I spent eight years (2011-2019) in Rochester, New York, a scant 60 miles east of Buffalo, NY where our nation’s most recent mass shooting occurred yesterday afternoon. I preached and lectured in churches all over Buffalo dozens of times. My son graduated from the State University of New York (SUNY) Buffalo. He shopped in the TOPS grocery store where this mass shooting occurred. This is a reminder to me, and to everyone that the hatred that so often results in gun violence can occur ANYWHERE at ANY TIME and can strike down ANYBODY!
The 18-year-old young man who shot thirteen people and killed ten of them drove over 200 miles from a 97.5% white community called Conklin, NY to a pre-selected African American community in Buffalo, NY because he was driven by the Fox News/Tucker Carlson-propelled “replacement theory.” This theory asserts that the white population majority in the United States is being replaced by non-white people such as African Americans, Hispanics, Asians, and Jews.
What happened in Buffalo, New York at a TOPS grocery store is the natural extension of the hysteria that the “replacement theory” is causing in this country. Remember the chant at the Unite the Right Rally in Charlottesville, VA where young white men chanted, “Jews will not replace us”? According to this theory, white supremacy is under assault. Adherents to this theory believe extreme actions must be taken to prevent this “replacement” from occurring.
The real trigger for this theory was the election of Barack Obama in 2008 and again in 2012. That was an event that many white people never imagined and that many never accepted. The election of Donald Trump in 2016 was an almost predictable reaction to a black man living and working in the White House.
The venom directed by white, Southern senators to Ketanji Brown Jackson during her confirmation hearings for the United States Supreme Court was a very public expression of white resentment about the emergence of a new generation of African Americans who are steadily moving into positions of power at the local, county, state, and federal levels. Ted Cruz of Texas and Josh Hawley of Missouri probably thought they should be serving on the court instead of that African American woman. The hundreds of voter restriction and voter suppression laws — even here in Ohio — are part of this resistance to changes in the demography of this country.
The shooter in Buffalo embodies the belief held by many white people that every step forward by non-whites is a step backward for them. The concept of a multi-faith, multi-cultural, multi-racial society seems to be absent from the worldview of those who embrace the replacement theory.
This rings hollow from the very ethnic group that used massive amounts of force to “replace” Native Americans and indigenous groups who were the inhabitants of North America before European settlers arrived in the 15th and 16th centuries. I live in Cuyahoga County and I was born and raised in the City of Chicago. Those locales do not bear Anglo-Saxon names. They reflect a culture that has been “replaced” by white people who believed they have the right to take what belongs to others and limit access to any benefits only to themselves.
There will not be, and there cannot be “liberty and justice for all” as long as hate-filled people armed with assault rights and fueled with the assumption of white supremacy believe that only they should enjoy the blessings and benefits of our great country.
There is a solution to this problem found in Jeremiah 31:33, where God wants to replace the laws written on books and tablets of stone that we seem unwilling to obey, and write God’s laws on our hearts so that our behaviors and our values can change from the inside-out. That is the replacement theory I want to preach about as I move between pulpit and public square.
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The Rev. Marvin A. McMickle, pastor emeritus of Antioch Baptist Church in Cleveland, Ohio, retired in 2019 as president of Colgate Rochester Crozer Divinity School in Rochester, New York, where he had served since 2011.
