How a Terrorist Attack Gave Birth to a (New) Newsletter
Two people hug outside of Tops Market after the Buffalo Shooting (AP Photo/Joshua Bessex)
When a White supremacist attacked a Black grocery store, everyone was affected. Some more than others. When the time-traveling grief of the shooting caught up with me, it left me alternating between shouting at the sky and crying into the dirt.
Then, two questions sat on my mind. How many more people like him are out there? And how can we respond to attacks like this?
I was asking these questions over and over again because I’m from the same town as the Buffalo shooter.
Raised Amid White Supremacy
Well, not exactly. I’m from a mid-sized city in Eastern Washington, not a small town in Upstate New York. But when you compare the demographics, they’re startlingly similar.
And, even if the towns are on opposite sides of the country, White supremacy knows no bounds. Wherever White people gather into one homogenous mass, hate is bound to follow.
Conklin, New York, the home of the Buffalo shooter, is 91.9% White and 0.6% Black. That profound lack of diversity is hard to beat, and it even might make the residents of Spokane Valley, the town of my birth, yearn for a splash of color.
The Valley, after all, is 84.9% White. But the town just east of the Valley is on another level. That town, Liberty Lake, with its 92.3% White and 0.0% Black population, gives Conklin something to aspire to.
I grew up on the eastside of the Valley in a neighborhood called Greenacres which was saddled between Spokane Valley and Liberty Lake. Given the demographics, it wasn’t easy for me.
Yes, I had the relative privilege of being biracial with lighter skin. But I was still Black. And I was surrounded by unbroken Whiteness. In that world, I felt like I was lost amid an endless, raging sea that threatened to swallow me whole at any moment.
Somehow, I made it out of those rogue waves alive. Of course, I still have to go back whenever I visit my mom. But, she moved out of the Valley a few years ago.
Aerial view of Coeur d'Alene - Photo via Unsplash (Matthew Lancaster)
Now, whenever I visit her, I get the thrill of venturing even farther east beyond Liberty Lake, into the deep waters of Whiteness, until I reach Coeur d’Alene, Idaho: a town known for its gorgeous lake, cozy atmosphere, and hate groups.
Coeur d’Alene has had more than its fair share of hate displays over the years.
In October of 2000, the Aryan Nation paraded through downtown Coeur d’Alene;
In 2012, White supremacists demonstrated on Martin Luther King Jr Day; and
In 2016, the KKK distributed pamphlets to recruit members and inform the world that they were watching.
Ever since the Southern Poverty Law Center began tracking hate groups in 2000, Spokane and Coeur d’Alene have been at the center of a cluster of hate groups.
A sign from a Black Lives Matter protest in Montreal (Unsplash/Rolande PG)
I was raised, quite literally, surrounded by White supremacists. Some of them were quiet. Others were quite vocal.
Like one blonde-haired, blue-eyed white girl who, during a class debate on American intervention in the Syrian Civil War, responded with a firm “Yes,” when I asked her if she thought “American lives were worth more than Syrian lives.” That these American lives were White was implicit to the question and the response.
Of course, all this White supremacy brought with it the baggage of patriarchy, classism, and homophobia – as White supremacy often does. Regarding homophobia, one memory stands out.
When the subject of queer people and gay rights activists being brutalized in Russia somehow came up during a Physics class, one gun-toting white boy said, “at least they do something right.”
I’d love to say these were isolated incidents, but I’d hate to lie. Situations such as these were the recurring theme of my adolescence. To drive the point home, I’ll share a memorable moment of being made to feel subhuman and undeserving of empathy.
During my sophomore year, my social studies teacher had the class debate political topics while we stood on either side of the classroom according to our stance on the topic.
One week, the ever-controversial topic of Obama’s Affordable Care Act came up. How did the classroom divide? All those opposed to Obamacare on one side, and me, alone, on the other.
What unfolded that day was far from a civil debate. It was an entire classroom of teenagers berating another because he dared to believe that – as Black as he and his dad were, and as poor as he and his mom were – his family deserved access to health care simply because they were human.
My classmates couldn’t believe it. How could they?
I’m not sure they even saw me as human.
To them, I was an animal they could pet whenever they wanted. They touched my hair so often, I shaved it off every two weeks – someone still rubbed my head every day.
To them, I was an anomaly. They couldn’t understand how the only Black kid in AP Physics, Calculus, and Chemistry kicked their asses on every test, so they said it was because I was half-white.
To them, I was an object for their angst and anger. They all laughed when a supposed friend threw a Capri-Sun with full force into my genitals at close range and shouted, “Respect the Pouch!”
These White people who demand respect but don’t know how to spell it surrounded me throughout my formative years. And I have no doubt they are the same kind who surrounded the Buffalo shooter. One thing in particular makes me confident of that.
Violence and White Supremacy
In the first days after the attack, I read an article that described how the shooter, with body armor and a high-capacity assault rifle, had intended to “continue his rampage” after the completing the carnage at Tops market. Those words, “continue his rampage,” lodged in my mind because they reminded me of the strangest movie night of my young life.
I was hanging out with my brother and a group of 4 or 5 of his friends, all White boys. I tagged along with them on occasion because I didn’t have many friends of my own (see above for reasons why), and I got along with them well enough.
Plus, I’m sure my Mom nudged me along to get the house to herself.
Whatever the reason, whenever I hung out with them, we would either shoot at each other with plastic pellets while playing airsoft, or we would shoot at each other with virtual bullets while playing Call of Duty.
Poster for the ultra-violent Rampage movie (IMDB)
The theme of violence carried over to movie night. That night, we watched Rampage, a movie about a white boy who loses his mind, dons full body armor, and goes on a mass shooting spree from one end of town to the other. It was full of aestheticized violence and glorified murder that left me disturbed for days.
I had even blocked the movie from memory until I read about the Buffalo shooter’s plans for a rampage of his own. Then, I couldn’t help but wonder if he watched the same movie at some point.
Admittedly, it was a few days before that question rose to mind. I spent the first days after the shooting screaming and crying my way through the grief before I reached a point where I could reflect on the strange similarities between my hometown and the Buffalo shooter’s, not to mention the implications of the attack.
Responding to White Supremacy
As soon as I processed just a portion of my grief, the implications were clear. Given the pervasive danger of White supremacy, along with the other ills of our society, it was clear I needed to do more to create a more just world, that we all could do more to create a better tomorrow.
Somewhat fortunately, I had spent much of Winter and Spring thinking about how I could build a platform to help people, including myself, discover the actions they can take to change the world for the better and act on them.
Then, Buffalo happened, and grief pushed that platform, this platform, to the top of my priority list. I accelerated my timeline, and on June 4th, 2022, the first issue of my new newsletter will drop.
There’s a slim chance you may be familiar with my former newsletter, Climate Chronicle, which lasted all of two weeks before my production schedule fell into disarray but which still saw a third issue released just two short months after its intended release date.
If you are reading this and happen to be one of the fifteen Climate Chronicle subscribers, I assure you, Just Progress will last much longer.
How do I know?
First, because of the lessons I learned from Climate Chronicle. Failure, when met face on, is the greatest teacher you could ask for.
But more importantly, I’ve spent the last seven months building a copywriting business and learning all I can about how to run an effective blog and newsletter, and I’m going to put all those skills to use with this platform.
Drawing from that experience, I’ve crafted a strategy for Just Progress that I continue to refine. With that strategy defined, I have no doubt that this newsletter will endure and keep people coming back because it offers something unique to readers, leaders, and dreams like you.
What does it offer?
As the name suggests, we’ll focus on just progress and nothing else. You won’t catch doomsaying and fearmongering in the pieces published here.
Yes, there’s a lot to be concerned about.
Yes, the world is full of White supremacy, patriarchy, homophobia, and so much else.
Yes, the climate crisis has moved from prologue to opening act.
But.
As adrienne maree brown says, “what you pay attention to grows,” and at Just Progress, we intend to grow movements for justice, regeneration, and liberation, so that’s what we’re going to pay attention to.
That’s what we’re going to lift up.
Of course, we won’t focus on any old kind of progress, just just progress. We’ll focus on the stories of the people, communities, and practices making a just, regenerative, liberated world possible.
Above all, we’ll give you the tools, information, and inspiration you need to exercise those practices, build those communities, and become those people.
When you sign up, you’ll receive a weekly newsletter every Saturday morning which will include:
A short lead-in reflecting on the past week,
A link to an original article featured on the Just Progress blog,
A set of guided reading questions for the Book of the Month,
A curated list of links to relevant news from the week,
A weekly Q&A response to a question submitted by a reader like you, and
An inspirational quote to close out each issue.
Just Progress was born because the world is a messed-up place full of violence, exploitation, and environmental degradation.
Protestors gathered together to demand change and progress (Unsplash/Koshu Kunii)
But it’s also full of people like you and me who want to change that, who are searching for the actions they can take, and who believe they and their community should be able to determine their own destiny.
Just Progress exists to help you and your communities begin to take hold of your destiny and take action to push the world in the direction of justice.
So, what are you waiting for?
Sign up today and jumpstart your journey to justice with Just Progress.
