My reaction to news of the mass shooting in Buffalo, New York, was more than emotional; my heart raced and my stomach churned. My hands are shaking as I write this nearly a week later.

My first thought, in the moment after I heard about the attack, was the same as it always is after every mass shooting: Dear God, please don’t let the shooter be Black. Because in the eyes of white America — consciously or not — the rest of us would be held to account.

The air cleared as the truth came out — a hate-filled young white supremacist, prosecutors say, had meticulously planned to annihilate as many Black people as he could while they shopped for groceries on a Saturday afternoon. Ten people died — all of them Black — and three were hospitalized.

As irrational as it seems, I felt a brief flash of relief; the shooter allegedly was, once again, a white man beholden to hate and enamored with guns, whose carnage would be his legacy.

But that relief was instantly dispatched by blinding rage, wrenching heartbreak, inchoate fear — and the isolating feeling of being a potential target in a violent and hateful land, carrying a load that few of my colleagues and neighbors can understand.

 

I have lived in that land for more than six decades now.

And I can still remember when I first began to feel the weight of that burden, when it dawned on me that my brown skin could make me a pariah.

Except I didn’t know that word back then, at Miles Elementary School in Cleveland, where almost all of the other students were white. I was in fifth grade and we were learning about the history of “our great country,” as my teacher always called it.

I tried to laugh it off when I was mocked by white classmates, who thought images of crowded slave ships and Black men being whipped were cartoonishly funny. I was grateful then that my brown skin hid the red flush of shame. Some of these were people I’d considered friends.

And the torment didn’t stop when the school day ended. At a New Year’s Eve sleepover at the YWCA, which I’d begged for permission to attend, my younger sister and I were terrorized by a cabal of white girls who pelted us with the N-word, then laughed uproariously as others joined in.

We suffered in silence; there were two of us, dozens of them.

When my mother picked us up the next day, we squirmed as we insisted we had fun — then we never spoke of it again. But the shame didn’t fade. And the question that was stuck in my head eventually found its way out:

Mommy, why do they hate us so much?

I wish I could tell you what her answer was.

I can only remember pain contorting her face and tears welling up in her eyes. Years later I learned that she’d asked her own mother that same question, when she was a child growing up in Alabama under the yoke of Jim Crow laws.

When my own daughter came to me as a teenager — humiliated by the way everyone stared at her when racist tropes were the subject of their history class — I braced myself for what I knew she would ask; the question generations of progress had not nullified:

Mommy, why do they hate us so much?

And now I’m forced to imagine my granddaughter, with her beloved coterie of brown Barbies and baby dolls, asking that same awful question when she’s old enough to recognize that people like us are not universally loved.

Mommy, why do they hate us so much?

 

My mother was born more than a century ago, when the Ku Klux Klan ruled rural Alabama, torturing and murdering any Black person who didn’t toe their line.

One by one, she and her siblings migrated north to Cleveland in the 1940s and built new lives.

I remember how hopeful she felt when we were growing up, at the apex of the civil rights movement, in a city known then for progression activism. We marched and protested and voted, and we clawed our way into the middle class. The future looked limitless and bountiful for our generation then.

Now I am glad she is not here to see this. Our country is moving back toward its nakedly racist past, fueled by shameless politicians, coarse public dialogue and fictional social media conspiracies.

And the danger now is not only from white-hooded goons, but random misfits and losers; ordinary racists and fascists, with massive arsenals and a growing list of enemies they’ve targeted by race, religion, ethnicity, gender and non-conformist identities.

We’ve spent a lot of time this week trying to parse the clues that might explain the evil that allegedly motivated Payton Gendron — as if the malignancy of the “great replacement theory” had somehow mysteriously infected him.

We need to stop feigning shock and innocence about how and why these massacres keep happening. We have shamefully lax gun laws, centuries-old racist and nativist proclivities, an education system stuck in the 20th century, and a growing unwillingness to care about anyone other than me, me, me.

So while we can keep trying to untangle the alleged motives of Gendron — as we did with Dylann Roof, Adam Lanza, Patrick Crusius, Robert Aaron Long, Robert Bowers and now David Chou — we might also consider what the carnage puts the rest of us through.

There’s a price we all pay in the wake of these unconscionable murders. And the burden falls heaviest on the targeted groups, whose emotional turmoil can last for months, long after other folks have moved on.

The funerals in Buffalo began on Friday, and dozens of friends and families began their journey into new lives, irrevocably altered by loss, sorrow and grief.

But those closest to the victims won’t be the only ones suffering.

Research has found that mental health can decline significantly, not only among those who witness or lose loved ones in mass shootings, but also among people who share elements of their identity, even if they live nowhere near the event.

Recent studies have focused on highly public anti-Black violence — like the murder of George Floyd, police shootings of unarmed Black men and planned attacks akin to the Buffalo market shooting.

But all racialized public incidents “likely have measurable spillover effects on the mental and physical health of members of the targeted groups,” according to social science research edited by Harvard professor David R. Williams.

A study Williams led years ago linked a database of every police shooting over three years to a database tracking the mental health of every population in every state.

“We found that every police shooting of an unarmed Black person led to worse mental health for the next three months, for the Black population in the state (the shooting) occurred,” Williams said.

But just as striking was a separate result: There was no mental health decline when the person shot by police was armed.

 

That finding opened a window for Williams and his team.

The fact that only unarmed victims generated mental health effects reflected the emotions underlying the decline: a sense of unfairness and a heightened awareness of vulnerability.

Both of those can lead to stress and physiological symptoms — like the racing heart and shaky hands I experience every time Buffalo comes to mind.

It makes me feel better somehow to know I am not alone; that my emotions are real and reasonable. I feel wary, unprotected, unsafe, and everything I read or see about the tragedy brings on new waves of grief that unsettle me.

It’s a wound to the psyche, Williams explained.

“It suggests that you can be totally innocent, and still you are potentially vulnerable… Your family members and friends, it could happen to them too. That’s what it feels like to you.”

The blow of this particular tragedy may hit Black people harder and hurt longer. But every targeted group is likely to wrestle with the same sense of fear, anger and grief when haters violently intrude on their community.

“It applies to other groups, under the same conditions,” Williams said. “You’re bound to be worried, to feel stress, when something like this happens” in your social network.

When an antisemite, armed with an assault rifle, bursts into a synagogue during Sabbath prayers and shoots 17 people down, how can a Jewish worshiper not be marked by the unholiness of that?

When families strolling through Walmart on a shopping trip are riddled with bullets by a white supremacist targeting Latinos — killing 23 people and wounding dozens more — how does your own Latino family ever feel safe in a crowded store again?

When a close-knit Taiwanese church welcomes a stranger with Christian courtesy, and he padlocks the doors, pulls out a gun, kills one man and wounds five elderly worshipers, how do you not worry that the stranger at your church door might also be up to no good?

And when a neighborhood market turns into a death trap, because a young white man needed someone to blame for his own personal failures, and considered Black people avatars in his virtual game, how do you stifle your own rage over the death of the grandma shopping for dinner and the dad shot down buying his son a birthday cake?

Sandy Banks wrties for the Los Angeles Times.

 

Modern baseball is boring.

That was Tim Anderson’s feeling in the spring of 2019 when the Chicago White Sox shortstop spoke to Sports Illustrated for a lengthy profile.

Anderson told SI writer Stephanie Apstein he felt like “today’s Jackie Robinson” in crossing what he called the “have-fun barrier,” hoping to make the game interesting to today’s fans.

“That’s huge to say,” he said of the Robinson reference. “But it’s cool, man, because he changed the game and I feel like I’m getting to a point where I need to change the game.”

The quote was a small part of a long-form article on Anderson’s emergence as a star. It came out on May 6, 2019, when the Sox still were rebuilding and the 25-year-old was beginning to make a name for himself in a season he later would win the American League batting title.

Three years later, MLB investigated an incident from Saturday’s game at Yankee Stadium in which New York Yankees third baseman Josh Donaldson called Anderson “Jackie” multiple times, precipitating a clearing of both teams’ benches and a war of words after the game.

On paper, it appeared to be a cut-and-dried case.

Donaldson surely was guilty. But of what, exactly? And what’s the penalty for instigating during a major-league game?

MLB handed out its ruling Monday, issuing Donaldson a one-game suspension and fine.

“There is no dispute over what was said on the field,” Mike Hill, MLB’s senior vice president for on-field operations, said in a statement. “Regardless of Mr. Donaldson’s intent, the comment he directed toward Mr. Anderson was disrespectful and in poor judgment, particularly when viewed in the context of their prior interactions.”

Donaldson — who elected to appeal his punishment — admitted to calling Anderson “Jackie,” explaining it was in reference to the 2019 SI interview. Donaldson’s defense was that he called Anderson “Jackie” during a previous series when he was with the Atlanta Braves, calling it an “inside joke.”

That series took place Aug. 30-Sept. 1, 2019 — about four months after the SI article appeared. The Braves swept the Sox, who already were out of contention. There were no reported flare-ups and Donaldson signed with the Minnesota Twins after the season.

Anderson didn’t speak to the media Sunday in New York and hasn’t been asked whether he recalled the “inside joke” Donaldson said they share. Anderson is expected to address the media before Tuesday’s game against the Boston Red Sox at Guaranteed Rate Field.

Donaldson also did not speak to the media Sunday. Yankees manager Aaron Boone gently suggested the remark was inappropriate, saying that mentioning Robinson’s name to Anderson “is just somewhere, in my opinion, he should not be going.” Boone said it was a “sensitive” issue and “you’ve got to read the room.”

After hearing Donaldson’s explanation, Boone said: “I sit here, as a white guy, that did change the context for me. But I also understand how it can be offensive or upsetting.”

Sox closer Liam Hendriks, who admittedly dislikes Donaldson from their days as Toronto Blue Jays teammates, called the inside joke defense “utter bull(bleep),” saying you don’t joke around with someone with whom you “don’t get along at all.”

Was it a “racist” comment, as Sox manager Tony La Russa alleged? Or just a poor choice of words that had no “malicious intent,” as Boone believed?

MLB didn’t go as far as siding with La Russa, but it clearly didn’t buy Donaldson’s story of an inside joke. The decision calling it “poor judgment” skirts the question of whether the remark was racist, and the ruling could have an effect on what is acceptable to say during games. What other trash talk is “poor judgment” that can lead to a suspension?

MLB has dealt with racial and ethnic slurs in the past. Former Cincinnati Reds owner Marge Schott was suspended one year and fined $25,000 in 1993 for “racially and ethnically offensive language” for making anti-Black and anti-Jewish slurs.

Anderson was involved in a similar incident in 2019 over a remark he made during a brawl to a Kansas City Royals pitcher. Anderson received a one-game suspension from MLB for “conduct” stemming from the undisclosed remark to Mitch Keller, who received a five-game suspension for throwing at Anderson in apparent retaliation for an epic bat flip following a home run.

In the 2019 SI article, Anderson admitted he called Keller a “weak-ass (bleeping N-word).” He said he did not regret calling Keller, who is white, the N-word.

“That’s a word in my vocabulary,” Anderson said. “When’s the last time (then-MLB disciplinarian Joe Torre) heard that word?”

Hill, a former Miami Marlins executive, currently holds the job of MLB disciplinarian. Anderson received a one-game suspension and fine from MLB on April 22 for making an obscene gesture toward fans during a game in Cleveland. But he appealed and won, receiving only an undisclosed fine.

Anderson is the face of the Sox organization and the undisputed leader of the clubhouse. He leads the AL again with a .359 average and finally is getting his due from the national media.

What’s more, Anderson seems to thrive on being in the spotlight, as evidenced by his walk-off home run in last season’s Field of Dreams game and his three-run blast Sunday night after being booed all night and called “Jackie” by Yankees fans.

Modern baseball may be boring.

But you can’t say the same about the White Sox.

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Timely booster doses of coronavirus vaccine continue to protect Minnesotans from severe illness and death, even as new strains of the virus emerge, according to new data released Monday by the Department of Health.

People 65 and older benefit the most, breakthrough data from the last 60 days shows. Among seniors who got COVID-19, the unvaccinated have been more than four times as likely to die and nearly five times as likely to need hospital care compared to their boosted peers.

Getting the initial shots of vaccine without boosters provides some protection, but as the coronavirus mutates into new strains, that initial protection is not as strong as it was when vaccination began in December 2020. The latest data is the first time state health officials have provided specific information showing the increased protection from additional COVID-19 shots.

“We are still seeing a substantial benefit in the 65 and up category with boosters,” said Stephanie Meyer, epidemiologist supervisor at the health department. But she noted there were still a lot of questions about how the timing of booster shots and different coronavirus variants impacts vaccine protection.

Variations of the omicron strain of SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes COVID-19, have dominated Minnesota infections since mid-December. The latest breakthrough data shows the various omicron variants are having better success infecting the vaccinated and are more likely to cause severe disease than some of the previous strains.

However, other factors also are at play, most notably patients’ underlying health conditions that may put them at higher risk. In recent months, Minnesota’s COVID-19 deaths again have been concentrated among older residents who tend to have other medical conditions.

“The comorbidity piece is something we cannot account for in these data. It is a really important factor,” said Keely Morris, senior epidemiologist. She noted that federal data continues to show vaccines offer protection to people who are high-risk because of other health conditions.

Morris also added that as more people get vaccinated, the share of new cases that affect vaccinated people is expected to climb. About 67 percent of the state’s 5.7 million residents have gotten their initial doses of vaccine, but only about 46 percent are up-to-date on their shots.

Meyer and Morris said state health officials continue to study breakthrough cases and the impact of vaccines and the timing of boosters.

CASES LEVEL OFF

There was some evidence released Monday that Minnesota’s latest spike in cases, driven by four different omicron sub-variants, may have stalled. The 2,152 new cases reported from last Friday is a week-over-week decline of about 11 percent.

However, case counts offer an increasingly limited view of the state’s outbreak because more people test at home and those results are not reported to the state. Health officials more closely watch hospitalization data and the prevalence of coronavirus genetic material in wastewater.

And last week, the Metropolitan Council reported a 58 percent increase in coronavirus DNA in Twin Cities sewage. The data was from the week ending May 16 and suggests cases could continue to rise.

Rates of hospitalization and death have ticked up in recent weeks but remain much lower than the state’s last big winter surge.

There are 422 patients hospitalized in the state with COVID-19, including 36 in intensive care. Critical cases have remained relatively flat as overall hospitalizations have fluctuated.

Another nine COVID-19 deaths also were reported Monday. They ranged in age from their early 60s to their 90s with six residing in private homes and three in long-term care.

Since the pandemic began in March 2020, 12,596 Minnesotans are known to have died from COVID-19. About 82 percent were seniors and about 46 percent residents of long-term care.