Since last week, the African-American taxi driver from Buffalo, New York, is afraid if a white person gets into his car. Derek Middlebrooks, an employee of an insurance company, is also very fearful. With white people he meets, he now feels the same as she does with him when he visits the suburbs: ‘That fear of what is this person doing here?’
Nearly a week after the Saturday afternoon when an 18-year-old white gunman opened fire at Tops supermarket, killing ten, Fagrance Stanfield is still trying to comprehend what happened. There are stains in her memory, she has questions. Why didn’t she grip her daughter more tightly? Why are people allowed to buy firearms? And: how can there be so much hatred hidden in a person?
Stanfield, 45, lay on the floor in aisle 12 near the frozen meals as the gunshots blazed through the store. She suddenly realizes that Yahnia is not with her. When the gunman entered the store, she had grabbed her daughter’s hand. But in the chaos, between the bangs and the screams, they had lost each other.
After a while—she can’t remember how long afterwards—she gathered her courage, got up and ran out the back door. Yahnia was not to be seen there either. “It wasn’t until the police arrived and it was all over that my daughter came out,” she says. “We fell into each other’s arms crying. I didn’t want to let her go.’
White supremacy
A few days after the attack, the area around the supermarket is still closed. There are police cars everywhere. At a memorial, opposite the shop, are mountains of colorful flowers. Well-known athletes from Buffalo come to offer their condolences. On Tuesday, US President Joe Biden visited with First Lady Jill Biden.
“In America, evil will not win,” Biden said in a speech. “White supremacy will not have the last word.” It is ‘a poison’ that flows through our ‘politics’, and, ‘silence is complicity.’ Biden emphasized that the perpetrator had carried out a “terrorist act”.
Payton Gendron, 18, walked into the Tops supermarket last week with a gun in hand. He shot shopkeepers and employees like puppets in a video game, as seen in the video he recorded. It is possible that some of his followers watched live while he shot at 13 people – ten fatally. “Sorry,” he yells at a white man he accidentally pointed his gun at. It was very clear why he had chosen this supermarket.
The shooter had already visited the day before, says employee Fragrance Stanfield. ‘I gave him a friendly greeting! You can’t imagine that, can you?’ Hello sir, she said to him, how is your evening?
Stanfield tells her story at the Bada Bing, a bar in Buffalo. She, along with all the other Tops employees, has just completed a five-hour therapy session. “I feel empty,” she says, slurping from the straw sticking out of her glass of lemonade.
love advice
Right-wing extremist Gendron had driven to Buffalo from his hometown of Conklin, in the agricultural south of New York State, to shoot people in the heart of the black community. When he was arrested, he put his firearm on his neck, threatened to shoot himself, but declined. His plan was to kill more black people in a second supermarket, police chief Joseph Gramaglia said. Gendron has since been charged with first degree murder, saying he is innocent.
For many residents of Buffalo, white extremism does not come out of the blue. African Americans were barred from white neighborhoods here in the last century, unable to take out the same mortgages as white Americans. Even for this supermarket, local residents have had to compete, Stanfield says.
‘The store was more than a supermarket. Tops was a kind of neighborhood center with regulars, where everyone knew each other, chatted.’ Stanfield often gave love advice to teenagers who passed by. Now Tops is a crime scene.
“Glad Joe Biden came to visit, but what’s going to happen here when the cameras are gone?” nurse Reneitha Cottom (37) wonders aloud, in the square behind the supermarket. “How are we ever going to get over this as a community?”
Most residents of East Side Buffalo have multiple instances of police experiences that they cannot erase from their memory. Cotton has been afraid of white cops for four years. She tells how in 2018 a man ordered her to the ground with a gun drawn after a car collision. Since Saturday’s attack, that fear has spread to all white people. ‘I even feel it with my colleagues in the hospital, with some patients. I know that sounds biased, but this is just how I experience it.’
glowing barrel
Biden pledged to fight racism in his country as presidential candidate. But in Buffalo they haven’t noticed that yet. They worry about white extremists with weapons plotting extremist plans online. Nurse Cottom wants the US president to do something about the amount of guns. She wants white people to be treated just as hard by the police as black people with the growth of right-wing extremism in her country. That they too are made suspicious, at the slightest thing. And she hopes that these kinds of events lead to conversations.
Not all white Americans are racist, but those who are have friends and family who know and don’t intervene. They must stop this.’
Like most residents on the East Side of Buffalo, she knew people who were in the grocery store: her niece, who had been lying on top of her 14-year-old daughter. “She begged him to leave her daughter alone,” she says. “The man put the gun to her head but shot someone else.” A photo shows a red circle: the burn that the glowing barrel left behind.
Another traumatized generation, Cottom sighs. ‘That girl no longer dares to go to school and only wants to sleep in her mother’s bed. She can’t get the perpetrator’s face out of her head.’
It is too early for Stanfield to dwell on the perpetrator’s racist motives. “I’m not angry, I’m hurt,” she says. “I still can’t believe the idea that I or my daughter could have been dead by now.”