Local leaders have often invoked the city’s invented “good neighbors” moniker to promote an ethos of gritty unity in Buffalo. In the aftermath of a racially motivated mass shooting at a Tops grocery store, which left ten African Americans dead, the current mayor of Buffalo, Byron Brown, made the familiar plea, saying, “We’re standing strong as a community and working to not let this horrible act of hate detract from us being a loving, warm, welcoming community. Buffalo is known as the City of Good Neighbors, nationally and internationally.” When New York’s governor, Kathy Hochul, joined President Joe Biden to speak in the city to express condolences and present her plan to prevent these kinds of attacks in the future, she made similar gestures. She compared Buffalo to Scranton, Pennsylvania, where Biden hails from. Hochul said, “Buffalo’s a little bit like Scranton, little bigger version of Scranton. You know, Scranton. You live a long time and you love your community, but you get knocked down a little bit and don’t quite get the respect sometimes as other parts of your state do.” She went on to say that, as a result, “there’s something called Buffalove. It’s a combination of the words ‘Buffalo’ and ‘love.’ We call it Buffalove.”
The effort to console and empathize can just as easily distort and conceal. Buffalo is not like Scranton, which has never had a population that was more than eight per cent African American. It is more akin to Philadelphia or Newark, with a large Black population constituting more than a third of the city. As in those cities, there is severe residential segregation, which keeps Black and white residents living in different social, economic, and political realities. In 1993, a writer in the local daily, the Buffalo News, compared Main Street, the central dividing line of the city, to the Berlin Wall, “dividing rich from poor, the haves from the have-nots.” Buffalo is one of the poorest cities in the country, and nearly half of children living in the city are poor. But the hardship that defines the city is not evenly shared. A disproportionate number of the have-nots live on the East Side of Buffalo, where more than three-quarters of the city’s African American residents live.