Last Wednesday, the 15th day of Black History Month, Payton Gendron was sentenced to life in prison without parole for massacring 10 Black people in a Buffalo supermarket last May. Gendron faces a second trial where, if found guilty, he may be sentenced to death – a punishment he deserves many times over.
Payton Gendron is an avowed white supremacist who was radicalized online. On that rancid day, Gendron decided to "defend" the "white race" by entering a supermarket and shooting 10 people to death for the "crime" of not being white.
As compared to two Black celebrities acting like fools at last year's Oscars, Payton Gendron's murder trial and sentencing received very little mainstream news coverage.
Why? White America's concern about Black people's pain and suffering is almost always temporary. Yes, there may be marches, signs of solidarity and support placed on lawns, social media badges and memes, and perhaps even a visit by the president of the United States or an invitation for the family of the victims to the White House or State of the Union Address, but Black pain and suffering are quickly and literally white-washed away from the (white) public imagination. In many ways, that trauma and existential fear are the bedrock of America's racialized "democracy" and a type of barrier and fence that determines the boundaries of the color line between those deemed to be White and those marked as black or brown.
Peyton Gendron is the hate that hate produced.
America could end its cultural practice of anti-Black violence (and anti-Blackness more broadly) if it so chose. That will not happen because too many white people have decided, both actively and tacitly, that violence against Black and brown people serves their collective interests. Such a decision signals to one of the many paradoxes of the global color line: as the truism goes, "everybody wants to be black, but nobody wants to be black."
The New York Times offered this summary of the Payton Gendron trial and verdict:
"You will never see the light of day as a free man again," the judge, Susan Eagan, said after reading a statement about the harmful effects of institutional racism and white supremacy, calling it an "insidious cancer on our society and nation."
The sentence reflected the outcome of a guilty plea to 10 counts of first-degree murder and a single count of domestic terrorism motivated by hate, which carries a penalty of life imprisonment without parole. He was the first person in New York convicted of that domestic terrorism charge.
Judge Eagan's sentence came after a brief apology by the gunman, Payton Gendron, 19, who said he was "very sorry" for the attack and blamed online content for the shooting rampage on May 14, in which 10 people were killed, all of them Black, and three people injured. He said he didn't want to inspire other racist killings.
"I shot and killed people because they were Black," he said. "Looking back now, I can't believe I actually did."
As Mr. Gendron spoke, a member of the audience began screaming and cursing at him, the second such interruption in an emotionally raw hearing.
Earlier, the sentencing was dramatically interrupted and the courtroom cleared after a man lunged at the defendant….
Mr. Gendron pleaded guilty in November to the state charges, which included gun and attempted murder charges. He is also charged with federal hate crimes and weapons violations, some of which could carry the death penalty if the Justice Department decided to seek it. Those charges are still pending.
Mr. Gendron, an avowed white supremacist, live-streamed the attack and specifically chose the Tops market in east Buffalo — some 200 miles from his home in Conklin, N.Y. —because it had a large Black clientele. He wore body armor and camouflage during his shooting spree.
In the days and months before his massacre, the gunman had written in exhaustive and hate-filled detail about his plans, including a lengthy screed riddled with racist writings. He also expressed admiration for a white supremacist ideology known as replacement theory, which posits the false idea that white people, who make up a majority of America's population, are being purposefully supplanted by minorities.
The Times continues:
Before Mr. Gendron heard his sentence, families of the victims testified as to the insurmountable damage done by the attack.
"You are a cowardly racist," said Simone Crawley, whose grandmother Ruth Whitfield, 86, was killed in the shooting. She asked for accountability for others who aided or turned a blind eye to Mr. Gendron's growing radicalization.
"You recorded the last moments of our loved ones' lives to garner support for your hateful cause, but you immortalized them instead," Ms. Crawley continued. "We are extremely aware that you are not a lone wolf, but a part of a larger organized network of domestic terrorists. And to that network, we say we, as a people, are unbreakable."
Zeneta Everhart, whose son Zaire Goodman was injured, but survived, said: "The world says you have to forgive in order to move on. But I stand before you today to say that will never happen."
Kimberly Salter's husband, Aaron Salter, a retired Buffalo police officer, did not survive: He was shot and killed in the attack. Ms. Salter quoted the Bible as she stood just feet from Mr. Gendron, who wore an orange jumpsuit and spectacles.
"You will reap," she said, "what you sow."
Intense feelings were palpable throughout the hearing, as a somber mood occasionally flared to anger and rage as speakers turned their attention to Mr. Gendron. He watched the speakers impassively and sometimes held eye contact with them when he was addressed directly. At one point, he could be seen crying.
But such displays, and apologies, seemed shallow to some of the victims' families.
"How can you possibly stand up here and say you are sorry?" said Brian Talley, whose sister, Geraldine Talley, was killed. "I watched my sister get shot by you. You treated it like a video game."
It was refreshing and freeing – even allowing for these most tragic circumstances – to see Black people not offer forgiveness to the white supremacist terrorist in Buffalo, to let their justified rage and anger flow.
For a variety of reasons rooted in white-on-Black chattel slavery, Jim and Jane Crow, and the ever present threat of white violence and terrorism, Black people in America learned, as a matter of survival, to wear a type of mask of obedience, civility, politeness, and compliance lest they be deemed "angry" or "difficult" or "impolite" or "uppity" and thus needing to be "put back in their place." That dynamic still applies, albeit in different ways and modulations, in post-civil rights America – and most certainly in the Age of Trump and ascendant neofascism. For example, Black people in America, especially if they work in majority white spaces as striving members of the middle and professional classes, are deemed to be "distant" and "cold" or "not friendly", "hostile", or the ubiquitous "not a team player" if they do not perform the expected role of being a warm welcoming laughing Black person who makes your white colleagues feel comfortable and validated. A good many of us, me included, have too much self-respect, and therefore no interest, in being "the best black friend."
The preeminent sociologist Elijah Anderson describes these burdens and perils of being a Black person in America in the following way:
"In White spaces, Black people are typically burdened by a negative presumption they must disprove to establish trust with others, discrimination that accounts for racial disparities in health, employment, police contact, incarceration, and random insults in public."
White people – white men in particular – are allowed and encouraged to show their anger and rage and upsetness from any slights (almost all of which are mostly imagined and acts of projection and racial paranoia) they experience as a group. The Republican Party and the neofascist movement are fueled by that white rage.
Americans, as a whole, do not practice systems level thinking where they seriously contemplate the connections between institutions, society, power, and the individual. This is especially true of White America and its Horatio Alger myths and other cultural fables of "rugged individualism" and self-made people who "did it all on their own." Through that distortion of reality, Payton Gendron is mostly seen as some type of outlier, an individual bad actor, instead of as the product of a white supremacist and racist society. But, of course, anti-blackness is a learned behavior. Gendron is the hate that hate produced. He was radicalized into the most extreme version of the lessons that American (and global) society teaches about black people and the color line and whiteness as a type of property, investment, and entitlement to be defended at all costs.
Media Matters has been documenting how, even during Black History Month, Fox News has been amplifying such white supremacist hatred:
Rather than using Black History Month to recognize the adversity faced by Black Americans and celebrate Black culture, Fox News, its website, and its online streaming platform Fox Nation have instead used the month of February to peddle problematic anti-Black narratives.
Although Fox has aired a few Black history month segments — such as one on civil rights activist and Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall and one on the first Black woman to hold a pilot's license, Bessie Coleman — more airtime was spent pushing racist rhetoric. Every day of February so far, Fox figures have spread anti-Black narratives, accusing President Joe Biden's administration of anti-white racism; fearmongering about critical race theory being taught in K-12 schools as a part of a so-called "woke" liberal agenda; and undermining the existence of and harm done by systemic racism.
…. Fox's behavior is part of a larger trend, as other right-wing media outlets and personalities have also pushed racist narratives this month. For example, The Daily Wire's Matt Walsh jokingly questioned on his February 9 podcast, "Why exactly is it a negative stereotype that a lot of Black people like chicken and waffles?" And on the February 1 edition of his own show, Charlie Kirk of Turning Point USA declared, "I don't think there should be a Black History Month."
Media Matters also highlighted this recent segment where Tucker Carlson, in his own version of the white supremacist novel The Turner Diaries or The Camp of the Saints (along with some Mein Kampf), used the techniques of stochastic terrorism to summon upon a tale about Hitler, Mao, and a non-existent war against "straight white men" by the Biden Administration.
TUCKER CARLSON (HOST): Joe Biden institutes a government-wide system of racial discrimination that dwarfs Jim Crow and nobody seems to notice. It happened yesterday, by the way. Did you know that? Probably not, because there was no press conference or signing ceremony, no media coverage. But 24 hours ago it happened.
Biden restructured the entire executive branch of the U.S. government to discriminate on the basis of immutable characteristics. He made that announcement on the White House website, and it proclaims that within 30 days, every federal agency -- all of them, from the Department of Justice, to NASA, to the Social Security Administration, all of them -- all must "ensure that they have a equity -- agency equity team within their respective agencies to coordinate the implementation of equity initiatives."
And these Maoist equity teams will report to something called the Gender Policy Council, and the White House "Environmental Justice Officer." Does the Environmental Justice Officer carry a sidearm? We don't know, actually.
We do know that running all of this -- which is the largest racial tracking bureaucracy since the fall of Nazi Germany -- will be former president Barack Obama. And he'll be doing that, as always, through his longtime lackey and cutout Susan Rice. Rice's goal, the goal of the entire initiative, is to place the federal government, all of it, in opposition to a very specific slice of the American population. Not a foreign population, our own population.
Here's how it works. Every single person in the United States will qualify for one of Joe Biden's many protected categories except straight white men. So we're all in this together except those guys who are on the outs. It's all of us versus them. Straight white men, they will not be protected because they are, by virtue of being straight and white and male, the cause of the problem. They're the enemy.
[...]
You're a domestic enemy now. You're an English-speaking version of Vladimir Putin. The equity agenda is your personal sanctions regime.
Mother Jones has called attention to how Carlson and other elements of the white right and its propaganda machine are using the horrible train accident in Ohio as a way of advancing their white supremacist anti-democracy agenda:
That's the big takeaway from Tucker Carlson, who has been hellbent on accusing Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg of intentionally neglecting East Palestine, a majority-white town. According to Carlson, Buttigieg is instead occupied with efforts to increase job opportunities for minorities and improve roads in Philadelphia and Detroit—cities that, Carlson sneeringly mentions, "vote Democrat."
"East Palestine is overwhelmingly white, and it's politically conservative," Carlson said during a February 14 broadcast. "That shouldn't be relevant but as you're about to hear, it very much is." He added: "If this had happened to the rich or the 'favored poor', it would be the lead of every news channel in the world. But it happened to the poor town of East Palestine, Ohio, whose people are forgotten, and in the view of the people who lead this country, forgettable."
In a separate Fox Business interview, Republican Sen. J.D. Vance echoed a similar narrative, blaming the Transportation Department's racial equity initiatives for setting the stage for the train derailment. "I've got to say, the Secretary of Transportation…talking about how we have too many white male construction workers instead of the fact that our trains are crashing…This guy needs to do his job."
These are but a few examples of a white supremacist media and propaganda machine that radicalized Payton Gendron to kill ten Black people last May in a supermarket in Buffalo, New York. His beliefs have now been mainstreamed by Fox News, the Republican-fascist Party, and other parts of the right-wing propaganda machine to many tens of millions of white Americans (and others). Polls and other research show that a majority of Republicans and Trumpists believe in the absurd conspiracy theory that white people are somehow under siege in the United States and Europe and are being "replaced" by Black and brown people. Other polls and research show that a plurality if not a majority of white Republicans and right-leaning independents are so delusional as to believe that white people are the "real victims" of "racism" and "oppression" in America and not Black and brown people.
Ultimately, there are many more Payton Gendrons. They are being made every day. And when the next act of white supremacist and racist violence takes place, be it by a police officer, vigilante, or white right-wing extremist and their larger movement, the ritual of shock and surprise, performative outrage and "not in my America!" and then whitewashed organized forgetting will be performed again and nothing will change.
