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Melissa-Harris Perry: This is The Takeaway. I'm Melissa Harris-Perry, thanks for being with us today. We're revisiting some important conversations all this week as 2022 comes to a close.

 To start off, we're beginning with one of the most difficult stories we covered all year, a deadly shooting by a white supremacist in Buffalo, New York back in May.

Zeneta Everhart: We do not talk about race and racism in this country. We talk about it, but the people at the table are speaking different languages and no one understands each other. They're not getting to any solutions. The talk is just talk, it's not solution-based talk.

Melissa-Harris Perry: That was Zeneta Everhart mother of Zaire Goodman, a 20-year-old employee of Tops Friendly Markets in East Buffalo, New York. During the attack at the grocery store in May, Goodman was shot in the neck, but survived the deadly massacre carried out by a white supremacist gunman. The point made by Everhart is key. We've heard the official response to acts of racial terror before.

"This is not who we are as a nation. We are better than this." Elected officials, including President Joe Biden and New York Governor Kathy Hochul did not hesitate to call the Buffalo massacre an active white supremacy. Hochul's response is also focused on how the shooter obtained a gun and why he was able to livestream his deadly rampage on Twitch for roughly two minutes.

These elements of the shooting are important to deal with but in some ways they obscure how acts of racial terror carried out in the 21st century are just the latest chapter in the violent, hate-filled history of our nation. The Buffalo shooting is not something unique to 2022. In fact, it brings to mind a spate of racist attacks that took place more than a century ago.

Jelani Cobb: Everything happened in the summer of 1919. When we look at the landscape of current events, particularly the volatile weaponized forms of racial hatred, culminating in events like the massacre in Buffalo, 1919 looks like a preface.

Melissa-Harris Perry: This is historian Jelani Cobb. He's a staff writer at The New Yorker and Dean of the Columbia Journalism School. I turned to Jelani to provide some much needed context into May's horrific shooting and we begin in the Red Summer of 1919.

Jelani Cobb: In that summer, we saw mass attacks on Black people in cities across the country and in reaction to a number of dynamics including the nascent great migration, Black people gaining a foothold in employment and industrial sectors et cetera and an attempt to literally beat them back into submission.

We talk about the Red Summer of 1919, but it's really shorthand for the entire era. The East St. Louis massacre happened in 1917 and the Elaine Arkansas massacre happened in 1921, Tulsa happened in 1921. It was a intense time period in which we saw an upswing of racial violence directed at Black communities.

Melissa-Harris Perry: Given that you are a historian who can so readily access that history, are you surprised when moments like 2019 when a gunman targeted El Paso Texas's Latino community or when an 18-year-old white man drives to Buffalo, New York and kills 10 people, most of them Black in a grocery store?

Jelani Cobb: I'm not surprised. I think we could throw into that 2015 when Dylan Roof, who was 21-years-old massacred nine people in the basement of the church in Charleston, South Carolina and the attack at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018. I think we've seen this pattern frequently enough to be able to recognize the details of it.

One of the things that was particularly notable is that now, the manifesto has become the accessory de jure for the mass murderer. They all pen these badly written screeds about racial jeopardy and the need to defend white people. That's one of the common themes we saw in everything left behind by these killers in each of those instances.

I think that both in the sense of the history, the grand sweep of history in the United States and in the sense of the immediate pattern we've seen over the last decade, there's no real way to be surprised at any of this, not if you've been paying the least bit of attention.

Melissa-Harris Perry: What is different, what is unique? Not necessarily better, but different about this 21st century violence than the 20th century violence that you've pointed us to?

Jelani Cobb: Certainly the context of it is different. What I mean by that is that Dylan Roof was reacting to the existence of a Black president. The 1919 iteration of this was happening in attempts to prevent Black people from even being able to participate in any form of civic life. From being able to vote, from being able to own property, from being able to exercise the most basic tenets of citizenship.

I think those things are different. Obviously, the capacity to disseminate this information through the internet and via social media, that is different. The mechanisms to dispersal here, even though there's been one thing that's been interesting that people have made the comparison of live streaming these attacks to the way that people made photos of lynchings and disseminated those through the mail.

Nevertheless, I think that the internet has amplified this and multiplied it by an exponent. That's different. I would also say, and I say this whenever people are talking, understandably in despairing tones that we have a community, despite the titanic obstacles confronting us, we have a community that has never been better positioned to respond to them.

By that I mean a community of people of conscience, a community of African-Americans, a community of people who believe in democracy and who are prepared to wage the protracted struggle that it will take to actually prevent these things in the future.

Melissa-Harris Perry: We have to take a quick break. More of this conversation in just a moment. Jelani Cobb is a staff writer at the New Yorker and Dean of the Columbia Journalism School. I suppose one of the things that's always held a certain morbid fascination for me about the period that, for me growing up in the South, I was taught was called The Redemption.

The period that at the end of reconstruction. Was that idea of people having achieved a thing, having accomplished a thing, having come to a space of freedom, of some level of participation and civic engagement and then having it taken. I've wondered often what it must feel like in one's gut to actually experience that.

We can see the advance and decline, but to actually experience it. I got to say as a Black woman, I'm beginning to not have to wonder anymore. I'm beginning to feel that sense of having achieved and then having it taken.

Jelani Cobb: I think that's very real. I think that also quite frankly at the dawn of the Trump era, I had to check myself personally. Because in my estimation we've had the relationship to freedom that the stereotypical Trust Fund Baby has to wealth. We have benefited so tremendously from the work of a previous generation.

We had struggles with things we had to do but the rudiments, the fundamentals were in place because of the work that had been done before us. We're now in a place where we actually have to get out and secure that future for ourselves or retain, regain that future for ourselves and for generations that come after us. It's a sobering awareness.

By no means do I think we can underestimate the scale of the work that is in front of us. At the same token, we admire W. E. B. Du Bois, we admire Anna Julia Cooper, we admire Ida B. Wells-Barnett for what they did precisely in moments like these, not for what they did in moments of comfort and ease. That's the reason that we've created this Canon that includes those people because we had some understanding that their example would be useful for us in some future moment. Now we find ourselves in that moment.

Melissa-Harris Perry: It is common in this moment, and we certainly have heard it from many political leaders, to offer an aspirational narrative of the American project and to say that moments like this massacre in Buffalo is not who we are, that America is something different than this. Then there's a pushback that says, "No, this absolutely is who we are." That the history of the United States is written in blood from settler colonialism to intergenerational chattel bondage on forward.

Do you see a role for an aspirational narrative, one that acknowledges that bloody past, but also somehow says, "Maybe we could be better than this"?

Jelani Cobb: I think we're heir to that legacy. The thing that I think of is those civil rights marches where people are carrying the American flag. Now, one of the things that is important for us to bear mind just as a honest reality, is that the flag of the Confederacy for the time that it flew, over the four-year existence of the Confederacy was the banner under which countless atrocities were committed against African Americans, people of African descent.

That American flag was witness to those atrocities for decades longer than that from 1776 to 1865. That's not if we count Jim Crow. We have to be real about what has happened here. At the same token, those people marching in Selma, those people marching in Montgomery, those people being bludgeoned carried the American flag. They were aware of that disparity. They were aware of what that flag had borne witness to, but they were carrying it in an attempt to redefine what it was and redefine what it meant.

I think that it's not fence-sitting to say that both of those things are part of the American tradition and that we're engaged now in a dire existential conflict about which of those traits will be the defining one when we look at the flag and what it represents.

Melissa-Harris Perry: Jelani Cobb is a staff writer at The New Yorker and Dean of the Columbia Journalism School. Thanks so much, Jelani.

Jelani Cobb: Thank you.

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