An image of a supermarket, similar to where nine Black elders lost their lives. Source: Unsplash.

And though you did me gruesome, I was surely relieved/
I completed my mission, wasn’t ready to leave/
But fulfilled my days, my Creator was pleased/

— Kendrick Lamar, The Heart Pt. 5

Nine of the eleven Black victims the Buffalo white supremacist shooter murdered were elders.

Aaron Salter was 55. Ruth Whitfield was 86. Pearly Young was 77. Katherine Massey was 72. Deacon Patterson was 67. Celestine Chaney was 65. Margus Morrison was 52. Andre Mackneil was 53. Geraldine Talley was 62.

Earlier this year, I had accepted a commission to write curricula regarding identity development. I wrote about Erik Erikson’s stages of development for high school teenagers to teach them how to conceptualize the complexity of determining who they wanted to become. I spent little time writing about the later stages of life.

Erikson argued that healthy identity development in middle and older ages produced a sense of generativity and integrity. Generativity describes an emotional need to give mentorship. At around this age, humans want to begin passing down their knowledge and experiences to younger folks. This transitions to the last stage of life, where elderly people feel a deep sense of integrity about their life decisions. They feel they have contributed effectively to their families and communities, and can ease into the afterlife with a sense of accomplishment.

Slater was a retired police officer who took the security job at the supermarket because he was bored and wanted to interact with people. Whitfield had just visited her husband in a nursing home. Young supported a food pantry for poor folks. Massey used to write for the local newspaper. Patterson would drive people in the community to the supermarket, the only place in the ‘hood for folks to get fresh food. Chaney had defeated cancer only to fall to a 5.56×45mm round. Morrison worked with children. Mackneil was buying his son a birthday cake. Talley had arrived at the supermarket from attending a festival with her fiancé and was going to become a grandmother.

Our elders were all navigating their stages of generativity and integrity when a white supremacist took their remaining time away.

A chart showing the gap and decrease of life expectancy between white and Black people. Source: Vox.

I call them elders because white supremacy slices years off Black life like a demonic charcuterie board. It is the blood price of existing in this physical world, deep within the afterlife of slavery. A 2020 Vox story reported on the life gap between white and Black Americans and how the COVID pandemic has pushed the length of time we spend on Earth down. Pre-pandemic, whites could expect to live an average of 79 years compared to 75 for Black folks; the pandemic reduced those numbers to 78 for whites and 73 for Blacks. The youngest of the elders the Buffalo shooter murdered was 52. Morrison could expect about another 20 years of survival, with the heath decline coming sooner than the 73 years our nation allotted for him. The rest had less. Whitfield and Massey, the two elders who defined those stats, were seemingly murdered for offending the time constraints white supremacy gave them to live. Their survival was an offense to a system designed to oppress them. White supremacy determined they had to go.

I think back to Charleston because I am beginning to evince a pattern in how white supremacy kills my people in this modern age. Cynthia Hurd was 54. Ethel Lance was 70. Susie Jackson was 87. Myra Thompson was 59. Daniel Simmons was 74. Five of the nine victims were elders lynched by bullets. There is, to me, a conspiracy in such current coincidence. In the past, Black people of any age could have their bodies burned and strung up as strange fruit. Such open, state-tolerated violence had to threaten all. The times have advanced. The labor is divided. The police concern themselves with harassing and killing Black youth and adults. The lone white wolves on 4chan and the other racist corners of the web want our old. The recent spate of mass shootings against Black personhood, however, is targeting our elderly and those on the border of becoming elders.

Our elders were all navigating their stages of generativity and integrity when a white supremacist took their remaining time away.

Charleston‘s and Buffalo’s violence is a premature eclipsing of our elder’s crescent years. White supremacy denies the generativity of that age, and prevents them from providing mentorship and guidance to their people. White supremacy seeks to destroy the integrity of the last years of Black personhood where elders can pass in peace. Instead, they died unexpectedly — or if they were the latter victims of the massacre, in terror. The white supremacist assault on Black bodies is heinous, but old. These recent attacks are against Black stories near completion. They are attacking the people who could tell stories of long lives earned by surviving cancer, raising children, becoming churched, finding romantic love in elderhood, obtaining a modicum of political power, and guiding youth. There is a horrible logic to killing the old. It imposes a coda on Black survival that ends in gratuitous violence.

As the bereaved lay their elders to rest, I think of the tradition of the Black funeral pamphlet. We evoke the sun as to when it rose over our lives and when it set to shadow our death. We speak of homecomings because we know that a planet shaped by whiteness is not our natural and welcoming home. We dedicate always a page to what the departed accomplished in life. We list their progeny by name and the number of grandchildren that came after. It is a genre of literature that preserves the generativity and integrity of ancestors that we keep stored with family photo albums and birth certificates. The Buffalo funeral pamphlets will stand as the last testament of a life fully completed, if not entirely lived; they were not ready to leave. That is something white supremacy can never destroy.