THE NEWS SAYS
This massacre of nine innocents was an expression of racial hatred and Second Amendment extremism by a homegrown terrorist.
The massacre of nine black women and men in Charleston’s Emanuel AME church was an act of terrorism by a white, born-inthe-U.S.A. racist armed with a gun — and magazine after magazine after magazine of ammunition. While racial hatred gives the mass shooting the feel of an abomination from the history books, the bloodshed was an expression of two virulent cultural strains: anti-black hatred and Second Amendment extremism.
This is the America of now, a nation where suspect Dylann Storm Roof is among the thousands of whites who passionately revile African-Americans, the form of group loathing that remains the nation’s most common brand of bigotry.
Roof entered the church, asked for the pastor and spent an hour in a Bible study among a dozen or so parishioners, taking advantage of the open hearts of his hosts.
According to witnesses, he then stood up, said he was there “to shoot black people” and fired his weapon, reloading five different times and stealing the lives of six women and three men, including the pastor, the Rev. Clementa Pinckney.
A survivor quoted Roof as voicing a psychopathology that has haunted America from slavery through the Ku Klux Klan, that of the black man as a sexual predator.
“I have to do it. You rape our women and you’re taking over our country. And you have to go,” said the gunman, recounted one survivor.
Roof’s Facebook page features at least one expression of white supremacism. In a photo, he wears a jacket with the flags of apartheid-era South Africa and white-ruled neighboring Rhodesia before it became Zimbabwe.
Those who took no action after hearing Roof say that he wanted to kill blacks to start a civil war, as a former roommate has admitted, are complicit members of a cancerous culture.
According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, the number of active hate groups in America more than doubled to over 1,000 between 1999 and 2011, before falling to just under 800 since. While these groups are concentrated in the South, they plague states across America.
At the same time, blacks suffer the most hate crimes per capita, by far; in 2012, 50 out of every 1 million black citizens were victims of racially motivated crime, according to the FBI.
From its very birth, Charleston’s Emanuel AME Church, one of the nation’s oldest black congregations, has had to fight to pray in peace.
Founded in 1816, after white congregations made clear, in increasingly odious ways, how unwelcome blacks were in their midst, the church saw its original structure burned to the ground by white supremacists.
It was rebuilt — but in 1834, all-black churches were banned in Charleston. The congregation met in secret for a generation.
During America’s great civil rights movement, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke there about voting rights, and Coretta Scott King led a march from its steps.
“This is a sacred place in the history of Charleston and in the history of America,” said President Obama, who knew the Rev. Pinckney and his wife.
For the 14th time delivering remarks about a mass shooting, Obama also said with accuracy and in seeming despair about the plague of guns: “At some point, we as a country will have to reckon with the fact that this type of mass violence does not happen in other advanced countries. It doesn’t happen in other places with this kind of frequency.”
June 17, 2015: Nine people murdered at prayer in a church dedicated to freedom and the Christian faith, nine people taken in a crime that evokes the racial warfare of the 19th and early 20th centuries and the church bombings of the 1960s.
This is America. This is now.