We shouldn’t have to live and grieve like this, but here we are again. Here we are all too often, our heads in our hands, mourning the loss of lives cut short by a racist killer and witnessing a community rocked to its core. What we saw in Buffalo was a clear and direct attack on Black people. Every person who had their life violently taken away from them on May 14, 2022 was Black; the target of a white man carrying out a white supremacist agenda.
We send our condolences to each of the families whose loved ones were killed and harmed.
Please consider supporting folks directly impacted in Buffalo:
Donate to Our Cause – Rooted In Love, Inc
FEED BUFFALO
Black Love Resists In The Rust
(Resources compiled by: @J Coley on Twitter)
We grieve alongside everyone across the country and the world impacted by these murders. Moments like this remind us that grief and anger rightly belong in our movement spaces. (Read: Grief Belongs in Social Movements. Can We Embrace It?)
But even as we grieve, check in, and make time and space for ourselves and others, we also heed the words of Kali Akuno (Cooperation Jackson) who reminds us to organize, not just agonize. (Watch: Kali Akuno: Organizing for revolution, not crisis avoidances.)
This cycle of crises we find ourselves navigating isn’t a chance occurrence. We’re here because white supremacists and the conservative right are serious about consolidating and wielding power to terrorize Black communities and other communities of color. Efforts (decades and centuries in the making) to indoctrinate, legislate, and adjudicate toward a vision of white supremacy are taking hold all around us.
Legislative attacks on trans folks, the quest to eliminate honest conversations about race from schools (painting Critical Race Theory as a boogeyman), the violent targeting of Asian and Pacific Islander people, attacks on reproductive rights and bodily autonomy, murders of Black people, climate chaos… an intersectional lens demands that we examine how it’s all connected.
We need to be serious about building power and get real about what we’re up against. (Read: Nonprofit and philanthropy: Stop with the BS and get serious about fighting white supremacy.)
We need to see white supremacist fascism for the very real, very organized, and well-resourced threat that it is. We’re at the beginning of a long turning point, and it’s up to all of us to forcefully dismantle white supremacy and turn the tide toward people’s power, dignity, belonging, and justice.
In solidarity,
The CompassPoint Team
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