Dylann Roof and America’s heart of darkness
The events in Charleston are grisly, but they are not shocking. They are depraved, but they are not the work of some lone psychopath.
On Wednesday night, a 21-year-old white man named Dylann Roof sat and worshipped in one of the oldest, most respected black churches in our nation, Emanuel AME. After about an hour or so, he rose, and opened fire, killing 8 congregants, along with the church’s pastor, state Sen. Clementa Pickney.
White supremacy did not give Dylann Roof the gun, but it gave him an aim. White supremacy did not give Roof his anger, but it told him where to direct it. And most importantly, white supremacy gave Roof shelter for his beliefs.
Because white supremacy, and the disgusting acts that flow from it, are at the core of America’s heart.
We have already heard the rush to separate Roof’s actions from the deeper problems they reflect.This always happens after these types of injustices, be they at the hands of police or civilians. It is convenient to imagine Roof is an isolated person, whose ideology has no basis in wider culture. But it does.
Much of the wealth and many of the institutions that still exist today in this country were built on the backs of black people. An entire wing of one of our major political parties seeks to take their country back. What’s more, this is just the latest in a long line of attacks on black churches by white Americans.
Many are quick to warn against lumping a nation into factions based on phenotype. But our country already does that, through housing discrimination, discrepancies in drug sentences, and the fraternal racism in our police system. The rush to lump our large nation into factions based on skin color is the reason a black woman who locks her children in a car loses her children, and a white woman who allows her child to fall into a cheetah exhibit is ordered to parenting class.
Moreover, the rush to paint with a broad brush is more than welcome when it colors white worldviews. It is the reason white citizens are largely struggling to bring themselves to support prison reform. It is the reason white citizens think the entire worldview of a community can be gleaned from rap music. And it is the reason white citizens convince themselves nothing need be done about the murderous hand of white supremacy, because black people kill each other, too: Tell them to stop, then we can talk.
We never apply the stereotypes to whites that we do to black people, though we could: White males make up the overwhelming majority of mass shooters. They do and sell drugs at nearly the same rate as their black counterparts. But yet America has never thought to address these as the problems of a group. Black criminals are all part of a racial problem; white criminals are all lone maniacs.
If black people were all of the evils we are said to be, in the measure America tells us we are, we would not act this way in silence. We wouldn’t restrict our bloodlust to our neighborhoods.
If black people were as violent as white people feared, if crime were so endemic, if education so unimportant, if hate so ingratiated, there would be no white people.
Roof believed in the myth that all black people posed a danger. According to Sylvia Johnson, one of three survivors, he said, “I have to do it. You rape our women and you’re taking over our country. And you have to go.’’
White supremacy is a cancer. It tells Bhagat Singh Thind that he cannot serve, tells black children they do not deserve to drink from the same fountains, and insulates Supreme Court Justices when they proclaim, in an opinion on a case about the Voting Rights Act, that the extraordinary, endemic problem of racism has grown ordinary, while black citizens died in the streets at the hands of police.
And white supremacy, like a soon-to-be killer in a church pew, hides in plain sight.
White supremacy does not just beat black girls, it does so while remaining cordial to the white boys who watch. White supremacy does not just kill churchgoers, it wonders if white visitors should feel safe in the place it just tried to destroy. White supremacy not only creates a scarcity of opportunity and resource, it casts doubt on the veracity and accomplishments of minority citizens who achieve greatness in spite of them.
Dylann Roof is not an anomaly in our society. He’s only a lunatic because he made his hatred overtly violent.
Dylann Roof is not a lone wolf. He’s a man after America’s own heart.
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