WASHINGTON (CN) — A man whose 86-year-old mother was killed during the mass shooting last month at a grocery store in Buffalo, New York, delivered an impassioned speech to the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday, telling its members they should resign if they cannot get domestic terrorism legislation over the finish line.
"I ask every one of you to imagine the faces of your mothers as you look at mine and ask yourself: 'Is there nothing that we can do?'" Garnell Whitfield Jr. said.
"Because if there is nothing, then, respectfully, senators, you should yield your positions of authority and influence to others that are willing to lead on this issue," Whitfield continued. "The urgency of the moment demands no less."
The bill in question would encourage the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security to cooperate with each other and with the FBI on domestic terrorism cases and extremist prevention work. It already passed by the House in a near-party line vote days after the May 14 shooting in Buffalo, but the legislation is unlikely to gain any ground in the Senate, which failed to start debate on the bill last month.
"We're taught to love even our enemies, but our enemies don't love us," Whitfield chastised the legislative body this morning "What are we supposed to do with all our anger and all of our pain? Expect us to continue to just forgive and forget over and over again?
"And what are you doing?" he asked. "You're elected to protect us, to protect our way of life."
Whitfield's mother, Ruth, was among 10 people, most of them Black, who were killed by an 18-year-old white supremacist at Tops Supermarket, a grocery store in a predominantly Black neighborhood of Buffalo.
Police said the shooter specifically targeted the store, driving three hours from his home, to kill as many Black people as possible in the attack he livestreamed online.
Online, the shooter ranted about “replacement theory,” a conspiracy nurtured by the right wing that says white power and the white race generally face an existential threat from the growing population of nonwhite people in the United States. It’s a belief oft described as fringe despite dating back to the early days of America when white people stoked fear about what it would mean for their monopoly on power if Black and nonwhite people gained freedoms such as emancipation, reproductive autonomy or the right to vote.
Whitfield told Senate lawmakers Tuesday that the racist views of the Buffalo gunman make plain the country's responsibility to act. “This should have never happened. ... This wasn’t an act of God. This was the act of a person and he did not act alone," the man spoke through tears in his testimony. "He was radicalized by white supremacists. His anger and hatred were metastasized like a cancer by people with big microphones screaming that Black people were going to take away their jobs and opportunities.”
Authorities apprehended the Buffalo shooter at the scene. While the Justice Department and FBI are still investigating whether to charge him with federal hate crime violations, Payton Gendron is charged with domestic terrorism motivated by hate and 10 counts of first-degree murder. He has pleaded not guilty to the charges.
President Joe Biden swiftly denounced the massacre as "straightforward terrorism" in a speech where he condemned white supremacy as "a poison" running through America and American politics.
Less than 24 hours after the Buffalo shooting, there was a racist shooting at a Taiwanese church in Laguna Woods, California, that left one person dead and five injured. And though law enforcement officials say the man who carried out this shooting had harbored a hatred of Taiwanese people, no hate crime charges have been filed in this case to date.
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