America Isn’t Ready to Truly Understand the Buffalo Shooting
Payton Gendron’s violence was not an isolated incident but one thread in a web of anti-Black hatred.
One evening about seven years ago in St. Andrews, Scotland, I was walking home from a long day of doctoral research. Most people out that night were not concluding studies. A scattered few exited the ancient city’s meager collection of pubs and restaurants.
That ordinary night shifted when a drunken man stumbled out of one of those bars and spotted my Black body. He presented no manifesto. I have no access to the soul-distorting experiences that led him to look upon me with contempt, but seconds after he saw me, he blurted out that most famous of anti-Black racial slurs. I had never been verbally accosted in a British accent and didn’t know that word
