As Buffalo, NY residents expressed grief over a mass shooting that left 10 people dead at a grocery store in a predominantly Black neighborhood, the attack by a young white gunman was being investigated as a hate crime and an act of “racially motivated violent extremism.”

SCRJ co-founder Ralph Richard Banks spoke to the Los Angeles Times about how racist fringe groups are a “long-standing feature of American society,” but the internet, along with access to guns, has fueled a specific kind of violence where extremists can “fortify each other” and think of each other as “righteous warriors.”

“It’s a mistake to individualize these incidents and to think that if we would’ve uncovered this one wrongdoer, we would have done our job,” Banks said. “All of these shootings are connected even if they don’t overtly connect themselves to each other. That’s the hard thing for us to see. The reality is the circumstances that produce these people are the problem, and those circumstances have to do with our history and culture and current inequalities and politics.”

(Continue reading the story on Los Angeles Times’ page here.)