The massacre of nine black churchgoers in Charleston and a rash of arson at other black churches across the South show that despite conservative self-serving claims — and liberal wishful thinking — about racism becoming a thing of the past, much more work needs to be done, says Lawrence Davidson.
By Lawrence Davidson
On the evening of June 17, a 21-year-old white man by the name of Dylann Roof walked into an old and famous black church, the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME) in Charleston, South Carolina, where a Bible study group was underway. Roof sat in on the class for an hour before allegedly pulling out a .45 caliber handgun, announcing that black people were ”taking over our country. And, you have to go,” and shooting 10 of the 12 people in the study group, nine of whom died.
It should be pointed out that at 21 years of age Roof presumably doesn’t have a fully developed pre-frontal cortex (which, in part, means his risk-aversion impulse is not fully developed) — a fact that is likely to do as little good in court for him as it did Dzhokhar Tsarnaev (also 21) in his Boston Marathon bombing trial.
Accused mass murderer and white supremacist Dylann Roof shown burning an American flag.
It did not take long for the authorities to identify and apprehend Roof. It turned out that he is a thoroughgoing racist with delusions of starting a second Civil War. He also had a thing for flags. Among the Facebook-posted pictures of Roof that soon surfaced were ones showing him with the flag of apartheid South Africa and the flag of white-ruled Rhodesia. Both of these are reported to be used as symbols of white supremacy in the U.S. And, there is the picture of him, with his handgun displayed, with the Confederate battle flag — the same flag that flies on the grounds of the South Carolina statehouse.
By the day after the shooting the issue for the media was no longer Dylann Roof (who had confessed to the murders, according to police). The issue was whether or not the Confederate battle flag on the statehouse grounds should be removed. For much of the country, the flag was a symbol of the racism that had moved Roof to commit the massacre.
As Nikki…