US President Joe Biden will on Tuesday in Buffalo denounce the racism that has killed ten African Americans during a “horrific and senseless mass murder” that has stirred emotions in the country and warn against an ideology he says is tainted ” The Soul of America”.
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The trip to the city in far north New York state was hastily arranged ahead of the president’s scheduled departure Thursday for a major diplomatic tour of South Korea and Japan. “He wants to share (the) grief” of the families and “give consolation,” said his spokeswoman Karine Jean-Pierre on Monday.
Accompanied by his wife Jill Biden, the 79-year-old Democrat will meet with survivors of Saturday’s killing and then deliver a speech in which he describes the massacre for “what it is: terrorism fueled by a hateful and evil ideology, an ideology that is tearing the soul of our country,” said a White House official.
“He will call on Americans to give no sanctuary to hatred and to reject the lies of racial hatred that are radicalizing us, dividing us and leading to the act of racial violence we have seen,” the official continued.
“We must work together to fight the hate that remains a stain on America’s soul,” Biden said Sunday.
The country of 330 million people is plagued by racial hatred and the daily scourge of gun violence. It also suffers from cultural divisions, which turn the smallest meeting of schoolchildren’s parents into a battlefield, and ideological ones, such as the recently reopened abortion issue.
Many executive and legislative initiatives on gun legislation have failed for years, and the NRA lobby remains very influential in the United States.
The organization Gun Violence Archive has counted more than 200 “mass shootings” this year, in which at least four people were injured or killed.
On Saturday, a white man killed 10 African Americans with an assault rifle at a Buffalo convenience store in “a racially motivated hate crime,” authorities said.
The alleged killer, Payton Gendron, 18, wore a camera and broadcast his crime on Twitch, although the platform claimed to have deleted the content “two minutes” after it began broadcasting.
180-page manifesto
Before the massacre, he published a 180-page racist “manifesto” in which media reports linked him to white supremacists and far-right conspiracy theorists, “big surrogate” theories.
“This person came with the goal of killing as many black people as possible,” said African-American Mayor of Buffalo Byron Brown.
Joe Biden decided to start the race for the White House after watching the far-right parade in August 2017 in Charlottesville, South Virginia. A young woman was killed after a neo-Nazi sympathizer drove into a group of anti-racist protesters.
Since his election, he has evoked the “soul” of an America that is essentially united but lacks the levers when it is necessary to take action.
On paper, his party controls Congress, at least until November’s general election, but the Democratic majority is too thin for major reforms.
Joe Biden is also fighting as he has promised to defend the African American community or other minorities in a country that has seen multiple racist killings: Buffalo, El Paso in 2019 (23 dead including mostly Hispanic people), Charleston in 2015 (nine African Americans killed in a church), Pittsburgh (eleven dead in a synagogue in 2018) or Atlanta (eight people including six women of Asian descent in 2021).
The president appointed a government team representing all minorities and pushed Ketanji Brown Jackson, the institution’s first black woman, to the Supreme Court.
In late March, he also signed legislation making lynching a federal crime, passed after more than a century of failed attempts.
But he failed to pass a federal law protecting ballot box access for minorities threatened by Republicans in the Southern states.
Most recently, he sharpened his rhetoric against Republicans who were convinced of the ideas of ex-President Donald Trump.