I still can't breathe...I am not okay Rev. Leah Burns May 16 It is Ms. Viola Fletcher…108-year-old survivor of the 1921 Tulsa, Oklahoma mass murder of black people by white people, who is quoted as saying of that tragic event:
Dismantling Racism
“They were killing all the black people.”
Well, as has happened before, Black people were killed on Saturday, May 14, 2022. The accounts that I have read report that a heavily armed, young white man entered a grocery store in a predominantly Black neighborhood in Buffalo, New York and opened fire. By the time the shooter surrendered a short time later, he had shot a total of 13 people, most of them Black, leaving 10 of them dead. The victims were senior citizens, retired law enforcement, churchgoers, grandparents, brothers, and sisters. The police allowed this man to “peacefully” surrender. They didn’t stomp, or choke-out, or beat down, or pistol whip, or shoot him in the back. Unlike the standard treatment of just about any black or brown “suspect,” they calmly, cuffed him and escorted him to a patrol car.
Prior to the crime, the shooter wrote a 180-page manifesto espousing “Great Replacement Theory (GRT)” and posted it online. In his post, he left no doubt that he intended to target Black people. He even painted the word "n***er" on the assault rifle he used. In Jemar Tisby’s insightful book, The Color of Compromise: The Truth about the American Church’s Complicity in Racism, the author discusses the “complicity” of white Christians in the racism that has plagued this country and its institutions for centuries. He said it is easy to point to slave traders, plantation owners, and Klan members as the “real racists.” But even though only a small number of people actually commit acts of violence in the name of racism, the ideas that lead to such acts are co-signed by the masses in their silence.
