In other words, the population that the mass shooter in Buffalo imagined to be overtaking his own mythologized white America was in fact marshaled into an under-resourced and neglected stretch of the city under the pressures of racial capitalism. Buffalo, like most major U.S. cities in the twentieth century, was segregated along the redlined flows of capital into a starkly segmented real estate market—a harsh financial version of apartheid greeting many African Americans who had relocated to northern cities as part of the Great Migration to escape the racial terror of Jim Crow rule. The Federal Housing Agency mapped urban areas and demarcated the degree to which neighborhoods should qualify for home loans via data such as the percentage of “negroes” already living there, and patterns of “shifting and infiltration.” The neighborhoods were divided into four categories, with “A” being the least financially risky to “D” the least stable. Masten was classed as a “C”-level loan risk—a “declining” neighborhood.

 

     This stigma of decline was soon imprinted on Buffalo’s ambitious modern-era redevelopment initiative—which worked to further insulate Masten from middle-class American prosperity.

 

     The Buffalo Municipal Housing Authority (BMHA) was established in 1934 to eliminate slums and purchase property for the construction of public housing. In the 1940s, the state of New York adopted a slum clearance program. Dante Place was considered to be a substandard area in the City of Buffalo, “not only in terms of physical decline of its building but in its reputation for social unrest.” In 1952, Dante Place was destroyed to create the Dante Place Project.  

 

     Initially, the Dante Place Project was one of the city’s most diverse public-housing locales. In 1954, 36 percent of occupants were African American; many of them had been displaced from the Ellicott District during the construction of Ellicott and Talbert Malls in 1953-1954.

 

     In 1957, the development of the Kensington Expressway displaced many of the city’s Black residents—together with a broad array of other redevelopment programs that further divided Buffalo’s social geography along racial lines. The Dante Place Project now accommodated Black residents who had been displaced from the construction of the Expressway, but in 1960 the complex was changed from low-income to middle-income and Black residents were relocated to homes within the Masten District.

 

     It didn’t take long for the bank-orchestrated “decline” of Masten to gain fresh momentum. Buffalo’s 1965 Community Renewal Program states: “Although at the time there was a sufficient number of adequate housing units available, the relocation program failed to take into account the residential exclusion problem that restricted the movement of non-whites…The impaction of these two areas in turn led to the speeding up of the process of blight formation in the remainder of the Ellicott and Masten areas.”

 

     This history, needless to say, was lost on the Buffalo gunman, who considered Black Americans to be “occupiers” of “white land” who threatened to replace white people—the anxiety that Tucker Carlson routinely platforms on the top-rated cable news show in the country. The gunman in Buffalo drove three hours to murder members of a population that had long been displaced, and seen their life chances diminished, under the logic of racial capitalism. It was as though the political heirs of Andrew Jackson had gone on to demonize the Cherokee Indian nation, brutally exiled from their Southeast homeland to the arid Southwestern interior along the Trail of Tears, as an all-powerful and fast-multiplying “occupying force.”

 

     Yet the core doctrine of replacement theory has gained a level of influence in American political discourse that the dissections of urban racial geography pioneered under critical race theory can’t begin to compete with. According to the New York Times, Carlson has echoed the paranoid racist refrain that white people are being “replaced” on more than 400 episodes of his show. Even after the Buffalo massacre, Republican political leaders continue endorsing the precepts of replacement theory as simple demographic fact.

 

     But the alleged descriptive value of replacement theory is far less to the point for right-wing demagogues than the xenophobic, racist, and violent ends that it serves. Here, for example, is Carlson on the June 17, 2019 broadcast of his show, warning that Central Africans immigrating to the United States will “overwhelm our country, and change it completely and forever—and our viewers should know that.” Within two months, a gunman killed 23 shoppers in an El Paso, Texas, Wal-Mart—targeting people of Latin-American descent and explicitly citing replacement-theory doctrine.

 

     The online manifesto of the Buffalo gunman likewise says that the shooting was an anti-immigration and “partisan action” taken against an “occupying force”—even though none of his intended victims were recent immigrants. This points up another ugly feature of the logic behind replacement theory thinking: all nonwhite peoples can be designated enemy combatants at a moment’s notice, according to the animus dictated by the self-styled defense of white America.