked to any of them in about five years,” Mr. Jones said.
Ibram X. Kendi, a professorial proponent of “antiracism,” has seen his academic star dim since 2020, when he founded the Center for Antiracist Research at Boston University with $55 million in donations. But in an interview, he said he still was taking the long view. The “antiracist revolution” has slowed, he conceded, but it was never going to ascend unimpeded.
“I know it became particularly popular in recent decades that there’s this singular arc of racial progress,” said Dr. Kendi, who will lead the Institute for Advanced Study at Howard University. “It’s political rhetoric, but it’s actually not historical reality.”
Thousands celebrated at the Minneapolis memorial set up for George Floyd after a police officer was found guilty of his murder. Credit: Joshua Rashaad McFadden for The New York Times
By the end of 2020, “Back the Blue” rallies, like one in Hauppauge, N.Y., heralded the coming backlash against Black Lives Matter. Credit: Eduardo Munoz/Reuters
Still, it is difficult to ignore the headwinds facing racial justice activists, especially when those gusts seem to be blowing hardest from the highest levels of American power.
Mr. Trump may have vowed in his second inaugural address to “forge a society that is colorblind and merit-based,” but the president’s belief that “anti-white” discrimination has tilted society in favor of African Americans remains a driver of administration policy. Those policies include the dismantlement of “diversity, equity and inclusion” in government, the targeting of perceived racial preferences in academia and the private sector and the rooting out of what Mr. Trump called “improper ideology” at the Smithsonian Institution.
As far back as 1989, Mr. Trump said, “if I were starting off today, I would love to be a well-educated Black, because I really believe they do have an actual advantage.” In the 1990s, Mr. Trump expressed concern that white people losing majority status would lead to a revolution.
In an Oval Office exchange on Wednesday with President Cyril Ramaphosa of South Africa, Mr. Trump accused the leader of not doing enough to protect the white South Africans who he said were “being executed.” He also has falsely claimed a genocide against white people was taking place. During the meeting Mr. Trump referred repeatedly to “dead white people.”
For some who achieved a new level of fame after Mr. Floyd’s death, to only later receive recriminations and scorn, the last five years have been disorienting.
“I’ve tried not to take it personally,” said Dr. Kendi, whose scholarship has been impugned by Mr. Trump’s supporters and whose tenure at Boston University included charges of mismanagement that were later dismissed. “I know it has less to do with me and more to do with this attempt to make people like me, or the people who are doing the type of work that I’m doing, into these scary, harmful characters.”
But Dr. Kendi has also faced criticism from his ostensible allies that his framework for antiracist activism is unworkable and counterproductive. Dr. Kendi has said that most of his critics “either haven’t read my work or willfully misrepresent it.”
In a heated meeting with Cyril Ramaphosa, the president of South Africa, President Trump exemplified his concern for white people. Credit: Eric Lee/The New York Times
Five years ago, congressional leaders donned the trappings of Black liberation to join the Black Lives Matter protests. Credit: Anna Moneymaker/The New York Times
In the wake of Mr. Floyd’s murder, the Black Lives Matter Foundation Inc. raised a staggering $79.6 million in fiscal year 2021. The next year, that figure was down to almost $8.5 million. By 2023, it was about $4.7 million, with expenses of $10.8 million, according to records tracked by the nonprofit journalism organization ProPublica. Allegations of mismanagement have ricocheted between the foundation and its funders, which harmed the reputation of the movement’s leaders.
Historians note that even when social movements are met with backlash, change is never fully rolled back. Despite the violence and terror used by southern states to suppress full Black citizenship in the post-Reconstruction era, slavery was not reinstituted.
And Black activism is American activism, said Dr. Steven Hahn, a professor at New York University, even if some of the white allies who once stood shoulder to shoulder with Black protesters have turned away,
“You wouldn’t have democracy in this country, or at least a sense of a robust democracy without Black people and their own struggles,” he said. “They were the most committed to real democracy that was not bound by exceptions and exclusions.”
But Professor Hahn expressed real worry.
“People get silenced, and then before you know it,” he said, “we’re really back at a really bad square one.”
The police reform movement that was sparked by Mr. Floyd’s murder has had lasting impacts. Many police departments still require officers to wear body cameras. No-knock warrants are banned in some areas. Data collection on police brutality has been enhanced.
Mr. Trump’s efforts to eradicate D.E.I., which has increasingly become a catchall term to describe policies that benefit anyone who is not white and male, is beginning to meet grass roots resistance. On Wednesday, the big-box retailer Target reported a drop in foot traffic and sales, a response in part to its retreat from diversity policies, in part to tariff anxiety. The company’s sales fell 3.8 percent last quarter compared with the same quarter a year ago.
On the flip side of that is Michael Green, who like many was moved by the protests of 2020. A self-described “flag nerd,” Mr. Green thought marchers should have proper banners that could match the iconography of Mr. Trump’s movement, so he started Flags for Good, which makes signage for progressive causes, including Black Lives Matter.
A company once run out of a spare bedroom has now become a career. Items in the Black Lives Matter section in particular have seen a huge leap in sales that, he said, was driven by Mr. Trump’s re-election.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Clyde McGrady reports for The Times on how race and identity is shaping American culture. He is based in Washington.
A version of this article appears in print on May 26, 2025, Section A, Page 15 of the New York edition with the headline: Black Lives Matter Movement Gives Way to the Politics of ‘White Grievance’. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper
See more on: U.S. Politics, Donald Trump
Five years ago, congressional leaders donned the trappings of Black liberation to join the Black Lives Matter protests. Credit: Anna Moneymaker/The New York Times
Clyde McGrady reports for The Times on how race and identity is shaping American culture. He is based in Washington.
A version of this article appears in print on May 26, 2025, Section A, Page 15 of the New York edition with the headline: Black Lives Matter Movement Gives Way to the Politics of ‘White Grievance’. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper
See more on: U.S. Politics, Donald Trump
Five years ago, congressional leaders donned the trappings of Black liberation to join the Black Lives Matter protests. Credit: Anna Moneymaker/The New York Times
Photos below originally posted on May 27, 2020:
PHOTO: George Floyd, MURDERED AT 46
PHOTO: Armaud Arbery, MURDERED AT 26
PHOTO: Armaud Arbery, MURDERED AT 26
PHOTO: Breonna Taylor, MURDERED AT 26
RED LIGHT
by Amiri Baraka, 1966
by Amiri Baraka, 1966
The only thing we know is the thing
we turn out to be. I don't care what you think,
it's true, now you think your way out of this
All,
The utterly pathetic and abject failure of the Democratic Party and the Biden Administration to deliver on its legislative promise of police reform (and its corresponding lowly abdication to the right wing antics and groveling fealty to the repressive and deeply racist politics of the police and its endless number of fascist “unions” throughout the United States) is only matched by the political ineptitude and ideological cowardice of Biden, his surrogates Bass and Booker and the DP generally in pretending to “negotiate” with one of the most craven, sniveling, and thoroughly reactionary UNCLE TOMS in the history of American politics and dumbass professional "yassah boss!" toady to Mitch McConnell and the rest of the despicable Republican Party cabal of corrupt white supremacists, Senator TIM SCOTT of South Carolina (yeah the very same state where Dylann Roof wantonly murdered NINE BLACK PEOPLE in their own church in Charleston (June 17, 2015) exactly ONE DAY AFTER TRUMP DECLARED HE WAS RUNNING FOR THE NOMINATION OF THE REPUBLICAN PARTY FOR THE U.S. PRESIDENCY BY OPENLY ATTACKING MEXICANS AND OTHER NON WHITE IMMIGRANTS IN GENERAL…
You CANNOT make this shit up…
Kofi
“America is NOT a racist country”
—Uncle Tim Scott, April 28, 2021
—Uncle Tim Scott, April 28, 2021
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/22/us/politics/police-reform-booker-scott.html
Daily Political Briefing
Bipartisan police overhaul talks are officially dead on Capitol Hill.
by Catie Edmondson
September 22, 2021
New York Times
September 22, 2021
New York Times
“We weren’t making any more meaningful progress on establishing really substantive reform for Americans’ policing,” said Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey, Democrats’ lead emissary for the talks.
PHOTO: “We weren’t making any more meaningful progress on establishing really substantive reform for Americans’ policing,” said Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey, Democrats’ lead emissary for the talks. Credit: Drew Angerer/Getty Images
by Jesse McKinley, Alex Traub and Troy Closson
New York Times
May 14, 2022
New York Times
10 people are killed and 3 are wounded in a mass shooting at a Buffalo grocery store.
BUFFALO — A teenage gunman entranced by a white supremacist ideology known as replacement theory opened fire at a supermarket in Buffalo on Saturday, methodically shooting and killing 10 people and injuring three more, almost all of them Black, in one of the deadliest racist massacres in recent American history.
The authorities identified the gunman as 18-year-old Payton S. Gendron of Conklin, a small town in New York’s rural Southern Tier. Mr. Gendron drove more than 200 miles to mount his attack, which he also livestreamed, the police said, a chilling video feed that appeared designed to promote his sinister agenda.
Shortly after Mr. Gendron was captured, a manifesto believed to have been posted online by the gunman emerged, riddled with racist, anti-immigrant views that claimed white Americans were at risk of being replaced by people of color. In the video that appeared to have been captured by the camera affixed to his helmet, an anti-Black racial slur can be seen on the barrel of his weapon.
The attack, at a Tops Friendly Market in a largely Black neighborhood in east Buffalo, conjured grim comparisons to a series of other massacres motivated by racism, including the killing of nine Black parishioners at a church in Charleston, S.C., in 2015; an antisemitic rampage in a Pittsburgh synagogue in 2018 that left 11 people dead; and an attack at a Walmart in El Paso in 2019, where the man charged had expressed hatred of Latinos. More than 20 people died there.
In the Buffalo grocery store, where four employees were shot, the savagery and planning were evident: Mr. Gendron was armed with an assault weapon and wore body armor, the police said. And his preferred victims seemed clear as well: All told, 11 of the people shot were Black and two were white, the authorities said.
“It was a straight up racially motivated hate crime,” John Garcia, the Erie County sheriff, said.
In a news conference Saturday evening, Gov. Kathy Hochul — a Buffalo native — echoed that sentiment and decried the attack as an “act of barbarism” and an “execution of innocent human beings,” as well as a frightening reminder of the dangers of “white supremacist terrorism.”
“It strikes us in our very hearts to know that there is such evil that lurks out there,” Governor Hochul said.
Based on what was written in the manifesto, the attack appeared to have been inspired by earlier massacres that were motivated by racial hatred, including a mosque shooting in New Zealand and the Walmart shooting in Texas, both in 2019.
In the manifesto, which was being reviewed by law enforcement, Mr. Gendron — who had attended a community college in Binghamton, N.Y. — wrote that he had selected the area because it held the largest percentage of Black residents near his home in the state’s Southern Tier, a predominantly white region that borders Pennsylvania.
The document outlined a careful plan to kill as many Black people as possible, complete with the type of gun he would use, a timeline, and where he would eat beforehand.
It also included details of where he would livestream the violence, mayhem that he had also calibrated. He carefully studied the layout of the grocery, writing that he would shoot a security guard before stalking through aisles and firing upon Black shoppers. He wrote that he would shoot some twice, in the chest, when he could.
He wrote he had been “passively preparing” for the Buffalo attack for several years, purchasing ammunition and gear, while infrequently practicing shooting. In January, the plans “actually got serious,” according to the manifesto, which also expressed praise for the perpetrator of the 2015 attack in South Carolina, and for a man who killed 51 Muslims at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2019.
Mr. Gendron had read the racist writings of the New Zealand gunman, who had also livestreamed his attack, a method also used in a shooting at a Jewish synagogue in Halle, Germany, in 2019.
In an arraignment on Saturday evening, Mr. Gendron pleaded not guilty to first-degree murder, a charge that could lead to life imprisonment without parole. He spoke little except to confirm he understood the charges, and gave little indication of emotion inside the courtroom.
The United States attorney in Buffalo, Trini E. Ross, said her office was also investigating the killings as federal hate crimes.
Other gunmen have referenced the racist idea known as “replacement theory,” a concept once associated with the far-right fringe, but one that has become increasingly mainstream, pushed by politicians and popular television programs.
Officials said the camera that the gunman wore was used to broadcast the attack live on Twitch, a livestreaming site owned by Amazon that is popular with gamers. On Saturday, Twitch said it had taken the channel offline. Still, screenshots of the broadcast were circulating online, including some that appeared to show the shooter holding a gun and standing over a body in the grocery store.
In his manifesto, Mr. Gendron seemed enthusiastic about broadcasting his attack, saying the livestream let “all people with the internet” watch and record the violence.
The massacre began around 2:30 p.m., the authorities said, when Mr. Gendron arrived at the market stepping out of his car — on a sunny spring afternoon — dressed in tactical gear and body armor and carrying an assault weapon.
He shot four people in the parking lot, the Buffalo police commissioner, Joseph A. Gramaglia, said at the news conference, three of them fatally. When he entered the store and continued shooting, he encountered a security guard, a retired Buffalo police officer who returned fire. But Mr. Gendron was wearing heavy metal plating; he killed the guard and continued into the store, firing on shoppers and employees.
By Julie Walton Shaver
When Buffalo police officers arrived and confronted Mr. Gendron, he put a gun to his neck, but two patrolmen persuaded him to drop his weapon and surrender, Mr. Gramaglia said.
The mayor of Buffalo, Byron W. Brown, said that he and his family periodically shopped at the store.
“Some of the victims of this shooter’s attack are people that all of us standing up here know,” said Mr. Brown, the fifth-term Democrat who was the first Black man elected mayor of Buffalo, New York’s second-most populous city.
The 10 people killed in Buffalo represent the highest number of fatalities in a mass shooting in the United States this year, according to the Gun Violence Archive, which tracks them. The highest death toll this year before that was six, in a shooting in downtown Sacramento on April 3. Six people were also killed in a shooting in Corsicana, Texas, on Feb. 5, and the same number were killed in a shooting in Milwaukee on Jan. 23, according to the site.
In a statement made late Saturday night, President Biden expressed sympathy for the victims’ families and praise for law enforcement, adding that “a racially motivated hate crime is abhorrent to the very fabric of this nation.”
“Any act of domestic terrorism, including an act perpetrated in the name of a repugnant white nationalist ideology, is antithetical to everything we stand for in America,” the president said. “Hate must have no safe harbor.”
Gun deaths reached the highest number ever recorded in the United States in 2020, the first year of the pandemic, surging by 35 percent, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported on Tuesday.
The gunfire in Buffalo on Saturday shattered a seemingly serene afternoon, sending shoppers screaming and fleeing inside the Tops, and families scrambling to find loved ones outside the store.
Ken Stephens, 68, a member of a local anti-violence group, described a grisly scene. “I came up here, and bodies were everywhere,” he said.
The attack took place in a neighborhood known as Masten Park on Buffalo’s East Side. Dominique Calhoun, who lives within sight of the supermarket, said she was pulling into its parking lot to buy ice cream with her daughters — eight and nine years old — when she saw people running out and screaming.
“That literally could have been me,” she said of the people who were killed.
Dorothy Simmons, 64, typically spends part of her Saturdays at Tops, shopping for food to prepare for Sunday dinner, something she says is part of a common tradition in her community. On Saturday, however, she was at work in Amherst.
And when she heard the news, she broke down and cried.
“This is our store,” Ms. Simmons said. “This is our store.”
Kellen Browning, Dan Higgins, Luke Hammill, Glenn Thrush, Adam Goldman, Alexandra E. Petri, Ashley Southall, Vimal Patel and Eduardo Medina contributed reporting. Jack Begg contributed research.
New York Times
May 14, 2022
New York Times
10 people are killed and 3 are wounded in a mass shooting at a Buffalo grocery store.
BUFFALO — A teenage gunman entranced by a white supremacist ideology known as replacement theory opened fire at a supermarket in Buffalo on Saturday, methodically shooting and killing 10 people and injuring three more, almost all of them Black, in one of the deadliest racist massacres in recent American history.
The authorities identified the gunman as 18-year-old Payton S. Gendron of Conklin, a small town in New York’s rural Southern Tier. Mr. Gendron drove more than 200 miles to mount his attack, which he also livestreamed, the police said, a chilling video feed that appeared designed to promote his sinister agenda.
Shortly after Mr. Gendron was captured, a manifesto believed to have been posted online by the gunman emerged, riddled with racist, anti-immigrant views that claimed white Americans were at risk of being replaced by people of color. In the video that appeared to have been captured by the camera affixed to his helmet, an anti-Black racial slur can be seen on the barrel of his weapon.
The attack, at a Tops Friendly Market in a largely Black neighborhood in east Buffalo, conjured grim comparisons to a series of other massacres motivated by racism, including the killing of nine Black parishioners at a church in Charleston, S.C., in 2015; an antisemitic rampage in a Pittsburgh synagogue in 2018 that left 11 people dead; and an attack at a Walmart in El Paso in 2019, where the man charged had expressed hatred of Latinos. More than 20 people died there.
In the Buffalo grocery store, where four employees were shot, the savagery and planning were evident: Mr. Gendron was armed with an assault weapon and wore body armor, the police said. And his preferred victims seemed clear as well: All told, 11 of the people shot were Black and two were white, the authorities said.
“It was a straight up racially motivated hate crime,” John Garcia, the Erie County sheriff, said.
In a news conference Saturday evening, Gov. Kathy Hochul — a Buffalo native — echoed that sentiment and decried the attack as an “act of barbarism” and an “execution of innocent human beings,” as well as a frightening reminder of the dangers of “white supremacist terrorism.”
“It strikes us in our very hearts to know that there is such evil that lurks out there,” Governor Hochul said.
Based on what was written in the manifesto, the attack appeared to have been inspired by earlier massacres that were motivated by racial hatred, including a mosque shooting in New Zealand and the Walmart shooting in Texas, both in 2019.
In the manifesto, which was being reviewed by law enforcement, Mr. Gendron — who had attended a community college in Binghamton, N.Y. — wrote that he had selected the area because it held the largest percentage of Black residents near his home in the state’s Southern Tier, a predominantly white region that borders Pennsylvania.
The document outlined a careful plan to kill as many Black people as possible, complete with the type of gun he would use, a timeline, and where he would eat beforehand.
It also included details of where he would livestream the violence, mayhem that he had also calibrated. He carefully studied the layout of the grocery, writing that he would shoot a security guard before stalking through aisles and firing upon Black shoppers. He wrote that he would shoot some twice, in the chest, when he could.
He wrote he had been “passively preparing” for the Buffalo attack for several years, purchasing ammunition and gear, while infrequently practicing shooting. In January, the plans “actually got serious,” according to the manifesto, which also expressed praise for the perpetrator of the 2015 attack in South Carolina, and for a man who killed 51 Muslims at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2019.
Mr. Gendron had read the racist writings of the New Zealand gunman, who had also livestreamed his attack, a method also used in a shooting at a Jewish synagogue in Halle, Germany, in 2019.
In an arraignment on Saturday evening, Mr. Gendron pleaded not guilty to first-degree murder, a charge that could lead to life imprisonment without parole. He spoke little except to confirm he understood the charges, and gave little indication of emotion inside the courtroom.
The United States attorney in Buffalo, Trini E. Ross, said her office was also investigating the killings as federal hate crimes.
Other gunmen have referenced the racist idea known as “replacement theory,” a concept once associated with the far-right fringe, but one that has become increasingly mainstream, pushed by politicians and popular television programs.
Officials said the camera that the gunman wore was used to broadcast the attack live on Twitch, a livestreaming site owned by Amazon that is popular with gamers. On Saturday, Twitch said it had taken the channel offline. Still, screenshots of the broadcast were circulating online, including some that appeared to show the shooter holding a gun and standing over a body in the grocery store.
In his manifesto, Mr. Gendron seemed enthusiastic about broadcasting his attack, saying the livestream let “all people with the internet” watch and record the violence.
The massacre began around 2:30 p.m., the authorities said, when Mr. Gendron arrived at the market stepping out of his car — on a sunny spring afternoon — dressed in tactical gear and body armor and carrying an assault weapon.
He shot four people in the parking lot, the Buffalo police commissioner, Joseph A. Gramaglia, said at the news conference, three of them fatally. When he entered the store and continued shooting, he encountered a security guard, a retired Buffalo police officer who returned fire. But Mr. Gendron was wearing heavy metal plating; he killed the guard and continued into the store, firing on shoppers and employees.
By Julie Walton Shaver
When Buffalo police officers arrived and confronted Mr. Gendron, he put a gun to his neck, but two patrolmen persuaded him to drop his weapon and surrender, Mr. Gramaglia said.
The mayor of Buffalo, Byron W. Brown, said that he and his family periodically shopped at the store.
“Some of the victims of this shooter’s attack are people that all of us standing up here know,” said Mr. Brown, the fifth-term Democrat who was the first Black man elected mayor of Buffalo, New York’s second-most populous city.
The 10 people killed in Buffalo represent the highest number of fatalities in a mass shooting in the United States this year, according to the Gun Violence Archive, which tracks them. The highest death toll this year before that was six, in a shooting in downtown Sacramento on April 3. Six people were also killed in a shooting in Corsicana, Texas, on Feb. 5, and the same number were killed in a shooting in Milwaukee on Jan. 23, according to the site.
In a statement made late Saturday night, President Biden expressed sympathy for the victims’ families and praise for law enforcement, adding that “a racially motivated hate crime is abhorrent to the very fabric of this nation.”
“Any act of domestic terrorism, including an act perpetrated in the name of a repugnant white nationalist ideology, is antithetical to everything we stand for in America,” the president said. “Hate must have no safe harbor.”
Gun deaths reached the highest number ever recorded in the United States in 2020, the first year of the pandemic, surging by 35 percent, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported on Tuesday.
The gunfire in Buffalo on Saturday shattered a seemingly serene afternoon, sending shoppers screaming and fleeing inside the Tops, and families scrambling to find loved ones outside the store.
Ken Stephens, 68, a member of a local anti-violence group, described a grisly scene. “I came up here, and bodies were everywhere,” he said.
The attack took place in a neighborhood known as Masten Park on Buffalo’s East Side. Dominique Calhoun, who lives within sight of the supermarket, said she was pulling into its parking lot to buy ice cream with her daughters — eight and nine years old — when she saw people running out and screaming.
“That literally could have been me,” she said of the people who were killed.
Dorothy Simmons, 64, typically spends part of her Saturdays at Tops, shopping for food to prepare for Sunday dinner, something she says is part of a common tradition in her community. On Saturday, however, she was at work in Amherst.
And when she heard the news, she broke down and cried.
“This is our store,” Ms. Simmons said. “This is our store.”
Kellen Browning, Dan Higgins, Luke Hammill, Glenn Thrush, Adam Goldman, Alexandra E. Petri, Ashley Southall, Vimal Patel and Eduardo Medina contributed reporting. Jack Begg contributed research.
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2022/05/14/nyregion/buffalo-shooting
Buffalo Supermarket ShootingGunman Kills 10 at Buffalo Supermarket in Racist Attack
President Biden called for a thorough investigation, and said there was no harbor for “hate-filled domestic terrorism.” The 18-year-old white gunman, who pleaded not guilty, left behind a manifesto.
The police said the gunman, whom they described as an 18-year-old white man from outside the city, was motivated by racism. He appeared in court hours after the shooting and pleaded not guilty to charges of first-degree murder. Credit: Malik Rainey for The New York TimesFollow our live coverage of the Buffalo mass shooting.
10 people are killed and 3 are wounded in a mass shooting at a Buffalo grocery store.
BUFFALO — A teenage gunman entranced by a white supremacist ideology known as replacement theory opened fire at a supermarket in Buffalo on Saturday, methodically shooting and killing 10 people and injuring three more, almost all of them Black, in one of the deadliest racist massacres in recent American history.
The authorities identified the gunman as 18-year-old Payton S. Gendron of Conklin, a small town in New York’s rural Southern Tier. Mr. Gendron drove more than 200 miles to mount his attack, which he also livestreamed, the police said, a chilling video feed that appeared designed to promote his sinister agenda.
Shortly after Mr. Gendron was captured, a manifesto believed to have been posted online by the gunman emerged, riddled with racist, anti-immigrant views that claimed white Americans were at risk of being replaced by people of color. In the video that appeared to have been captured by the camera affixed to his helmet, an anti-Black racial slur can be seen on the barrel of his weapon.
The attack, at a Tops Friendly Market in a largely Black neighborhood in east Buffalo, conjured grim comparisons to a series of other massacres motivated by racism, including the killing of nine Black parishioners at a church in Charleston, S.C., in 2015; an antisemitic rampage in a Pittsburgh synagogue in 2018 that left 11 people dead; and an attack at a Walmart in El Paso in 2019, where the man charged had expressed hatred of Latinos. More than 20 people died there.
In the Buffalo grocery store, where four employees were shot, the savagery and planning were evident: Mr. Gendron was armed with an assault weapon and wore body armor, the police said. And his preferred victims seemed clear as well: All told, 11 of the people shot were Black and two were white, the authorities said.
“It was a straight up racially motivated hate crime,” John Garcia, the Erie County sheriff, said.
In a news conference Saturday evening, Gov. Kathy Hochul — a Buffalo native — echoed that sentiment and decried the attack as an “act of barbarism” and an “execution of innocent human beings,” as well as a frightening reminder of the dangers of “white supremacist terrorism.”
“It strikes us in our very hearts to know that there is such evil that lurks out there,” Governor Hochul said.
Based on what was written in the manifesto, the attack appeared to have been inspired by earlier massacres that were motivated by racial hatred, including a mosque shooting in New Zealand and the Walmart shooting in Texas, both in 2019.
In the manifesto, which was being reviewed by law enforcement, Mr. Gendron — who had attended a community college in Binghamton, N.Y. — wrote that he had selected the area because it held the largest percentage of Black residents near his home in the state’s Southern Tier, a predominantly white region that borders Pennsylvania.
The document outlined a careful plan to kill as many Black people as possible, complete with the type of gun he would use, a timeline, and where he would eat beforehand.
It also included details of where he would livestream the violence, mayhem that he had also calibrated. He carefully studied the layout of the grocery, writing that he would shoot a security guard before stalking through aisles and firing upon Black shoppers. He wrote that he would shoot some twice, in the chest, when he could.
He wrote he had been “passively preparing” for the Buffalo attack for several years, purchasing ammunition and gear, while infrequently practicing shooting. In January, the plans “actually got serious,” according to the manifesto, which also expressed praise for the perpetrator of the 2015 attack in South Carolina, and for a man who killed 51 Muslims at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2019.
Mr. Gendron had read the racist writings of the New Zealand gunman, who had also livestreamed his attack, a method also used in a shooting at a Jewish synagogue in Halle, Germany, in 2019.
In an arraignment on Saturday evening, Mr. Gendron pleaded not guilty to first-degree murder, a charge that could lead to life imprisonment without parole. He spoke little except to confirm he understood the charges, and gave little indication of emotion inside the courtroom.
The United States attorney in Buffalo, Trini E. Ross, said her office was also investigating the killings as federal hate crimes.
Other gunmen have referenced the racist idea known as “replacement theory,” a concept once associated with the far-right fringe, but one that has become increasingly mainstream, pushed by politicians and popular television programs.
Officials said the camera that the gunman wore was used to broadcast the attack live on Twitch, a livestreaming site owned by Amazon that is popular with gamers. On Saturday, Twitch said it had taken the channel offline. Still, screenshots of the broadcast were circulating online, including some that appeared to show the shooter holding a gun and standing over a body in the grocery store.
In his manifesto, Mr. Gendron seemed enthusiastic about broadcasting his attack, saying the livestream let “all people with the internet” watch and record the violence.
The massacre began around 2:30 p.m., the authorities said, when Mr. Gendron arrived at the market stepping out of his car — on a sunny spring afternoon — dressed in tactical gear and body armor and carrying an assault weapon.
He shot four people in the parking lot, the Buffalo police commissioner, Joseph A. Gramaglia, said at the news conference, three of them fatally. When he entered the store and continued shooting, he encountered a security guard, a retired Buffalo police officer who returned fire. But Mr. Gendron was wearing heavy metal plating; he killed the guard and continued into the store, firing on shoppers and employees.
by Julie Walton Shaver
When Buffalo police officers arrived and confronted Mr. Gendron, he put a gun to his neck, but two patrolmen persuaded him to drop his weapon and surrender, Mr. Gramaglia said.
The mayor of Buffalo, Byron W. Brown, said that he and his family periodically shopped at the store.
“Some of the victims of this shooter’s attack are people that all of us standing up here know,” said Mr. Brown, the fifth-term Democrat who was the first Black man elected mayor of Buffalo, New York’s second-most populous city.
The 10 people killed in Buffalo represent the highest number of fatalities in a mass shooting in the United States this year, according to the Gun Violence Archive, which tracks them. The highest death toll this year before that was six, in a shooting in downtown Sacramento on April 3. Six people were also killed in a shooting in Corsicana, Texas, on Feb. 5, and the same number were killed in a shooting in Milwaukee on Jan. 23, according to the site.
In a statement made late Saturday night, President Biden expressed sympathy for the victims’ families and praise for law enforcement, adding that “a racially motivated hate crime is abhorrent to the very fabric of this nation.”
“Any act of domestic terrorism, including an act perpetrated in the name of a repugnant white nationalist ideology, is antithetical to everything we stand for in America,” the president said. “Hate must have no safe harbor.”
Gun deaths reached the highest number ever recorded in the United States in 2020, the first year of the pandemic, surging by 35 percent, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported on Tuesday.
The gunfire in Buffalo on Saturday shattered a seemingly serene afternoon, sending shoppers screaming and fleeing inside the Tops, and families scrambling to find loved ones outside the store.
Ken Stephens, 68, a member of a local anti-violence group, described a grisly scene. “I came up here, and bodies were everywhere,” he said.
The attack took place in a neighborhood known as Masten Park on Buffalo’s East Side. Dominique Calhoun, who lives within sight of the supermarket, said she was pulling into its parking lot to buy ice cream with her daughters — eight and nine years old — when she saw people running out and screaming.
“That literally could have been me,” she said of the people who were killed.
Dorothy Simmons, 64, typically spends part of her Saturdays at Tops, shopping for food to prepare for Sunday dinner, something she says is part of a common tradition in her community. On Saturday, however, she was at work in Amherst.
And when she heard the news, she broke down and cried.
“This is our store,” Ms. Simmons said. “This is our store.”
Kellen Browning, Dan Higgins, Luke Hammill, Glenn Thrush, Adam Goldman, Alexandra E. Petri, Ashley Southall, Vimal Patel and Eduardo Medina contributed reporting. Jack Begg contributed research.
UPDATE: New York Times
May 15, 2022
ET1 hour ago
Anushka Patil
Gunman targeted Black neighborhood shaped by decades of segregation.
Near the scene of the mass shooting on Buffalo’s East Side on Saturday. Credit: Derek Gee/The Buffalo News, via Associated PressThe high concentration of Black residents on Buffalo’s East Side — which the suspect in Saturday’s mass shooting said was his reason for targeting the area — is a direct result of decades of segregation and systemic racism, according to decades of research.
One analysis from the University of Michigan, based on data from the 2010 census, found that the Buffalo-Niagara Falls metro area was the nation’s sixth most segregated when ranked specifically by the distribution of Black and white residents.
