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The news of the racist grocery store shooting in Buffalo reached journalist Wesley Lowry at a strange moment. For years, he's reported about race in this country. He won a Pulitzer

for his reporting on police violence

while he was over at the Washington Post. And he'd just finished up a new manuscript.

I've been working now for a year or two on a book about the rise and increase in white supremacist

violence in the decades since Barack Obama was elected and looking at various attacks that are driven by racist ideologies

and also trying to sit with and think about this idea

of how much of our mainstream political rhetoric

accelerates and empowers these ideologies.

I'm kind of stuck on the irony of the fact that you were putting to bed this book

that was about the increase in racist violence, and then the shooting happens.

The timing is kind of eerie.

Yeah, it's so, and I'll be honest, I've had a real hard time finishing this book.

Again, my editor somewhere is like, why are you on podcast right now and finishing chapters?

In part because the topic is difficult and the work is difficult.

You've got to go to all these dark places in your head and think about how to do it and how to do it responsibly and do it well.

I think that too often when we think about racism, when we think about white supremacy, we think about the individual racist.

We think about our buddy in the group chat who's a little off color.

We think about our uncle or aunt who says that thing at Thanksgiving that we don't like.

That's the wrong way to think about it.

We have to think about white supremacy as what it is, which is a coherent ideology in a world of view.

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