The Cost of a Blind Eye
On Saturday, May 14, a gunman opened fire in a supermarket in Buffalo, New York killing ten people and wounding three others.
When I got that notification on my phone, I was upset but not surprised. Shootings are not a rarity in a country with ineffectual gun control, but this particular shooting had a unique streak that separated it from many other shootings. The gunman, a white supremacist, specifically targeted people of color in a supermarket belonging to a predominantly black neighborhood. He violently took the lives of people for the simple crime of being a different color than he was. Learning this information deepened the hurt I felt. Shootings will always be tragic. But witnessing a mass hate crime yet again while people will claim to my face that we live in a post-racial society is a sharp stab in the back.
The modern American political landscape is filled with false assurances that racism is a thing of the past. Claims of discrimination on the basis of race, they claim, are based on non-issues forged by a generation who scours everything looking for something new to be offended by. Hence, holding white people accountable for things that are claimed to be racist, but in actuality are not, is actually “racist” to white people. Through this logic, countless have turned a blind eye to the facts: racism is deeply ingrained into our society. It affects how people of color move through the world, and how they are viewed and treated.
In the aftermath of the Buffalo shooting, I see responses that are familiar. People mourning, people being angry at the fact that racism has taken the lives of innocent people once again, people actively defending the shooter, and people who simply turn a blind eye to the racism that fueled this crime. The Buffalo shooting is not the first racism-fueled shooting, and it will not be the last. As thoughts and prayers continue to flood our media, it’s important to acknowledge the dogmas that made it possible for something like this to happen. Racism is deeply ingrained in our society, and we must start actively acknowledging that. When we ignore the failures of our political, socioeconomic, and cultural norms, we see the cost of a blind eye— the lives of innocent people of color.
Illustration by Katheryne Menendez
