With shock, rage, grief and solidarity, PPT stands with Black communities mourning the racist, white supremacist mass shootings at Tops Friendly Market in Buffalo, NY. This carefully planned and executed mass murder is directly linked to the increasingly hateful racist rhetoric spewed by an emboldened hard right that is allowed to proliferate through both social and traditional media. We mourn the 10 lives lost and the families and communities forever traumatized by heinous event. We hold Black communities across the US and Canada close through this incomprehensible grief that compounds centuries of pain and profoundly unfair burden of immeasurable resilience. We echo this reminder; racism, white supremacy, the odious “great replacement theory” are not mental illnesses – they are skillfully messaged, well-funded and hateful world views that are stoked by increasingly powerful hard-right media outlets, public figures and most worryingly, elected officials across the world, including here in Canada. What is growing in the US is also growing here and the movements are linked. The Ontario Tech University’s Centre on Hate, Bias and Extremism defines right wing extremism as “a loose movement, characterized by a racially, ethnically, and sexually defined nationalism. This nationalism is often framed in terms of white power, and is grounded in xenophobic and exclusionary understandings of the perceived threats posed by such groups as non-whites, Jews, immigrants, homosexuals and feminists.”  Recent Canadian examples of right-wing extremism include the Toronto van attack that explicitly targeted and murdered women, the murder of a Muslim family in London Ontario, the funding and organizing behind the so-called “trucker” “protests” in Ottawa, the hateful and verbally assaultive interaction a group of white supremacists in Peterborough had with Jagmeet Singh – Canada’s first racialized leader of a federal party, the sharply rising levels of hate crimes and the funding attempting to grow the anti-choice movement in this country. At PPT, we are are committed to always come together and resist right wing extremism and white supremacy in all the ways that we are able. Today our thoughts are with the ten lost lives, those wounded and their families. May they rest in power, and may their memory be a revolution.

As we mourn, we demand that our elected officials immediately respond to the calls for action from communities impacted by the violence of white supremacy and right wing extremism, and to the policy and programmatic recommendations as outlined in this 2021 report scanning online right wing extremism in Canada to ensure that such reprehensible hatred is prevented, identified, rooted out and held strongly accountable in this country.  https://www.isdglobal.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/ISDs-An-Online-Environmental-Scan-of-Right-wing-Extremism-in-Canada.pdf                                          

There are many Black-led organizations in Buffalo responding to this tragedy through care for the Black community in Buffalo at this time. If, to show your solidarity at this time, you would like to donate, please consider giving to Black Love Resists in the Rust https://blackloveresistsintherust.org/ or Rooted in Love https://www.feedbuffalo.org/”