Though Buffalo leaders took pains to point out the suspected gunman came from hundreds of miles away to carry out the attack, pretending that the horrendous attack was something new, locals know clearly that racism is something that has been going on for their entire lifetime, local newspaper The Buffalo News said in an online article published Monday, Xinhua reported.
Last month, a heavily armed 18-year-old white man shot and killed 10 people and injured three others at a local supermarket, 11 of them African Americans, according to local enforcement officials.
Behind this hate crime lie decades of racist policies, incidents and "sometimes outright violence that, according to some in the African American community, have marked life for some Blacks here," the article said.
"State and federal authorities say dozens of hate crimes have been reported in this area in recent years, though researchers caution that such incidents are widely underreported," it added.
As Buffalo seeks to heal from this heart-wrenching wound, "the city must reckon with its own legacy of racism," it warned.
"This is a systemic and generational problem that we have in Western New York," the article quoted India Walton, a community activist and former Buffalo mayoral candidate, as saying.