By Tammi Thompson // Racism // EEW Magazine Online

Former Buffalo Fire Commissioner Garnell Whitfield Jr., who lost his 86-year-old mother, Ruth Whitfield, when a white gunman, 18-year-old Payton Gendron, massacred 10 Black people in a racist rampage at a Buffalo supermarket, is struggling with the notion of forgiveness.

“We’re not just hurting. We’re angry. We’re mad. This shouldn’t have happened. 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 love even our enemies,” Whitfield said at a news conference with civil rights attorney Ben Crump and others.

But holding on to faith in God and striving to adhere to the Bible’s principles in daily life is not easy in the face of pure hatred and racism.

“You expect us to keep doing this over and over and over again — over again, forgive and forget,” he continued. “While people we elect and trust in offices around this country do their best not to protect us, not to consider us equal.”

Most of the victims at Tops Friendly Market on Jefferson in Buffalo’s inner city were elders, a distinction that historically carries weight in Black communities. The same was true for several of the nine Black people killed in 2015 in a racist attack at a historic Black church in Charleston, South Carolina by White Supremacist Dylann Roof.

At a bond hearing days after the attack, some of the victims’ family members offered Roof forgiveness and said they were praying for him, even as they described the pain of their losses.

Such displays of mercy and kindness amid injustice are often taken for granted and even expected of Black people, particularly because historically, we are among the most religious.  But Whitfield, like so many Black Christians today, are experiencing forgiveness fatigue and are tired of turning the other cheek.

They wonder, when will justice come? When will racism end? When will Black people feel safe in America? When do we get to stop forgiving White Supremacist terrorists?

Beyond forgiveness, Whitfield, whose mother was killed after making her daily visit to her husband of 68 years in a nursing home, also has something less spiritual and more practical to consider: “How do we tell him that she’s gone? Much less that she’s gone at the hands of a White Supremacist? Of a terrorist? An evil person who is allowed to live among us?”

Authorities said that in addition to the 10 Black people killed, three people were wounded: one Black, two white.

Gendron planned to keep killing if he had escaped the scene, the police commissioner said Monday, as the possibility of federal hate crime or domestic terror charges loomed.

The gunman, who had crossed the state to target people at Tops, had talked about shooting up another store as well, Buffalo Police Commissioner Joseph Gramaglia told CNN.

“He was going to get in his car and continue to drive down Jefferson Avenue and continue doing the same thing,” the commissioner said.

The commissioner’s account was similar to portions of a racist 180-page document, purportedly written by Gendron, that said the assault was intended to terrorize all nonwhite, non-Christian people and get them to leave the country. Federal authorities were working to confirm the document’s authenticity.

Gendron traveled about 200 miles from his home in Conklin, New York, to commit the attack, police said. Authorities said he wielded an AR-15-style rifle, wore body armor and used a helmet camera to livestream the bloodbath on the internet.

The bloodshed in Buffalo was the deadliest in a wave of weekend shootings, including at a California church and a Texas flea market.