Power  /  Q&A

Making Sense of the Racist Mass Shooting in Buffalo

An expert on the white-power movement and the “great replacement” theory puts the act of terror in context.

When people such as Tucker Carlson try to do the “respectable” version of this, they often say, Oh, we’re worried about illegal immigration, and they pretend that they’re not saying something quite as bad as what they mean. It’s almost always about immigrants, not African Americans. I assumed that was because it would be hard to pretend that African Americans haven’t been here for a long time. Is this shooter’s focus on African Americans notable in any way?

The “great replacement” comes from that novel, “The Camp of the Saints,” which is specifically about the threat of immigration. So it comes up a lot in the manifesto of the Christchurch shooter, who was focussed on immigrants as his victims. This document that has been circulated that we believe to be the manifesto of the shooter in Buffalo is largely drawn from the Christchurch manifesto. The anti-immigration rhetoric is sort of being used as the frame for an act on African Americans.

In the past few years, we’ve had a series of mass attacks employing this ideology on different kinds of victim groups: the Tree of Life shooting in Pittsburgh, the El Paso shooting of Latino folks at a Walmart. The Christchurch shooting targeted Muslim congregations in New Zealand. The Charleston shooting by Dylann Roof targeted African Americans in a church. All of those gunmen share an ideology. They are using the same framing language in their manifestos. They’re all identifiable as white-power gunmen. This is a movement with a long history.

When you say “movement,” does that imply a structure or something with leadership?

When I say “movement,” what I’m talking about is a set of groups and actors who are working with a common ideology and with interpersonal connections toward the same end. As a historian, I don’t think we’ll be able to see the interconnections for at least another ten years. But there’s good reason to think that they are there because this movement works the same way now as it has since the late nineteen-seventies, and there’s been no decisive change in how we’ve prosecuted or surveilled the movement. There’s no reason for it to change its method of organizing.

What we’ve seen in the earlier period is broad-based interconnection of money; weapons; exchange of ideas; travel between groups; people with multiple memberships; people changing memberships; and social connections such as marriages, churches, counselling services, picking each other up from the airport, staying with each other when they come through town. It’s a deeply networked social movement. It’s been using the Internet in one way or another since the nineteen-eighties. It’s the same movement that has perpetrated a long string of racially motivated attacks, including the Oklahoma City bombing. And we’ve never had a moment of coming to terms with it or of dedicating sufficient resources to stopping its activity.