This isn’t an essay. This won’t be edited or even read before I post. I’m not offering the definitive take, nor a particularly novel one. I’m ruminating from a perspective I specifically have because of where specifically this happened.
[Of paramount importance, though, and since I’m writing the beginning of this at the end, I must say this sea-of-consciousness did not turn out how I thought it would, and many of the thoughts, words, and occasionally even rhythm of this piece owe a considerable debt to pan-African writers and thinkers, Black people more generally, and elements of Black art, storytelling, and culture, including but not limited to James Baldwin, Maya Angelou, bell hooks, Stokley Carmichael, and W.E.B. Du Bois, as well as Buffalo’s own India Walton. Any exact lifts are purely coincidental and corrections and citations will be annotated post-publish.]
Should you wish to help those more personally affected, you can do so here.
Alright, let’s talk about Buffalo.
Ihave a lot on my mind and in my heart but nothing elegant to say. It’s no picnic to see your hometown become the latest hashtag, and that’s to say nothing about how these terrorist attacks never get any easier in general, much less hear that this isn’t even the first or second or even third establishment I’ve set foot in that would later become some Doom-3D fodder for some anonymous nothing barely old enough to work the Taco Bell Drive-Thru, who decided to spend his off-hours LARPing as a brownshirt.
None of what I’m capable of saying on this platform will be easy to write or hear, and I fear it won’t be eloquent enough or right enough for the moment, and I know it’ll contain stray pot-shots and cuss words. It feels raw. I feel conflicted. It aches the way a phantom limb might. That’s what violence does when it’s done the way this was, and when you observe it from exactly the distance away that I am. When it comes to your home, but you’ve left. When it hits a community that welcomed you, but not the community you belong to. The violence that hits exactly there, exactly now, brings with it a sense of urgency without clarity — and prompts a tidal wave of thought without a drop of focus.
I wanted to tell you about how Buffalo is a city of color and culture. A city that’s — contrary to the common Barstool Sports Bills-Mafia Narrative rendering everyone in the 716 area code white-trash drunken dipshits diving through flaming tables at NFL tailgates — a haven for immigrants, with copious communities of Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, Cubans, Afro-Caribbeans Italians, Poles, Jews, West Africans, South Asians, Southeast Asians and more. Those communities remain tight, occasionally even to each other. They’ve had to.
Buffalo is also a city of stunning importance given its modest size. (About 270,000 in the city proper and a shade over a mil in the metro.) In 1900, it was the eighth-largest city in the United States … and the second-richest city in the world, after Paris. (In 2022, from the outside, you probably see Grand Rapids, Michigan with an NFL team.) The city was the world and the world came to it.
Buffalo is the first true inland American boomtown, the first city powered by electricity, the first gateway to the American West, and a terminus for both the Erie Canal and the Underground Railroad. All those are important — especially that last part. Because what never went discussed before now is this: Buffalo is an all-caps and all-time and unapologetically Black city. [40-ish percent and growing, according to the past few census estimates.]
Black Buffalo is Buffalo, and Buffalo is BLACK. Like, DC Black. Philly Black. Oakland Black. It’s Rick James and Bennie the Butcher and India F**king Walton Black. Longest-tenured Black mayor in American history ever Black. (Byron Brown, the current mayor, upon completion of his latest term.)
Buffalo is lunch meetings at Mattie’s on Fillmore. It’s Jamaican BBQ and Haitian-Creole home-cooking served hot and delicious in styrofoam trays by your call center coworker whose mama “just made extra.” It’s slow-cooked ribs and heavily-sauced wings at whichever house invited the block that week. The gate’s open, don’t bother knocking, and if you’re tall enough to see over our fences that were never for keeping you out but for holding you close, then you’re old enough to grab a cup and help yourself to Labatt on tap. That Blackness is joy, and it’s pure Buffalo.
That joy? It remains covered, muted by the pain of what — and who — surrounds it. We can’t tell the story of all those smiles, sights, smells, and sounds without telling the other story. The one you know, because it’s the one we can never not tell until we first stop writing it. The one with the redlining, redistricting, housing discrimination, and food deserts that created a city so deeply segregated — few cities even come close — that no white person would dare drive down Bailey Ave in broad daylight, much less gentrify the blocks east of Main. It’s not even a self-contained society so much as a city under siege.
Want the rest of the story? Well, drive a couple of blocks. Welcome to Amherst, or Cheektowaga, or Williamsville, or Tonawanda. Keep driving.
The parties out there hit different. They’re full of pain, grievance, bitterness, and quiet while the fences scream Get The Fuck Out. Conversation fodder falls into loosely two buckets: the way things used to be, and the various objects of ire — New York City, Albany, NAFTA, cancer, Brett Hull — who took those things away. Welcome to the suburbs and the uncomfortably large pockets of Diet-KKK nobodies who haunt them.
Whiteness will turn this shooter into a media celebrity and a martyr of the modern fascist movement. Because whiteness sees only itself and never its whiteness, so there’s a tendency, a rush, a compulsion to ask “why” when white men kill. The answers are many and also blindingly obvious.
Because the guns keep getting more plentiful and more lethal.
Because the schools hide our real history from our kids and shield white kids in their whiteness.
Because the cities aren’t so much built, but ripped apart, burned down, and rebuilt all wrong among the remnants.
Because the leaders we elect and entrust can’t and won’t say what this is or do a damned thing about what they will not yet name or even admit to themselves.
Because the men who’ve been unceremoniously dismissed from a predatory economy and can no longer provide feel a sudden urge to “protect.”
Because the purpose and meaning and emotional maturity we should be instilling in our children never arrive — or fade away just like the steel mills and the union jobs and the affordable college and within that vacuum, nothing but unchecked anger, addiction, and aimlessness.
Because America’s original sins remain unwashed, the country unbaptized in the holy waters of equity, equality, and empathy.
Because whiteness is blind. And it smiles to hide the pain of never knowing itself. Never holding or healing itself. Never knowing it exists at all. Never seeing itself … only others. That blindness is what makes whiteness self-sustaining. For as long as there are others, others will only know whiteness. For as long as whiteness cannot see itself, it cannot be eliminated from the inside. Meanwhile, the cycle self-perpetuates as the bleach and bullets spread.. . . . . .
Wedon’t ask “why.” We ask “who.”
Who are we? Who made us? Who belongs? Who can we yet become?
Who do we need to reach to bring these young boys home to the block, so they can see themselves and their brethren as human, before they descend, not into madness, but into whiteness?
Who can we elect, serve, give to, and elevate, so we can build ourselves and our cities and country better, or at the very least truly good for the first time?
Who do we see when we look in the mirror and look at our neighbors?
These questions have answers, but you can only honestly answer them yourself. I know mine. They are not perfect and they change over time, but they are my answers.
We ask “who” because this story is shaped and progress is made by people. People with institutional power and generational wealth. People with love in their hearts or hate in their bones.
Whether they come from Buffalo, or Austin, or from a speed-trap town or a pristine gated community, the “who” is important, and we all shape society in our own way.
Right now it’s eroding, if not imploding. We’re doing that. Whiteness is doing that. The people who sit perched in high seats of power and who drive hundreds of miles to gun down people they never once met before they cocked and loaded. They’re doing that, too. They learned it from watching us. They’re always watching. They’re still watching.
Still, we write the story.
So, I ask: “who.” Will it be you? And what will you do?
I wanted to write this to see my city and the full humans who live there and give the city its character, and the full humans who lost their lives.
Yet the story goes how it always goes: reduced to the immutable truth that is the answer to the question that punctuates each tragic beat of this unending tale: A fascist drove for hours to my hometown just to kill. He did not act alone. Who was with him?
You know who.
Buffalo, I love you. You’re my home. Black Buffalo, I love you. You made me feel at home.
What loaded the gun is what created the community. On Saturday, May 14, 2022, at a Tops in my hometown, the gun and the community met. The gun won; the gun always wins. Still, we write the story.
