The hate that killed Tyre Nichols

are and what they are capable of shape everything about how we live in this country.”

The recent brutal beating and murder of Tyre Nichols—a Black man—who died on January 10, at the hands of five Black police officers in the Memphis Police Department, underscores the fact that the pathology of antiBlackness is alive and well in the hearts and minds of some White folk as well as some Black folk in America.

Anti-Blackness is a byproduct of the false ideology of White supremacy and Black inferiority, woven within the fabric of America, so much so that even the victims of this deadly ideology—including some Black people—have internalized it.

James Baldwin said, “The reason people think it’s important to be White is that they think it’s important not to be Black.”

Anti-Black hate is as old as America and as American as apple pie and baseball. You don’t need to go back in our history to see evidence of this pernicious reality.

In 2015, Dylann Roof—a 21-year-old White man—walked into a church in Charleston, SC, and murdered nine Black people in cold blood. It was reported that the police officers who captured Roof treated him to fast food before escorting him to the police station.

In May 2022, a gunman—an 18-year-old White man—murdered 10 Black people in a Buffalo, NY, supermarket targeting Black people. There are other cases of anti-Black violence, but I will stop here.

In both notable cases, antiBlack hate was their motive which fueled their terror. In his book, “Democracy in Black: How Race Still Enslaves the American Soul,” Eddie S, Glaude Jr., wrote, “a host of assumptions about who Black people