Racist hate continues to rot and destroy

Ohio-based anti-racist trainer Simone Crawley has spent her career educating others about the menacing consequences of white supremacy, racism, and oppression. On Saturday, Crawley’s grandmother, 86-year-old Ruth Whitfield, was one of the 10 victims killed in the terrorist attack on a Buffalo supermarket. She was shot to death by a young man consumed with hate.

“How do you dedicate your life to fighting bigotry, trying to educate White people on their role in ending this blight on humanity all for it to take your own grandmother??!!” wrote Crawley on LinkedIn in a heart-wrenching post that has received over 21,000 responses and several thousand messages of sympathy and condolences from around the world.

“I feel like everything I’ve ever done in my career was completely pointless! I know that it should make me want to double down and be proof of why it’s such important work but I promise you I feel the opposite,” wrote Crawley.

Her anguish and hopelessness at the senseless loss of her precious grandmother are understandable and disheartening. These feelings have become far too common among communities that are consistently threatened by racism — whether from those espousing farright ideologies, or individuals and institutions intentionally or inadvertently upholding systems of discrimination and exclusion.

It often feels that no amount of anti-racism education will work while online spaces continue to host communities of like-minded individuals sharing dangerous concepts, including those involving conspiratorial fears of being replaced by members of “outgroups.”

Prof. Matthew Williams, director of HateLab at Cardiff University in Wales, has pointed out that addressing the virulence of extreme hate online has simply not been a priority for social media platforms because “there’s no money in stopping hate.”

Without an imperative to address this phenomena, its danger only grows as a variety of external factors create optimal conditions, including “a failing economy or divisive politics.”

“When combined with other influences like negative norm and value transmission from peers, a lack of daily face-to-face contact with the outgroup, and gradual exposure to subversive subcultures and fringe online media, the seeds of prejudice can rapidly germinate into hate,” wrote Williams in his 2021 book, “The Science of Hate.”

If social media platforms are failing to stem this tide of bigotry, who then can Black and racialized communities trust to prevent hate-motivated terrorists from killing them?

How can it be the police? Over 223,000 people in Canada reported being victims of hate crimes in Statistics Canada’s General Social Survey in 2019, yet police-reported figures are less than 1 per cent of that.

Racialized communities are expected to trust law enforcement agencies even when evidence demonstrates systemic racism and bias among some police officers.

Last week, a report presented to an Ottawa Police Services Board committee found that Black people were five times more likely to be on the receiving end of police force. Middle Eastern people were 2.4 times more likely and Indigenous people also faced higher rates. The report was the first of its kind since Ontario required police forces to collect race-based data around use of force back in 2020. All of this takes a heavy toll on young and old.

“Pray for my soul,” concluded Crawley in her post. “This is the type of moment where you find yourself at a moral crossroad. You can choose to turn pain into purpose and vibrate higher in love or you can turn a corner and meet these people in depths of hell and go tit for tat. I am paralyzed at that crossroad right now and the only thing holding me up is a phrase my grandmother wrote to me in a letter ‘we fall down, but we get up.’ ”

Getting back up is sometimes very hard to do.