There comes a time in the dynamic evolution of contradictory forces when a critical mass is reached, a moment when the tension between the two is so high that the only resolution is the negation of the one by the other. America is at such a moment now. White supremacy, America's original sin, cannot not go on like before. What happened at a Buffalo supermarket in May changed the trajectory, but not in the direction the young white supremacist hell-bent on killing as many African-Americans as possible had intended. Like other racist mass murderers before him, this self-proclaimed fascist believed his cold-blooded executions of Blacks would accelerate a race war in which whites and white supremacy will emerge victorious over the Untermenschen seeking to replace them. Instead the opposite outcome is beginning to emerge from the racist slaughter in Buffalo. Anti-racism is gaining strength in both theory and praxis, but it has a very long way to go before the scourge of racism is neutralized, let alone negated altogether.
One necessary step in that direction is brutal honesty about racism in America. In the wake of the horrific mass murders in Buffalo, President Biden issued an official statement from the White House in which he stated "A racially motivated hate crime is abhorrent to the very fabric of this nation. Any act of domestic terrorism is antithetical to everything we stand for in America." That assertion is a blatant lie, a classic case of denial; and, as such, it is part of the problem. This is no time to sugar-coat, let alone deny, the abhorrent racism which has been embedded in the very DNA of the American experience, one which has never institutionalized full equality for non-whites and repeatedly generated movements to rid this land of them. Though efforts to send freed slaves back to Africa largely failed, sending nearly the entire indigenous population to eternity did not. This is no time to ignore state-sponsored genocide of Native Americans; the state-tolerated lynching of thousands of African Americans; the state-endorsed racist immigration policies; the state-legislated expulsion of the Chinese population; the state-run syphilis experiments on African American men and forced fertilization of Puerto Rican women; etc. ad nauseam. This is a time for brutal honesty about racism in America; and a time to repent for it.
The racist ideologies behind such abhorrent practices by the state are variations of what is now commonly called Replacement Theory. Long before the French racist Renaud Camus wrote about Le Grand Remplacement in 2012, a racist ideology embraced by the Buffalo mass murderer as well as scores of right-wing politicians and journalists, its key thesis was found in other popular publications. In his 1978 novel, The Turner Diaries, William Pierce favorably projects a race war leading to the extermination of people of color. In his widely acclaimed 1921 book, The Rising Tide of Color, another American white supremacist, Lothrop Stoddard, warns the nation and world about the growing threat inferior races, people of color, pose to whites. Among the book's most ardent enthusiasts was US President Harding, and one of its most racist implementations in policy was the notorious Immigration Act of 1924.
The legacy of institutionalized racism must end and be replaced with institutionalized anti-racism, which is precisely what Critical Race Theory attempts to do in the field of education. But that is not nearly enough. Institutionalized anti-racism has either remained woefully absent or terribly anemic. The time has come for a a profound qualitative change, a paradigm shift, in policy in all our institutions, especially the criminal justice system. The institutionalized racism of the past must be replaced by institutionalized anti-racism in the future. For as the great African American scholar, W.E.B. Du Bois, wrote in the depths of the Jim Crow era: "Either the United States will destroy ignorance, or ignorance will destroy the United States".