On Saturday, a white gunman in Jacksonville, Florida killed three Black people at a Dollar General store in what authorities have described as an anti-Black hate crime. The shooter wrote a racist manifesto ahead of the attack, used racist slurs in his writings, and drew swastikas on his firearm.
“This shooting was racially motivated, and he hated Black people,” Jacksonville Sheriff T.K. Waters said at a press conference. The three victims, two of whom were shoppers and one of whom was a Dollar General employee, are Angela Michelle Carr, 52; Jerrald Gallion, 29; and Anolt Joseph “AJ” Laguerre Jr., 19. The shooter died of an apparent suicide following the rampage.
The shooting is the latest in a string of racist attacks in which perpetrators have targeted Black people in recent years, including a mass shooting at the Tops supermarket in Buffalo that killed 10 people in 2022 and a mass shooting at a historically Black church in Charleston that killed nine people in 2015. Prior to his attack at Dollar General, the gunman was flagged by a security guard near the campus of Edward Waters University in Jacksonville, a historically Black institution. After the guard approached him, the shooter drove away.
FBI data on hate crimes also show that there’s been an uptick in hate crimes directed at Black Americans and other racial groups in recent years. Though the FBI’s data is incomplete, and therefore somewhat unreliable, it remains one the most comprehensive sources of hate crime data available. It shows that in 2020, hate crimes toward Black Americans were up 49 percent, compared to 2019, and that in 2021 — the latest period for which data is available — hate crimes toward Black Americans were up another 14 percent compared to 2020.
Such attacks have come as Republican leaders and GOP-aligned media personalities have amplified racist ideas like the “Great Replacement Theory,” a white supremacist conspiracy theory that white people are being oppressed…
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