USA TODAY International Edition
We must disarm racism and hate
My mom died in Mother Emanuel church
Growing up, my mom and I always had to think about being African American before we thought about anything else. It was Charleston, South Carolina, in the 1960s: home to segregation, Jim Crow laws and us. My mom’s name was Ethel Lee Lance, and she was just 14 years old when she had me. We got followed, questioned and turned away from places, just like everyone else who looked like us. The racism was baked into the very bones of our city: a continuous hurt, a soul- deep weariness that came from being told at every turn that our Black lives didn’t matter. Over time, we learned to cope. My mom and I graduated from high school in the same year, then she worked for the city for 30 years and, after some searching, I found my calling as a reverend. Even as I moved around the country, we talked on the phone nearly three or four times a week and our relationship never wavered. But five years ago, on June 17, 2015, the racism that had followed us for our whole lives caught up to my mom: A white man filled with hate and armed with a gun murdered her and eight other African Americans, including two of my cousins and one childhood friend, while they prayed in Charleston’s Mother Emanuel Church. It was the same church where my mom first saw me preach, sitting in the front row and saying, “Amen, that’s my baby.” My mom was killed with a gun that the shooter never should have been able to purchase. He was prohibited from buying a gun and should have been stopped in his tracks, but because of a loophole backed by the National Rifle Association, allowing a gun sale to go forward when a background check takes longer than three business days, he was able to buy one anyway. The rest is tragic history, and the loophole is now named the “Charleston loophole” after my hometown. In recent weeks and months, I’ve been thinking a lot about my mom, my cousins, my friend and the others killed five years ago. Because their lives, and their deaths, are not so different from those of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor and so many others killed by systemic racism and hate in our country. Nor are they that different from the tens of thousands of African Americans who have been killed by COVID- 19, a disease that kills us at disproportionate rates because of that same systemic racism.
A problem that kills Black people
This is the time to address these problems — by protesting, by voting, by addressing loopholes like the one that killed my mom and cousins five years ago and by dismantling the systems of oppression that African American communities face every day. But like so many of these problems that kill Black people in America, the Charleston loophole has gone unaddressed — even as the other victims’ families and I have continually called out for action. The House of Representatives passed Rep. Jim Clyburn’s bipartisan legislation to address this loophole more than a year ago, but the bill has sat on Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s desk, collecting dust, because he has refused to even give it a vote in the Senate. There have also been suggestions that Congress could take action in the next COVID- 19 relief package or the appropriations process, but again, nothing has happened. Simply put, there’s no sign of when enough will finally be enough. This inaction continues even though the loophole has likely become deadlier during the pandemic, due to a surge in gun sales that has overwhelmed our background check system and made it likelier than ever that background checks will take longer than three business days. All told, it’s estimated that over 90,000 gun sales have been finalized without a completed background check in the past three months alone. That’s thousands of guns that could end up in the hands of someone like the man who killed my mom.
An awakening, protest by protest
There are some days when all of this runs me down, when I want to just lie in bed, watch Netflix and eat things I shouldn’t — days when that soul- deep weariness of my youth drowns out everything else. But on those days, I remember my mom, what she went through as a 14year- old Black girl in the Jim Crow South, and I keep going. I do so in the hopes that day by day, protest by protest, we can bring about an awakening on the Charleston loophole and so many other issues that African Americans have faced for centuries. That’s why I write today: to keep my mom’s memory alive on the fifth anniversary of her death, to keep pushing forward like she always did and to do my part to disarm hate while protesters across the country march to stamp it out. All I can hope for is that some of you will join me in this fight and that my mom is looking down on me now, saying what she said that first time she saw me preach: “Amen, that’s my baby.” The Rev. Sharon Risher’s mother, two cousins and childhood friend were killed in the Mother Emanuel Church shooting on June 17, 2015, in South Carolina. She is a volunteer with Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, a member of the Everytown Survivor Network and author of “For Such a Time as This: Hope and Forgiveness after the Charleston Massacre.”