Strong national reactions in S.C. massacre
THE CHARLESTON CHURCH SHOOTING
And of course, it happened again: Another mass shooting in an American community. This time, it wasn’t at a mall or a school, but in an African-American church in Charleston, S.C., by a white supremacist who crashed a prayer meeting and started firing on Wednesday night. At the end, nine people were dead. Police have called it a hate crime. Writers, bloggers and columnists around the nation have had much more than that to say about it, as the national debate about guns, laws and mental health reared up again — this time, overlaid with a discussion about race, racism and justice. Today, we share a sampling of edited comments from selected national publications and sites. Feel free to share your thought via email: rrollins@coxohio.com. — Ron Rollins
We can learn a lot from the social media reaction.
From the BBC: The Charleston incident sparked a resurgence of the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag on Twitter, with more than 60,000 tweets using the phrase in the first 24 hours after news of the attack broke. The hashtag first made an appearance on social media in 2013 following protests across America after George Zimmerman, a neighbourhood watch volunteer, was cleared of murdering unarmed black teenager Trayvon Martin in Florida.
It’s subsequently been used in connection with the deaths of other black people across the U.S., particularly in incidents involving police — including Freddie Gray, Walter Scott, Eric Garner and Michael Brown.
The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart also attracted widespread praise online for his reaction to the shootings. Uncharacteristically, he didn’t make any jokes about Charleston — instead he spoke emotionally about his frustration about the way the suspect was talked about as “crazy” rather than as a terrorist. “We invade two countries and spent trillions of dollars and lost thousands of American lives and now fly unmanned death machines over like five or six different counties, all to keep Americans safe,” Stewart said. “We’ve got to do whatever we can — we’ll torture people. We’ve got to do whatever we can to keep Americans safe. But nine people shot in a church? ‘Hey, what are you going go to do? Crazy is as crazy is, right?’”
The second-most shared image was a picture of Clementa Pinckney, the church’s pastor and a state senator.
President Obama said at a press conference the day of the shooting, that both he and Michelle knew Pinckney personally, and he spoke of their “sadness and anger” at the tragedy.
Many of the images shared online were comparing reaction to other attacks by different ethnic groups, and asked the question why white suspects were often described as “lone wolves” or mentally unstable.
We’ve heard the ‘black rapist’ thing from racists all through history.
From Jamelle Bouie
on Slate: Make any list of anti-black terrorism in the United States, and you’ll also have a list of attacks justified by the specter of black rape. The Tulsa race riot of 1921 — when white Oklahomans burned and bombed a prosperous black section of the city — began after a black teenager was accused of attacking, and perhaps raping, a white girl in an elevator. The Rosewood massacre of 1923, in Florida, was also sparked by an accusation of rape. And most famously, 14-year-old Emmett Till was murdered after allegedly making sexual advances on a local white woman.
It’s worth a look at the second part of (accused Charleston shooter) Dylann Roof’s claim, which informs the first: “You’re taking over our country.” Behind the myth of black rapists was an elemental fear of black autonomy, often expressed by white Southern leaders who unhesitatingly connected black political and economic power to sexual liaison with whites.
This fear took its most violent form in the years after the Civil War — when blacks won their freedom — but it’s been with us for centuries. Throughout the antebellum period, whites lived in terror of a challenge to the racial order and believed that black freedom would lead to a world of “Negro domination” where they lived as slaves, or worse. Likewise, during the 1864 election, Northern Democrats attacked Abraham Lincoln as a “black Republican” who sought to debase the white race with miscegenation. Similar accusations were used during the civil rights movement, and in the North, urban whites justified residential segregation — in patterns that still exist — as necessary protection from the violent, sexually aggressive black criminal. ...
Fetid swamps of Internet racism aside, racist rape accusations have all but faded from American life. But the more elemental fear — of a topsyturvy world of black dominion — endures in diminished form. You hear it, for instance, in claims that Barack Obama is here to bring “reparations,” to punish a “Colonialist” America, or to build a world where “white kids now get beat up with the black kids cheering.”
It’s tempting to treat Dylann Storm Roof as a Southern problem, the violent collision of neo-Confederate ideology and a permissive gun culture. The truth, however, is that his fear — of black power and of black sexuality — belongs to America as much as it does the South.
And how, exactly, is what happened not to be called terrorism?
From Jack Hunter at Rare: What is the most basic definition of terrorism? Targeting innocent
people to advance an idea or objective.
These victims have absolutely nothing to do with their murderer’s agenda. They are innocent bystanders.
Terrorists also usually insist their targets are not really innocent.
Why did radical extremists murder nearly 3,000 innocent people at the World Trade Center in New York City on Sept. 11, 2001? Because they wanted to promote an agenda. Did the people they murdered have anything to do with their agenda? No. But to al-Qaeda, their targets were complicit in supporting the American government and therefore weren’t really innocent.
Why did Timothy McVeigh murder 168 innocent people when he blew up a government building in Oklahoma City in 1995? Because he wanted to promote an agenda. Did the people he murdered have anything to do with that agenda? No. But to McVeigh, his targets were necessary “collateral damage” in his fight for his “cause.”
Why did the Ku Klux Klan and other white racists murder innocent black men and women throughout the United States in the late 19th and early-to-mid 20th centuries? To promote an agenda of white supremacy. Did the people they murdered have anything to do with that agenda? No, but racists made up every possible justification for targeting them. They even made movies about it.
Why did shooting suspect Dylann Roof allegedly walk into the Emanuel AME Church in downtown Charleston to gun down nine innocent black men and women as they worshipped? To “advance” whatever warped, racist agenda he thought he was promoting.
Did the people he allegedly murdered have anything to do with his “agenda?” Roof reportedly said as he fired upon his victims, “I have to do it. You rape our women and you’re taking over our country and you have to go.”
The victims of 9 /11 were murdered simply because they were on American soil. The victims of the Oklahoma City Bombing were murdered simply because they were in a government building. The victims of white racists in the United States were murdered in this century and the last simply because they were black.
The victims of the Charleston church shooter were murdered simply because they were black.
They were all innocent people who were targeted to promote another group or individual’s extremist agenda.
If that isn’t terrorism, I don’t know what is.
Some are still wrestling with the idea that racism is involved here.
From Jeet Heer, at the
New Republic: Nikki Haley, South Carolina’s Republican governor, made a curiously obtuse statement on Facebook in the aftermath of Wednesday’s massacre at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston. “While we do not yet know all of the details, we do know that we’ll never understand what motivates anyone to enter one of our places of worship and take the life of another,” the governor said.
A charitable reading of the remarks is that Haley was trying to express the idea that so horrific a crime defies fathoming. Yet her choice of the word “motivates” conveys the false idea that this type of mass murder cannot have an explicable intent. But in point of fact, attacks on houses of worship often have all too clear agendas: When Al Qaeda attacks churches in Iraq, no one would say that their motives were unclear. For that matter, the 1963 church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama, and the 2012 shooting at the Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, were two blatantly obvious cases of a place of worship being targeted for violence by racists.
It’s hard to escape the suspicion that Haley’s remarks were a pre-emptive attempt to deflect listeners from an uncomfortable possibility: that, like the killings in Birmingham and Oak Creek, the Charleston slaughter was a racist hate crime. In an America where conservative pundits and a Supreme Court judge assure us that racism is a thing of the past, news of so horrific a hate crime goes against politically convenient narratives. ...
Despite the accumulating evidence of Roof’s racial attitudes, there’s been a reluctance on the right to link his crime to racism, a gingerly approach to talking about the crime very much in keeping with Haley’s deliberately murky remarks. Republican public figures and conservative media figures have gone out of their way to deflect attention away from the possible racist motive and claim that what the massacre was really an attack on Christianity.
This is what evil looks like; let’s start with that and avoid politics.
From Erick Erickson
at Red State: Dylann Roof appears more evil than disturbed. Perhaps he had mental health issues. But at some point we just need to call him evil. White supremacy and segregation are evils. He appears to have believed in both. People who believe in white supremacy and segregation do not have to suffer from mental health, but do in all cases have to be evil.
As Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal said yesterday, evil is real and the government is not going to legislate it away.
But in typical fashion, the conversation immediately became political. The state of South Carolina, controlled by Republicans, elected an IndianAmerican governor and put a black man in charge of the congressional district from which the first shots of the Civil War were fired. They then elevated him to the United States Senate. Both are Republicans.
The state has moved on. But, of course, cries from the left were all about the state’s racism. Race hustlers picked it up for political gain. Fox News and the GOP were attacked. Governor Nikki Haley was blamed. I dare say online and on leftwing television programs, most every person and idea on the rightof-center was blamed more than Dylann Roof.
The President and others went immediately to gun control. There does appear to be an issue with how Dylann Roof got his gun, but some reporter actually tweeted that it is easier in this country to get a gun than to get food. I suspect the reporter has never actually tried to purchase a gun. ...
Yet again we have a twenty-something white male loner or semi-loner who got a gun and decided to kill people. In most cases we have found that the mass shooter was mentally disturbed. In this case, it looks more and more than Dylann Roof was just a servant of an evil that says some of those created in the image of God are better than others or that some people are not created in the image of God at all.
As a nation, when these things happen, we never have the conversation about real evil. We also never have the conversation about mental health. For that matter, we don’t have honest conversations about why some kid in Minnesota or Alabama would want to go join ISIS and kill their fellow citizens or why some kid would want to join neoNazis or a gang.
Instead, we descend into partisan conversations where everything is political and neither side can concede or acknowledge the other’s points. Everyone and everything gets blamed while ignoring the actual person who killed.
This exposes the nation’s racist roots, and we should consider that.
From Kirsten West Savali at The Root: On the run and armed, the threat Roof posed wasn’t “perceived,” as is the excuse typically given when innocent and unarmed black people are gunned down around the country by thugs with badges — or men whose whiteness grants them the same freedom and authority to kill with impunity. Still, he was quietly captured 200 miles away in Shelby, N.C., and escorted to a plane that transported him back to Charleston without a blonde hair on his head out of place.
As usual, killing while white affords you protection and the presumption of innocence, while existing while black gets you killed.
True to form, a mainstream media complex crafted to perpetuate white supremacy has quoted family members describing Roof as “quiet and soft spoken” and his sadistic smile has been described by media as “baby-faced.” Just as insulting, Republican Gov. Nikki Haley pulled out her best version of white tears as she led law enforcement on a victory lap for capturing the racist killer.
She insisted that we should “lift” them up — a very calculated political statement in the wake of backlash against unhinged law enforcement officers who stay triggerhappy in the presence of African American people — but she failed to mention that we should also “lift up” the victims of racial terrorism in her state. Instead, she gave an “All Lives Matter” speech, waxing poetic about the “heart and soul of South Carolina (being) broken.”
Let’s be clear: Haley’s commitment to flying a flag drenched in the blood, sweat and tears of enslaved Africans, and her stance that state hate crime legislation is not needed, proves that she doesn’t give a damn about the souls of black folks. To paraphrase Audre Lorde, her guilt does not serve us and she’s better off saving her tears for someone else, possibly the hypocritical white Christians who screamed #IAmCharlie in support of Islamophobic free speech, but have yet to declare #IAmCharleston.
Maybe they can console each other.
As is the black church’s custom, Roof was freely allowed into Mother Emanuel’s congregation only to have him spit in the face of their Jesus, showing that not only did he hate their black lives, he hated their black institutions and took pleasure in making a mockery of their black faith. There are some people disillusioned with civil rights leaders who are calling for more prayer when the same God that they’re asking people to pray to seemingly allowed the devil to open fire in His house.
This is a nation that systematically de-arms African Americans, while fighting disproportionately for the Second Amendment rights of white Americans, leaving our communities vulnerable to these kinds of white terrorist attacks.
What happens, then, if we arm our communities and dare a white terrorist to try to infiltrate it?
At some point, we’re going to have to talk about that. ...
The days ahead will be rife with political dodgeball debates on racism, gun control, white supremacy and the continued and pervasive dehumanization of black lives. Today, though, we mourn and we rage. We brace ourselves for that inevitable moment when it happens again. Because this is America. The infestation of racism will continue to gnaw relentlessly at this country’s foundation — unnoticed by those not living within its margins and crevices — until things fall apart and it all comes down.