On Wednesday, a shooter entered Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, and killed nine people during a weekly Bible study. Emanuel, like so many other black churches, has been the target of racial violence in the past — most famously, it was burned to the ground in 1822 in retribution for a planned slave revolt — and no matter what people might like to convince themselves, it was again this week. It wasn’t about religion, it wasn’t about politics. It wasn’t, to any extent that authorities can determine, about any one individual. It was about hatred. The alleged killer, known and open white supremacist Dylann Roof, sat with his victims for an hour that night in Bible study, and then stood up and opened fire, saying to one man, “No, you’ve raped our women, and you are taking over the country … I have to do what I have to do.” And then killed him.
That was Tywanza Sanders, a recent Allen University graduate who jumped in front of his aunt, Susie Jackson, to shield her when the shooting started. They both died alongside the Rev. Clementa Pinckney, senior pastor at Emanuel and a South Carolina state senator; Emanuel pastors Rev. Daniel Simmons and Myra Thompson; high school girls track coach Sharon Coleman-Singleton; public library employee Cynthia Hurd; longtime church member Ethel Lance; and retired community program development director Depayne Middleton Doctor. Those are not the only victims at “Mother Emanuel” — families mourn, and a community will never be the same — but they’re the ones who were killed.
In the Washington Post, Anthea Butler writes about the media’s treatment of the shooting, and others like it, not as an act of terrorism but as the action of one tragic figure. (“We don’t know his mental condition,” one MSNBC anchor pointed out, and he was found with a pill bottle possibly filled with a drug used to treat opiate addiction, so of course we have to give him that, and how many other outs can we find to make him soft and sympathetic? Let’s workshop.) Senator Lindsey Graham dismissed Roof as “just one of those whacked-out kids,” just a “young man who was obviously twisted.” White supremacists took to the Internet yesterday hoping that the killings weren’t motivated by race but by religion or anything else, so there you go, deniers, you’re in good company. (The link goes safely to the Huffington Post, but trigger warning there for GAAAAH.)
Dylann Roof might well have had a mental illness. (We don’t know for sure one way or the other, but of course we’re going to give him the benefit of the doubt, because it’s much easier to demonize people with mental illnesses than to accept that sane people do evil things.) Plenty of people do and still manage to not post hatred on Facebook, terrorize communities, and take lives. For that matter, we know that the vast majority of people who commit violence don’t have mental illnesses, and people with mental illnesses are far more likely to be the victims of violence than the perpetrators.
And for that matter, society rarely if ever speculates about the mental health of dark-skinned terrorists who commit atrocities within the U.S. They’re just terrorists. They’re straight-up evil. They belong to a hateful religion, they’re enemy combatants, they hate us for our freedoms. White people die in terrorist attacks and at the hands of “thugs,” and brown people die in “parking disputes,” and tragedies. They die in “unfathomable” acts.
Dylann Roof was a terrorist. He was a white supremacist. He told the police that he went to Emanuel that day to start a race war. He planned his attack at length, purchased his weapon, and sat quietly for an hour before attacking, reloading five times as he did. As he was leaving the church, he asked one of the three survivors if he’d shot her, and when she said no, he said, “I’m not going to kill you, I’m going to spare you, so you can tell them what happened.” In an AME church, 193 years and one day after the planned Vesey slave revolt, 150 years minus two days after Juneteenth, as the Confederate flag flew over the South Carolina state house, Dylann Roof killed nine people who had welcomed him into their church not just because he hated their skin but because he hated the people to which they belonged. It was a hate crime intended to leave a community, a whole country, in a state of terror. And yes, it was absolutely a tragedy, but it’s a tragedy with far deeper meaning than just one whacked-out kid of indeterminate mental state.