Hatred takes centre stage yet again

The methodical evil of it nearly beggars belief.

Ruth Whitfield, 86, mother of Buffalo’s retired fire commissioner, had just been to a nursing home to visit her husband. The days were few that she didn’t see him. “She was his angel,” her son says.

On the way home on Saturday afternoon, Mrs. Whitfield stopped to get something to eat at the Tops Friendly Mart in a city that is considered neighbour and friend to many in southern Ontario.

There, Mrs. Whitfield encountered an 18-year-old man with hate for Black people in his heart and weapons in his hands.

By the time he surrendered to police, 10 people were murdered, three more injured.

It took a special depth of malice to carry out a terror attack in such a calculated manner as hit Buffalo.

The young man had driven 320 kilometres to reach Mrs. Whitfield’s neighbourhood. He had researched local demographics to locate a largely Black area. He had scouted the scene. He livestreamed the beginning of his attack.

He reportedly left a long statement outlining a racist ideology founded on the belief that the United States should belong only to white people and that others — so-called “replacers” — should be eliminated by force or terror.

This so-called “great replacement theory” is rooted in aggrieved, racist paranoia that alleges a plot to diminish the status and influence of white people. Adherents loathe immigration, fret about demographics that report white people having lower birth rates than other populations, and imagine that Jews are somehow behind the campaign.

The theory is promulgated on the far-right reaches of the internet, while variations are served up to conservative audiences by broadcasters growing rich on the fomenting of grievance and rage. In a few short years “replacement theory” has moved from the most extreme fringe to taint the mainstream of American political life.

To her credit, Liz Cheney, a Republican member of the U.S. House of Representatives, acknowledged her own party’s responsibility in the American iteration of this lunacy.

“The House GOP leadership has enabled white nationalism, white supremacy and antisemitism,” she said in a tweet. “History has taught us that what begins with words ends in far worse. GOP leaders must renounce and reject these views and those who hold them.”

It’s likely that the shooter was radicalized in the same way as terrorists of various stripes who have loosed their hate around the world, including in normally peaceable realms such as Norway, New Zealand and Canada, too. Through immersion in a twisted online world.

We may be tempted to think this is more an American problem than Canadian. But bear in mind that homegrown right-wing activists like Pat King, one of the organizers of the Ottawa trucker protest, are known to espouse replacement theory. This week that came back to haunt Conservative leadership front-runner Pierre Poilievre, who previously has been supportive of the trucker protest, and who had to publicly condemn both King and the conspiracy theory to distance himself.

Ruth Whitfield was 12 years old when president Harry Truman ended segregation in the U.S. armed services, 18 when segregation in schools was ended with the Brown v. Board of Education ruling, and 19 when Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a white person on a bus in Birmingham, Ala.

She was 27 when Martin Luther King gave his “I have a dream” speech and almost 30 when Congress passed president Lyndon Johnson’s landmark Voting Rights Act. She was 72 when an African-American family first occupied the White House.

The social change in her lifetime was painfully slow. Yet shrunken souls see even that grudging progress as a threat.

Not for the first time, the fear and fury poured into a young heart and mind has played out in mass murder in America.

There is so much that needs to change — in societies abroad and at home, in political parties, social media head offices, in individual hearts. For now, we grieve with Buffalo, with loved ones of the victims and for our hate-blighted humanity.