Trump isn’t out there with a gun, but he’s enabled this war against black people

White supremacy is as American as apple pie, as the latest killings in Buffalo show. Biden needs to take a stand against neofascists

Last weekend, just as I finished a live performance in California of Four Questions, the Grammy award-winning jazz collaboration for which I provided spoken words, word reached me about the racist killing of 10 people as they shopped in Buffalo, New York. I try never to be surprised by evil and never paralysed by despair. Instead, my immediate reaction was here we go again", with the horror, the suffering and then the now familiar routine of rhetorical gestures and superficial posturing.

On Tuesday, Joe Biden described white supremacy as a poison, and he is right, but - as ever - he fails to understand the gravity of his failure to make racial justice a priority; to see this cowardly white supremacy as a threat to American democracy.

Cornel West is an American philosopher, author, critic, actor, civil rights activist and Dietrich Bonhoeffer professor of philosophy and Christian practice at Union Theological Seminary (NYC)