White Masculinity and the Buffalo Massacre

White Masculinity and the Buffalo Massacre
5/17/2022 by Jackson Katz


Media coverage of the horrific massacre in Buffalo needs to address race and gender.

Mourners light candles at a memorial outside of Tops market on May 16, 2022, in Buffalo, N.Y. A gunman opened fire at the store on Monday, killing 10 people—Roberta A. Drury, 32; Margus D. Morrison, 52; Andre Mackneil, 53; Aaron Salter, 55; Geraldine Talley, 62; Celestine Chaney, 65; Heyward Patterson, 67; Katherine Massey, 72; Pearl Young, 77; and Ruth Whitfield, 86—and wounding another three. (Scott Olson / Getty Images)

The dominant media narrative about the horrific massacre in Buffalo describes it as a racist hate crime perpetrated by an 18-year-old who had been radicalized online through exposure to the ‘great replacement‘ theory. Under this conspiracy theory, which originated in Europe but has become a rallying cry across a wide swath of right-wing America, from neo-Nazis to Fox News, Jews and other shadowy global elites have plotted the demise of white European society through their promotion of multiculturalism and immigration from Global South countries with large non-white populations. Consumed by racist hatred and possibly suffering from still-unidentified mental health challenges, the shooter drove 200 miles from his small and overwhelmingly white rural community to an urban Buffalo neighborhood that he knew was predominantly African American. Armed with an assault rifle that is notoriously easy to obtain in a country awash in guns, he carried out the latest mass killing in a country already numb to such events, leaving in his wake grieving families and yet another community in mourning.
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This is all accurate as far as it goes—but there is more to the story. The killer is not just a young white person. He is a young white man. For us to have any hope of preventing future such incidents, and effectively countering the belief systems and social forces that produced him and so many others, we need to understand the complex intersections of race and gender that lie at the heart of these ongoing tragedies. The alarming increase in right-wing attacks in this country is due to a growing number of aggrieved white men who believe in both the acceptability and necessity of violence to perpetuate white supremacy and protect and defend their (white) people. In his murder manifesto, the Buffalo shooter put it this way: “I carried out the attack,” he wrote, in order to intimidate and physically remove the “replacers,” and to incite violence with the intent of creating an “atmosphere of fear and change” that could “eventually start the war that will save the western world.” Furthermore, he wrote,********* “The time for meekness has long since passed,” as has the time for a democratic solution. “Men of the West must be men once more.”******

Notably, the Buffalo killer thinks of himself in gendered terms. In words that echo those of Brendan Harrison Tarrant, who murdered 51 Muslim worshipers at two mosques in New Zealand in 2019, as well as the Norwegian mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik, who blamed feminism and soft white men for the increasing Islamization of Europe before slaughtering 77 (mostly white) people in 2011, dozens of them teenagers at a summer camp, he wrote:

“The people who are most to blame [for The Great Replacement] are ourselves, European men. Strong men do not get ethnically replaced, strong men do not allow their country to degrade, strong men do not allow their people to die. Weak men have created this situation and strong men are needed to fix it.”

With this explicitly gendered rhetoric available to review online, it is folly for media commentators and analysts to continue to refer to the alleged perpetrator—in this case and others—with gender-neutral terms such as “shooter,” “individual,” “suspect,” “white supremacist” and “terrorist.” There is no gender neutrality in the commission of these acts; they are overwhelmingly committed by white men. Journalists, podcasters and writers who talk and write about them need to acknowledge this. To what end? To understand the ways in which culturally resonant beliefs about “manhood” are implicated in the commission by men of various types of violence—from domestic and sexual violence to school shootings, mass killings, and even incidents of organized political violence such as the January 6 insurrection.

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As our fragile democracy faces growing threats from exactly the sort of right-wing terrorism on display last weekend in Buffalo, we ignore this gendered element at our peril.

https://msmagazine.com/2022/05/17/white-masculinity-buffalo-shooting-racism-sexism-misogyny/