In the aftermath of the Buffalo shooting, some residents have been clear in saying they don’t just want political statements condemning the shooting and racism that allegedly motivated it — they want real, structural change, too.
Long before a white gunman allegedly stormed a grocery store in a majority-Black Buffalo neighborhood, killing 10 people, the city bore all the harrowing scars of racial inequality: segregated neighborhoods and concentrated poverty, a yawning gap between Black and white homeownership, a lack of grocery stores in communities of color, and disparate health outcomes.
But segregation and economic inequality are also aided by America’s policymakers, and a fact of life that people in Buffalo have been living with for generations. A 1990 study on the state of Black Buffalo led by Henry Louis Taylor Jr., the director of the Center for Urban Studies at the University at Buffalo School of Architecture and Planning, unearthed high unemployment, high poverty rates, and segregation on the city’s East Side.
One neighborhood close to where the shooting occurred, Cold Springs, was once also described as undesirable for mortgage lending due to the “infiltration” of Black people, according to reporting from WKBW, an ABC affiliate in Buffalo, and maps created by the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation. The color-coded maps entrenched segregation, made it so that Black people could not afford to become homeowners, constrained wealth creation, and subjected them to a more predatory rental market, Taylor said.
“They see white neighborhoods and the quality of white neighborhoods as the work of white people,” Taylor said. “Then they say, ‘Those neighborhoods over there used to be great when white people lived in them, but when white people left and Black people moved in they messed them up.’ That’s the type of racist type of thinking that occurs.”“I mean, it’s a kind of contradictory view that doesn’t make sense,” Taylor said.
To be sure, Republicans have pushed back on assertions that their rhetoric could be somehow linked to the Buffalo shooter’s motivations, according to the New York Times. Wyoming Republican Rep. Liz Cheney, however, wrote on Twitter TWTR, +1.19% that “the House GOP leadership has enabled white nationalism, white supremacy, and anti-semitism.”
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