'If mass shooter Payton Gendron was Black, the police would have shot him': Buffalo's East Side residents respond to mass shooting

This is the sad reality of the so-called 'white privilege' even murderers can benefit from it

By Edward Era Barbacena

You don’t need to tell the residents of the mostly-Black East Side neighborhood of Buffalo, New York, where 10 people were killed and three were wounded in a mass shooting at a grocery store, that their city is deeply racially divided. Eleven of the 13 people shot were Black.

Payton Gendron, the white man accused of the mass shooting, targeted that particular grocery store because, one, he knew it was in a predominantly Black area, and two, it was in a food desert. Tops Friendly Markets is the only grocery store in the East Side neighborhood. Gendron knew the store would be busy and that its patrons would be mostly Black.

Gendron drove around 200 miles from his home in Conklin, New York, to the East Side neighborhood to investigate the area in preparation for his murderous act.

Donna Davis, 62, told the Los Angeles Times she was outraged by how the police treated Gendron.

“If he was Black, they would have shot him… Instead, police officers showed up and begged him to surrender? After shooting 13 people? And he’s armed?” Davis said.

Gendron, 18, planned to continue his shooting spree, according to Buffalo Police Commissioner Joseph Gramaglia. In an accounting of the teen’s reported 180-page, hate-filled diatribe, he outlined his white supremacist conspiracy views—often espoused by some GOP officials and many Fox News hosts—of the “great replacement theory,” a fear-based ideology that justifies killing innocent Black and brown people who may one day replace his ridiculous white ass.

Garnell Whitfield lost his 86-year-old mother, Ruth Whitfield, in the mass shooting. At a recent news conference, Whitfield described his grief and anger at a nation that continues to allow Black people to be erased at the hands of violent, white racists.

“We’re not just hurting. We’re angry, we’re mad—this shouldn’t have happened,” Whitfield said. “We do our best to be good citizens, to be good people. We believe in God, we trust him. We treat people with decency, and we even love our enemies, and you expect us to keep doing this over and over again, forgive and forget, while the people we elect and trust in offices around this country do their best not to protect us, not to consider us equal, not to love us back. What are we supposed to do with all this anger and all this pain?” 

“We have to define it as such. We can’t sugarcoat it, we can’t try to explain it away by talking about mental health. No, this was an act of domestic terrorism perpetrated by a young white supremacist. There’s no question about his intentions,” Crump said. “And just like America’s response to terrorism, America needs to respond to this act of bigotry, racism and hate as a terrorist act.”

Dr. Henry Louis Taylor Jr., director of the Center for Urban Studies and a professor of urban and regional planning at the University at Buffalo School of Architecture and Planning, wrote a follow-up study last year to one he’d prepared in 1990 documenting the state of Black residents in Buffalo. “Black Buffalo did not progress. Everything changed, but everything remained the same,” the new report reads.

“When we looked back, the city leaders never addressed the core problems facing the African American community,” Taylor said in a 2021 interview with UB Now. He added that although some changes had been made since 1990—like new development, for example—nothing had been done to address issues facing Buffalo’s Black residents.

“When we took a look at Black Buffalo 31 years ago, we felt the community was on a downward trend; we were increasingly locked in the economic basement,” Taylor said.

“When we looked at these trend lines some 31 years later, we see no reversal. … We see us not getting closer to any of the goals and objectives that we outlined. We see that with some of the critical metrics—the poverty rate, household income, homeownership, employment—not only is there no progress, there’s no change. When we say there’s literally no change, we’re saying that in a lot of ways the situation is more entrenched, more solidified. And that implies that breaking the downward cycle is going to be even more difficult and complex than it was before,” 

Taylor added.

Dwayne Jones, senior pastor at Mt. Aaron Baptist Church and a former deputy sheriff, told the Times he’s been unsuccessfully trying to get another grocery store on the East Side for a long time.  

“And that’s systemic racism itself… That we only have one supermarket on the East Side,” he said.