The racist massacre of nine black worshippers at a Charleston, S.C., church on June 17 was an act of such heinous ugliness that it demands to be scrutinized for any larger meanings it may possess. That the victims had graciously welcomed the murderer, Dylann Roof, to their Bible study class at the Emanuel A.M.E. Church and had politely sat with him for nearly an hour before he started shooting makes their killings all the more heart-wrenching. Given America’s history of racial terror, including attacks on black churches, it is appropriate to ask humbly, with trepidation, whether the shooting reflects currents of hate that are still active in American culture. It is not, however, appropriate to answer that question with boilerplate rhetoric that bears little resemblance to reality.
An honest appraisal of race relations today would conclude that the Charleston massacre belongs to the outermost, lunatic fringe of American society. The country’s revulsion at the carnage was immediate and universal, resulting in a justified movement to banish the Confederate flag, embraced by Roof as a white-supremacist symbol, from official sites. Roof was not expressing the will of anyone beyond his own narcissistic, twisted self. White-supremacist killings are not a common aspect of black life today; their very rarity is what made this atrocity so newsworthy.
And yet the Democratic elites, from President Obama on down, opportunistically turned Roof into a stand-in for white America, linking his rampage to the Left’s standard grab bag of institutional racism that allegedly poisons black life. Eulogizing Emanuel A.M.E.’s pastor, the Reverend Clementa C. Pinckney, on June 26, Obama fingered virtually every white as a potential co-conspirator in the killings. “Maybe we now realize the way racial bias can infect us even when we don’t realize it,” Obama said. In other words, it took this violence for white America to wake up to its enduring racism, racism that is continuous with Roof’s homicidal mania. Obama cautioned “us” (read: whites) about other manifestations of “our” potentially lethal racism. Once we “realize” how we are “infected” with bias, he said, we will be “guarding against not just racial slurs, but . . . also . . . against the subtle impulse to call Johnny back for an interview but not Jamal. So that we search our hearts when we consider laws to make it harder for some of our fellow citizens to vote.”