In the days following the tragic mass shooting in Buffalo, President Biden referred to white supremacy as poison. An investigation is also being launched to examine the social media platforms the alleged shooter used before and during the attack. Now, the NAACP is preparing to propose a plan in other to protect Black Americans from white supremacist violence, the Associated Press reports.
The plan seeks to build a policy approach to curb anti-Black domestic terrorism involving law enforcement, business regulation, and gun control. In particular, the NAACP is calling for the following:
- Holding accountable any corporation that is complicit in the spread of bigotry and racism through news media and on social platforms
- Enacting gun violence prevention measures that keep mass-casualty weapons out of the hands of would-be assailants and reforming police practices so Black Americans experience the same de-escalation tactics often used to apprehend murderous white supremacists peacefully.
- The creation of a “domestic terror watch list” and banning those on the list from legally purchasing firearms.
- Calling for President Biden to take executive action in lieu of the stalled George Floyd Justice in Policing Act before the second anniversary of Floyd’s murder next week.
Regarding media entities, the NAACP named Fox News, the cable news channel it accuses of using airtime “to sow bigotry and racism, create dissension, spread misinformation, and promote conspiracy theories that continually encourage violence.” Color of Change President Rashad Robinson noted that white supremacy has a bigger platform to spread its message than ever before.
“What we’re seeing right now, with the dominance of social media platforms, is an unchecked corporate infrastructure whose incentive structures demand a type of engagement that makes going down the rabbit hole of white supremacy way more likely,” Robinson said. “Until we actually have consequences on the 21st century, technological infrastructure, we will be a place where it’s going to be dragging us back to the 18th and 19th century.”
NAACP President and CEO Derrick Johnson is scheduled to meet with Attorney General Merrick Garland today. Policy and research coordinator for Movement for Black Lives Amara Enyia says it’s essential to see the Buffalo shooting as “evidence of a systemic problem that has grown significantly in recent years.”
“These atrocities that are committed are systems, and they’re systems of a structural and systemic cancer,” Enyia said. “You have this person who is fueled by anti-Black racism and a society whose systems are built on anti-Black racism.
“When we understand that, it can’t come as a surprise that this person would act out in this way, because he reflects a certain worldview that unfortunately undergirded the various systems upon which this society was built. And those of us who are organizers, activists, we’ve been working to try to dismantle these systems because they’ve been harmful.”