WASHINGTON, D.C., May 16, 2022 – This weekend, several mass shootings took the lives of people of color across the country. The suspect responsible for a shooting that killed ten people and injured three others in a Buffalo, NY grocery store had written extensively about his support for white supremacy and anti-Semitism. He specifically expressed belief in the “great replacement” conspiracy that has been espoused by Fox News hosts like Tucker Carlson and Republican lawmakers like Congresswoman Elise Stefanik.
Alliance for Justice President Rakim H.D. Brooks issued the following statement:
“I am frightened by the course our country seems to be willfully taking. White supremacy is alive and well and it is becoming ever more aggressive, violent, and deadly. Yet, we seem unprepared or unwilling to name, confront, and destroy it once and for all.
“We have seen this story before. After the Civil War, white vigilantes subdued emancipated Black citizens by violence and developed propaganda to justify that violence. The narratives were painfully similar in response to Black individuals and other people of color assuming positions of power that white people had previously occupied. The success of that propaganda led to nearly 100 more years of violent repression under the regime called Jim Crow.
“I hate to say it but I know that many of the Black elders who were killed knew that old system of racial violence intimately, either through personal experience or tales from family that never migrated from the South. It should crush the spirit of every concerned citizen that those that we lost thought they had escaped such terror only to find it at their doorstep after the murderer traveled 200 miles to find them.
“It’s utterly disgusting.
“And yet I fear that in a week or so, we may return to ‘normal.’ We will rebuke white supremacy and those who embrace it as backwards and uncivil, without confronting that this is no longer about politics. It is about life and death.
“If we allow racism and hate to win, this will happen over and over again: White supremacists will be emboldened, they will purchase automatic weapons, and they will kill innocent Black and brown people and other vulnerable minorities.
“The Alliance for Justice knows what side of history it will be on. I pray that the country is with us.”