“I have to do it. You’re raping our women and taking over the country. You have to go.”


image

I’m in transit with spotty internet access, but clearly we need a thread to discuss the horrific race crime in Charleston. I’m dismayed that not only was this an act of premeditated, racially motivated murder, but the media is slow to even consider that the white perpetrator was a terrorist and a racist (would you believe I’ve even seen the excuse that he had ‘black friends on facebook’?)

I’m going to go further. The people who worship the confederacy — this moral moron had a license plate with a confederate flag — are traitors to the country and even if closeted, are propping up racism. This comment from one of his friends is incredibly oblivious.

“I never heard him say anything, but just he had that kind of Southern pride, I guess some would say. Strong conservative beliefs,” he said. “He made a lot of racist jokes, but you don’t really take them seriously like that. You don’t really think of it like that.”

But now, “the things he said were kind of not joking,” Mullins added.

There’s nothing wrong with being proud of where you come from, and there’s much in the South that’s good. But somehow Southern pride has become a code phrase for being white, resenting the Civil War, and opposing civil rights for non-white people.

This kid didn’t think much of racist jokes, or ‘strong conservative beliefs’, or nostalgia for the Confederacy. He should have.

That’s the whole problem right there. Flying a Confederate flag from the back of your truck ought to be a mark of shame and a sign of potential problems in the same way torturing small animals as a child is.


Go read Charles Pierce.

Comments

  1. anteprepro says

    Really? The “I have black friends” excuse? Extended to fucking facebook “friends”? And of course, the continued unwillingness to call white mass killers “terrorists” (or “thug” even, though that would be minimizing anyway). You couldnt make up this stuff if you tried.

  2. says

    […] Immediately after Roof’s name was released, pictures from his Facebook page circulated; in one, he appeared to be wearing patches of the flags of apartheid-era South Africa and Rhodesia. That is more than suggestive. There is also a mug shot in circulation: Roof was, according to press reports, arrested on March 1st, on a drug charge, and on April 26th, for trespassing. He was out on bond. Sometime in April, he had his twenty-first birthday; one of his presents, from a relative, was, according to a Reuters report, a gun. […]

    http://www.newyorker.com/news/amy-davidson/dylann-roof-and-a-night-of-hate-in-charleston

  3. says

    So how much you want to bet this guy was raised Baptist or some kind of fundamentalist? Odds? What happens to that “attack on faith” deal when the media interviews his neighbors. “He was always so quiet. We had no idea.”

  4. Dexeron says

    Already some pundits are trying to re-frame this as an assault on Christianity. Or sweep the terroristic, racist nature of what he did under the rug with opining about “mental illness.” We can never seem to address the problem of terrorism committed by white males head-on, nor that of gun violence. There’s always some deflection to bring into play.

  5. frugaltoque says

    >>> But now, “the things he said were kind of not joking,” Mullins added.

    Yeah, that’s like what someone said about rape jokes.
    *You* know you’re just kidding and you wouldn’t really rape anyone. But someone within earshot is *not* kidding. And that guy? He thinks you’re on his side.

  6. says

    “You’re raping our women and taking over our country”-
    Does anyone else get a whiff of misogyny (misogynoir to be exact) in there? It’s like he’s addressing black men, and erasing black women.

  7. What a Maroon, oblivious says

    Fourteen years into the “war on terror” and racist assholes like this still have no problem getting their hands on murder tools?

    Fuck that shit.

  8. says

    The ultra-pale geniuses at Fox News would like you to know that the mass shooting at an African-American church in Charleston, South Carolina is really an attack on faith.

    Fox News is advising pastors to arm themselves.

    E. Hasselback: A horrifying attack on faith killing 9 people, including a famed pastor. […]

    […] I would urge pastors and men in these churches to prepare to defend themselves. It’s sad, but I think that we’ve got to arm ourselves. At least have some people in the church who are prepared to defend the church when women and children are attacked. […]

    Steve Doocy: Uhhh, it was released earlier—and extraordinarily they called it a hate crime—uhhh, and some look at it, because it was a white guy, apparently, and a black church, uhh, but you made a great point just a moment ago about the hostility towards Christians, so—and it was a church! So, maybe that’s what their talking about. They haven’t explained it to us.

    Link

    So now we know how rightwing pundits will spin this: as an attack on christians — no racism at all.

  9. Beatrice, an amateur cynic looking for a happy thought says

    Tony,

    You get double misogyny for the price of one:

    black women don’t exist and the our women bit.
    You see, “they” are welcome to rape their own women, it’s just our women they should take their hands off.

  10. Gen, Uppity Ingrate and Ilk says

    This is such a horrible and needless tragedy, I don’t even know what to say. It seems very clear that the motivation is racism.

  11. kayden says

    @Tony! at 6,

    The shooter speaks as if he “owns” White women, which is definitely sexist. So I guess this evil scumbag is both racist and sexist like so many other bigots. Probably was homophobic too.

  12. tbtabby says

    Of course they’re not going to acknowledge it’s about race. That would mean acknowledging that racism is still a problem in this country. And they’re not going to call it terrorism, because everyone knows only Muslims can be terrorists. Personally, I’m surprised they didn’t start talking about the criminal records of the murdered parishioners and claim he was just standing his ground.

  13. kayden says

    @ Lynna at 8,

    How many people would feel comfortable attending churches where guns were prolific? I know I wouldn’t. I’d just stay home instead. How about less guns for everyone, like other developed countries?

  14. qwints says

    It’s chilling to think he sat with people in the church for an hour before starting to murder them.

  15. Beatrice, an amateur cynic looking for a happy thought says

    My condolences to everyone who lost their family or friends in the shooting.

  16. Beatrice, an amateur cynic looking for a happy thought says

    BBC writes that the officials called it a hate crime.

  17. Ashley F. Miller says

    I see the Daily Beast has updated their farcical claim that he didn’t have a reputation for being racist.

  18. says

    More blather from the rightwing — spinning the attack into an attack on religious liberty:

    Presidential candidate and former Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA) on Thursday called the attack by a white gunman on a historic black church in Charleston, S.C. part of a broader assault on “religious liberty” in America. […]

    Santorum called for a broader pushback against the “assaults” on religious liberty.

    “You talk about the importance of prayer in this time and we’re now seeing assaults on our religious liberty we’ve never seen before. It’s a time for deeper reflection beyond this horrible situation,” he said. […]

    Link

  19. Gen, Uppity Ingrate and Ilk says

    And amidst all this, South Carolina’s state house is flying a confederate flag. Apparently “still”. So it’s just been there, and everyone was just OK with it?

    Living in South Africa, where we have a very definite flag that denotes a horrible, inexcusable period in our country’s history (the very flag this shooter had on his jacket in one of the pictures), I find it mindboggling that something like that is just allowed. To me, that spells a clear endorsement of racism.

  20. AlanMac says

    Knocked the R.C. Pope right out of the news cycle, didn’t it! Now, which hat should I wear today; tin foil or aluminum.

  21. auraboy says

    Ah and given a gun for his 21st birthday. What a wonderful heart warming NRA advert right there.

  22. Pen says

    If hate speech is a warning indicator for potential hate crimes, and if the circulation of hate speech produces new converts for potential violence are we going to talk again about the proper limits of free speech? As well as gun control?

    Maybe after we’ve recovered a bit and found out more about this guy. The quote in the title of the post isn’t in any of the news media I read. I thought this post was going to be about Donald Trump. Did you know he said something rather similar about Mexicans? How dangerous do you think that is? (not a rhetorical question)

  23. says

    More dunderheaded blather from the rightwing, this time connecting the shooting to the evil of abortion rights:

    […] Fox News contributor Alveda King, a conservative activist with the group Priests for Life, appeared on “Fox & Friends” this morning, where she linked the shooting to abortion rights: “You kill babies in the womb, kill people in their beds, shoot people on the streets so now you go into the church when people are praying.”

    Link

  24. says

    President Obama expressed sadness, and he also asked for a discussion of gun control, and for a reality check of some kind:

    […] “I have had to make statements like this too many times. Communities have had to endure tragedies like this too many times,” he said. “We don’t have all the facts, but we do know that once again, innocent people were killed in part because someone who wanted to inflict harm had no trouble getting their hands on a gun. Now is the time for mourning and for healing. But let’s be clear. 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.”

    The President continued by calling on leaders in Washington to “come to grips” with their resistance on gun control laws, saying, “It is in our power to do something about it.” […]

  25. Beatrice, an amateur cynic looking for a happy thought says

    Pen,

    I absolutely think that a country that takes human rights seriously should have hate speech laws.

  26. says

    Reverend Clementa Pinckney, one of the nine people killed Wednesday night, campaigned unsuccessfully in the South Carolina Senate for stricter mental health checks for gun purchases.

  27. Larry says

    this time connecting the shooting to the evil of abortion rights

    Well, that didn’t long. I was wondering which the fundy freaks would blame first: abortion or gay marriage. I knew it was coming but just not how soon it would appear. They never disappoint, do they?

  28. JohnnieCanuck says

    Fox News people are advising black pastors and black men to arm themselves so they can be safe in church? Christians are being persecuted religiously and so must arm themselves? That’s a lot of concentrated spin doctoring.

  29. says

    One more example of cluelessness in response to the shooting:

    […] a local Charleston reporter asked a group of African-American activists, community leaders what the black community could do to prevent events like the mass shooting at Emanuel Baptist. This bizarre moment continued with the reporter seemingly rejecting the obvious–that racism is an obvious element in the white-on-black murders committed at Emanuel Baptist–and doubling down by suggesting that the black community gives comfort to “snitches,” […]

    Link

  30. David Marjanović says

    There’s nothing wrong with being proud of where you come from

    There absolutely is if we take “proud” literally; but I digress. I like the picture.

    Fox News people are advising black pastors and black men to arm themselves so they can be safe in church?

    Wow! That means they’re less racist now than in the 1960s! *slow clap*

  31. says

    But now, “the things he said were kind of not joking,” Mullins added.

    Kind of not joking. Even in the wake of horrific murder, we get a “kind of…”. There’s no clarity, no definition, no condemnation. That “kind of” denotes the heavy hesitancy to label any white person a racist, no matter their ideas, attitudes, or actions.

  32. says

    Lynna @ 26 quoted Barack Obama. “[I]nnocent people were killed in part because someone who wanted to inflict harm had no trouble getting their hands on a gun.”

    So how long before the wingnuts start calling this a false flag operation so Obama can take your guns. There are still people convinced that Sandy Hook never happened…

  33. Ogvorbis: failed human says

    When I first heard about the shootings, I tossed this on the Drum:

    Cue the ‘it was an isolated incident that has nothing to do with gun culture, it is not terrorism because [fill in the blank], we need more guns so this will not happen, he was crazy so we don’t have to look at society, this was the liberal’s/Obama’s/victim’s/atheist’s/abortion doctor’s/secularist’s fault’ from the national media, the older-conservative-white-rich-man-talking-head, and any conservative who wants to make money or get votes.

    And from quotes here, and on the ‘Look at all the white people’ thread. Depressing how many of my predictions are already coming true.

    Maybe cynic is a snynonym for realist?

  34. says

    Chrisv @ 35:

    What fool gave this punk a gun instead of a banjo and a bridge?

    Just because you’re expressing bigotry from the other side doesn’t make it less bigoted. I’m pretty sure you could come up with a substantial, non-biased comment if you try.

  35. chigau (違う) says

    chrisv #35

    What fool gave this punk a gun instead of a banjo and a bridge?

    Please explain what you mean by this.

  36. microraptor says

    Proof once again that the terrorists who pose the greatest danger to America are white Christians.

  37. Alverant says

    But somehow Southern pride has become a code phrase for being white, resenting the Civil War, and opposing civil rights for non-white people.

    What do you mean “has become”? Seems like it always was about those things.

  38. slithey tove (twas brillig (stevem)) says

    re Pen @23:

    If hate speech is a warning indicator for potential hate crimes, and if the circulation of hate speech produces new converts for potential violence are we going to talk again about the proper limits of free speech?

    I read this question as a disguised attack on PZ for always speaking against ~lotsastuff~. That speaking against them is “hate speech” and is preluding violence.
    I know I’m being overly defensive, correct me. [not rhetoric]

  39. says

    From Lynna’s link @8:

    I would urge pastors and men in these churches to prepare to defend themselves. It’s sad, but I think that we’ve got to arm ourselves. At least have some people in the church who are prepared to defend the church when women and children are attacked.

    Let’s reinforce restrictive gender roles while advocating for guns. Do the men not deserve protection too?

  40. says

    Another thing on the “kind of not joking”, with the emphasis on joking this time. This also comes up in cases of harassment and sexual assault too. When someone is often making ‘jokes’ which are based on racism, or rape, or some other nasty bias, it’s not so much joking as it is seeking approval for repugnant attitudes, and if people don’t speak out about this when it happens, that person is receiving tacit approval for those repugnant attitudes. We all have to do a whole lot better on this.

  41. says

    Ogvorbis @36, I think you may have left out the gun-rights activist explanation: the church was a gun-free zone, and therefore people died. Actually, the church was not a legally-mandated gun-free zone, but Second Amendment activists are claiming it was.

    Discredited gun researcher John Lott falsely claimed that guns are “banned” in South Carolina churches to blame the mass shooting at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church on “gun-free zones.” […]

    Lott, who invented the debunked “more guns, less crime” hypothesis and is a frequent source of conservative misinformation on gun violence, quickly blamed “gun-free zones” for the shooting. […] “Not surprising that yet another mass public shooting has taken place where guns were banned. Yet, again, the ban only ensured that the victims were vulnerable.” […]

    The law says: ” A permit issued pursuant to this section does not authorize a permit holder to carry a concealable weapon into a: […] (8) church or other established religious sanctuary unless express permission is given by the appropriate church official or governing body […]” That’s a loophole big enough for any number of automatic weapons in churches.

    In an opinion piece for FoxNews.com, Lott similarly mischaracterized South Carolina law, writing, “the massacre took place in a gun-free zone, a place where the general public was banned from having guns.” Lott also speculated that gun policies formed the shooter’s motive, writing, “Churches, like the one in Charleston, preach peace, but the killer there probably chose that target because he knew the victims were defenseless.”

    Link

  42. says

    backupbob @45:

    He reportedly told a victim that he was sparing her life so that she could tell everyone what happened.
    This guy wants fame, and the media is going to give it to him in spades.

    That’s a possibility.
    It’s also possible he wanted a survivor to tell others what happened as a warning. He was sending a message to the black community that there are people like him out there and they wish us harm. Moreover, if he was willing to waltz into a church, where else are like-minded individuals willing to walk into?

    Hmm, I wonder if the killer chose that specific church because of its importance to the community. Given that churches are very important in the African-American community a strike at an historically important church could be seen as a blow the heart of the community.

  43. Moggie says

    rq:

    Six Victims From Charleston Shooting Identified, please let’s take a moment for them, too.

    Seems to me at least four of those six were women. So much for the “you’re raping our women”.

  44. rq says

    Moggie
    Of the 9 victims, 6 are women, 3 are men. Could just be an accident of bible-study demographics, maybe not. Still. Another tick against ‘erasure of black women’.

  45. says

    Tony

    Does anyone else get a whiff of misogyny (misogynoir to be exact) in there? It’s like he’s addressing black men, and erasing black women.

    All the men are black, all the women are white. But before we delve into how it’s sexist against white women, let’s not forget that the construction of “white womanhood” is part and parcel of white supremacy.

    Gen
    Guess what flag he wore as a patch on his jacket.

    +++
    Re: hate speech laws. Yes, please. After WWII Germany implemented a simple rule: You don’t get to use open society to abolish open society. Some things are off limit.
    I also don’T think that every person who makes racist jokes is going to shoot black people. But every time this is going unnoticed a message is sent. Nobody reacted when he told those jokes when he was 14, 16, 18, 20. He had many, many years of white tolerance and white acceptance. He was not born a white supremacist mass murderer. He became one. He became on in a climate where he made racist statements and everybody seemed to agree with him.

  46. Gen, Uppity Ingrate and Ilk says

    Giliell, 52 Ugh, I know. I talked about it at 20. It’s absolutely chilling and sickening.

  47. scienceavenger says

    @38 Please explain what you mean by this [What fool gave this punk a gun instead of a banjo and a bridge?]

    Sounds like he thinks this guy was clearly a defective human being, and from the evidence, it sounds spot on. What do *you* think he meant? And what [@37 Caine] is bigoted about that?

  48. scienceavenger says

    @19 RE Santorum – that has to be the most disgusting political use of a tragedy ever. Ricky deserves all the Googled misery he gets.

  49. says

    Gen
    Sorry, I got you wrong

    scienceavenger

    Sounds like he thinks this guy was clearly a defective human being, and from the evidence, it sounds spot on.

    No please stop that. Or better, please explain what you mean by “defective human being”? Apparently yestrday morning nobody thought there was anything wrong with him.

  50. scienceavenger says

    @47 I’d have thought gun-free zone arguments would have stopped after the Fort Hood shooting. Word is they have a few weapons there.

  51. qwints says

    @57 scienceavenger, Fort Hood does not allow soldiers to carry weapons freely around base. “Here are the rules on carrying firearms on Fort Hood”

    Soldiers on all military installations, including Fort Hood, are not armed while on post, nor are they permitted to carry any privately owned firearms. Only law enforcement and security personnel are allowed to have weapons on post.

  52. scienceavenger says

    Or better, please explain what you mean by “defective human being”? Apparently yestrday morning nobody thought there was anything wrong with him

    That’s the problem isn’t it, running around with his stars and bars, and spitting out his racist jokes, just like commenter 52 above said. Wait that’s you. Then why are you asking, if you are from the south, you know how normalized this shit is.

    “Defective human being” – dumbass. Mentally challenged. Warped view of the world. Obviously racist as fuck. Why do so many of you seem to have trouble understanding the meaning, seemed pretty clear to me.

  53. Moggie says

    Gen:

    And to further tie it in to the OP, apparently that confederate flag in front of the state house was flying full staff while the others were at half staff this morning.

    I want to know who was responsible for that. I can’t see that being accidental. Somebody has the responsibility of issuing instructions to lower the flags, and it’s somebody’s job to go and do it. Do you think this time they just sort of accidentally forgot the racist traitorous one? No, I reckon that was a conscious decision, and I want to hear them justify it.

  54. rq says

    Please don’t make this about gun-free zones. Please let’s talk about the racism.
    Oh and the gun was gifted to the shooter by his own dad. So no background checks, etc. That’s what loose gun laws get you, armed and angry racists killing black people. So yeah, let’s talk about what made him a racist person.

  55. chigau (違う) says

    scienceavenger #54
    What I think chrisv meant is not relevant.
    In the interest of non-jerking knees, I asked for an explanation.

  56. rq says

    1) Mental illness is not racism.
    2) Racism is not a mental illness.
    (As borrowed from twitter.)
    White supremacy isn’t a mental illness. It’s a cultural condition. But it does not make one mentally challenged, mentally ill, or otherwise ‘defective’ as a human being.
    Human beings, perfectly functional ones, are fully capable of doing great evil and of committing heinous crimes.
    Let’s focus on what helped him foster such hate, the climate in which he grew up in, the jokes other white people let slide.
    And to be clear (to borrow from POTUS), these are not issues exclusive to the USAmerican south. The USAmerican north is rife with racism, and it’s merely a luck of geography that this kind of shooting occurred where it did, latitudinally. Because his kind of normal is certainly normal.

  57. congaboy says

    I really have nothing to add to this thread except that I want to voice my complete support of everything PZ said. I have, for decades, believed that those who display or give reverence to the Confederate flag are anti-American and racists.

  58. chigau (違う) says

    scienceavenger #59
    You are not new here but you may have missed the many discussions we’ve had decrying attempts to equate mental illness and other issues with racism.
    Don’t start another one because it distracts from the main issue.

  59. rq says

    … And because it’s buried in the article:

    Charleston County Corner Rae Wooten identified the victims who died as:

    –State Sen. Clementa Pinckney, the church’s pastor.

    –Cynthia Hurd, 54, St. Andrews regional branch manager for the Charleston County Public Library system.

    –Sharonda Coleman-Singleton, a church pastor, speech therapist and coach of the girls’ track and field team at Goose Creek High School

    –Tywanza Sanders, 26, who had a degree in business administration from Allen University, where Pinckney also attended

    –Ethel Lance, 70, a retired Gilliard Center employee who worked recently as a church janitor.

    –Susie Jackson, 87, Lance’s cousin who was named by a relative and was a longtime church member.

    –Depayne Middleton Doctor, 49, who retired in 2005 as Charleston County director of the Community Development Block Grant Program.

    –Mira Thompson, 59, a pastor at the church.

    –Daniel Simmons Sr., 74, who died in a hospital operating room.

  60. rq says

    Shooters of color are called ‘terrorists’ and ‘thugs.’ Why are white shooters called ‘mentally ill’?

    Police are investigating the shooting of nine African Americans at Emmanuel AME church in Charleston as a hate crime committed by a white man. Unfortunately, it’s not a unique event in American history. Black churches have long been a target of white supremacists who burned and bombed them in an effort to terrorize the black communities that those churches anchored. One of the most egregious terrorist acts in U.S. history was committed against a black church in Birmingham, Ala., in 1963. Four girls were killed when members of the KKK bombed the 16th Street Baptist Church, a tragedy that ignited the Civil Rights Movement.

    But listen to major media outlets and you won’t hear the word “terrorism” used in coverage of Tuesday’s shooting. You won’t hear the white male shooter, identified as 21-year-old Dylann Roof, described as “a possible terrorist.” And if coverage of recent shootings by white suspects is any indication, he never will be. Instead, the go-to explanation for his actions will be mental illness. He will be humanized and called sick, a victim of mistreatment or inadequate mental health resources. Activist Deray McKesson noted this morning that, while discussing Roof’s motivations, an MSNBC anchor said “we don’t know his mental condition.” That is the power of whiteness in America.

    U.S. media practice a different policy when covering crimes involving African Americans and Muslims. As suspects, they are quickly characterized as terrorists and thugs, motivated by evil intent instead of external injustices. While white suspects are lone wolfs — Mayor Joseph Riley of Charleston already emphasized this shooting was an act of just “one hateful person” — violence by black and Muslim people is systemic, demanding response and action from all who share their race or religion. Even black victims are vilified. Their lives are combed for any infraction or hint of justification for the murders or attacks that befall them: Trayvon Martin was wearing a hoodie. Michael Brown stole cigars. Eric Garner sold loosie cigarettes. When a black teenager who committed no crime was tackled and held down by a police officer at a pool party in McKinney, Tex., Fox News host Megyn Kelly described her as “No saint either.”

    Early news reports on the Charleston church shooting followed a similar pattern. Cable news coverage of State Sen. and Rev. Clementa Pinckney, pastor of Emmanuel AME who we now know is among the victims, characterized his advocacy work as something that could ruffle feathers. The habit of characterizing black victims as somehow complicit in their own murders continues.

    It will be difficult to hold to this corrosive, racist media narrative when reporting on the shootings at Emmanuel AME church. All those who were killed were simply participating in a Wednesday night Bible study. And the shooter’s choice of Emmanuel AME was most likely deliberate, given its storied history. It was the first African Methodist Episcopal church in the South, founded in 1818 by a group of men including Morris Brown, a prominent pastor, and Denmark Vesey, the leader of a large, yet failed, slave revolt in Charleston. The church itself was targeted early on by fearful whites because it was built with funds from anti-slavery societies in the North. In 1822, church members were investigated for involvement in planning Vesey’s slave revolt, and the church was burned to the ground in retribution.

    With that context, it’s clear that killing the pastor and members of this church was a deliberate act of hate. Mayor Riley noted that “The only reason that someone could walk into a church and shoot people praying is out of hate.” But we need to take it a step further. There was a message of intimidation behind this shooting, an act that mirrors a history of terrorism against black institutions involved in promoting civil and human rights. The hesitation on the part of some of the media to label the white male killer a terrorist is telling.

    In the rapidly forming news narrative, the fact that black churches and mosques historically have been the targets of racial violence in America should not be overlooked. While the 1963 Birmingham church is the most historic, there also was a series of church burnings during the 1990s. Recognition of the terror those and similar acts impose on communities seems to have been forgotten post-Sept. 11. The subsequent Islamophobia that has gripped sectors of media and politics suggests that “terrorism” only applies in cases where the suspects are darker skinned.

    This time, I hope that reporters and newscasters will ask the questions that get to the root of acts of racially motivated violence in America. Where did this man, who killed parishioners in their church during Bible study, learn to hate black people so much? Did he have an allegiance to the Confederate flag that continues to fly over the state house of South Carolina? Was he influenced by right-wing media’s endless portrayals of black Americans as lazy and violent?

    I hope the media coverage won’t fall back on the typical narrative ascribed to young white male shooters: a lone, disturbed or mentally ill young man failed by society. This is not an act of just “one hateful person.” It is a manifestation of the racial hatred and white supremacy that continues to pervade our society, 50 years after the Birmingham church bombing galvanized the Civil Rights Movement. It should be covered as such. And now that authorities have found their suspect, we should be calling him what he is: a terrorist.

  61. says

    scienceavenger

    That’s the problem isn’t it, running around with his stars and bars, and spitting out his racist jokes, just like commenter 52 above said. Wait that’s you. Then why are you asking, if you are from the south, you know how normalized this shit is.

    1. I am not from the “South” my “South” is on a different continent.
    2. If you got from my comment that normalised racism isn’t the problem then you git me wrong. I apolgise for the confusion. Normalised unchallenged racism is exactly what is wrong and what allowed this guy to further radicalise.

    “Defective human being” – dumbass. Mentally challenged. Warped view of the world. Obviously racist as fuck. Why do so many of you seem to have trouble understanding the meaning, seemed pretty clear to me.

    Being mentally challenged is not the same as being a mass murderer. It is pretty ableist to imply this, same as “mental illness” when there is absolutly no evidence that this was the case and also no causative link.
    Actually, I think I understood you pretty well. In the spirit of the recent discussions about the climate here on Pharyngula I decided to leave room for doubt and ask you for clarification.
    You’re wrong. You’re horribly wrong. This isn’t the story of a lone “defective” guy who decided to murder 9 people out of the blue. It’s the story of white supremacy and racism. The statement quoted in the OP is as old as the history of slavery, painting black men as sexually threatening brutes who savage white women.

  62. sumdum says

    @48 from what I read the shooter lived 100 miles from that church, and it’s a church where MLK spoke, so I wouldn’t be surprised if he chose it with intent to strike at the heart of the black community.

  63. says

    scienceavenger @54:

    Sounds like he thinks this guy was clearly a defective human being, and from the evidence, it sounds spot on. What do *you* think he meant?

    Asking for clarity isn’t a bad thing.

    Also, I really don’t like the phrasing “defective human being”. Too much like othering. The attitudes of the shooter are shared by many, many people out there. None of them are “defective human beings”. They’re racist (and likely sexist, along with some other -ists)

  64. rq says

    sumdum
    That church has so much black history attached to it in addition to MLK speaking there, that it is difficult for me to doubt that he specifically chose it as another layer to his message.

  65. kayden says

    @rq at 69,

    Even Black victims are called thugs by the media. Look what happened to Michael Brown, Trayvon Martin, etc. in the media. Megan Kelly even claimed that the 15-year old girl who was brutalized by that police officer in McKinney “was no saint”.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VAtT1KHwnT4

    But whenever a White person commits a horrific crime, we’re supposed to wonder if they were mentally ill as if that would excuse their behavior. Had Andreas Lubitz been Muslim or Black, would the media have discussed his mental state? Doubt it.

  66. says

    The media (Fox in particular) is turning this into an “attack on Christians,” not a racial attack.
    No, it’s an attack of “secularism” on traditional Christian values.

    They are removing race as a factor.

  67. rq says

    kayden
    The label ‘thug’ is so rarely applied to white people that it is practically synonymous with the n-word.
    White perpetrators are always isolated incidents with [issues]. Someone needs to connect the dots.

  68. eeyore says

    Today, the US Supreme Court ruled in a case brought by some group called the Sons of Confederate Veterans, who were suing the Texas Department of Motor Vehicles for refusing to issue license plates with the confederate flag. The good news is they lost. The bad news is it was only a 5-4 vote, meaning just one more Republican on the court and it likely would have been decided the other way. Also, I suppose it’s progress that Texas had refused to issue the license plates in the first place.

  69. says

    rq, don’t kid yourself.
    THEY get it, but they are deliberately steering their viewers in the wrong direction to make sure their viewers won’t get it.

  70. Moggie says

    Jafafa Hots:

    The media (Fox in particular) is turning this into an “attack on Christians,” not a racial attack.
    No, it’s an attack of “secularism” on traditional Christian values.

    They are removing race as a factor.

    I wonder why a resident of Columbia had to travel all the way to Charleston to make an “attack on Christians”? Christians must be a lot rarer in South Carolina than I thought.

  71. says

    Is there a racism denial Bingo card?
    Lindsey Graham downplays race after black church shooting: ‘People looking for christians to kill them’

    Graham told hosts of The View on Wednesday that his niece had gone to school with Roof.

    “Strange, disturbed young man,” the senator noted. “Emily said in school he was just a quiet strange kid. Seems like one of these Newtown-type guys.”

    Dear Mr. Graham-
    Why is he called a ‘disturbed young man’, rather than a ‘brutal thug’? Why the sympathetic terminology?

    “Once thing it’s not — let’s talk about what it’s not, in my view — it’s not a window into the soul of South Carolina,” Graham insisted. “It’s not who we are, it’s not who our country is, it’s about this guy. This guy has got tons of problems.”

    It’s not a window into the soul of South Carolina?! Certainly not *all* of the residents of South Carolina, but a fair chunk of them. After all, this is a state where (as Gen pointed out @20) a Confederate flag still flies at the state house.

    He continued: “I can’t explain this. I don’t know what would make a young man at 21 get so sick and twisted to kill nine people in a church, this is beyond my understanding.”

    We figured that out the minute you downplayed racism as one of Roof’s motivations.

    “Do you think it’s a hate crime or do you think it’s more mentally disturbed?” one of the co-hosts asked Graham.

    “Probably both,” he replied. “There are real people out there that are organized to kill people in religion and based on race. This guy is just whacked out.”

    Oooh, just what we need in this discussion-armchair mental health diagnoses or speculations from people completely unqualified to judge.

    “But it’s 2015, there are people out there looking for Christians to kill them,” Graham added. “This is a mean time we live in.”

    Just had to put that Christian martyrdom complex on display, eh?

  72. Ogvorbis: failed human says

    Lynna @47:

    Ogvorbis @36, I think you may have left out the gun-rights activist explanation: the church was a gun-free zone, and therefore people died.

    I thought I had that covered with:

    we need more guns so this will not happen,

    but my writing sucks right now.

    Well, for a while.

  73. says

    Just heard a clip from “Fox and Friends” – not only are they calling it an attack on “faith” etc., they are actively criticizing anyone who is “jumping to conclusions” and suggesting race was a factor… Elizabeth Hasselbeck is worried about how she can feel safe in her church… and of course the answer is pastors with guns.

    But they are actively criticizing the idea that there was a race motive.

  74. Azkyroth, B*Cos[F(u)]==Y says

    Also, I really don’t like the phrasing “defective human being”. Too much like othering. The attitudes of the shooter are shared by many, many people out there. None of them are “defective human beings”. They’re racist (and likely sexist, along with some other -ists)

    So, I finally figured out what bothers me about this line of argument.

    “Humanity” has had an aspirational as well as a purely denotative sense basically forever. There are implications of being human, responsibilities to live up to, implied by it, and referring to a violent racist as “defective” may be problematic for historical reasons but “failure as a human being” is pretty accurate.

    Insisting that it can only possibly be used to mean a literal member of the species Homo Sapiens… it’s a “Dictionary Human” Argument.

  75. says

    Words fail me:

    Gov. Nikki Haley, who was in tears during a news conference this morning on the mass shooting at the historically black church, previously rejected the notion of removing the flag at a debate last year, saying it was a “sensitive issue” but that she didn’t believe the flag presented an image problem for the state because she never had “one conversation with a single CEO about the Confederate flag.”

    So I guess we all now know where the Governor’s priorities lie…

  76. kayden says

    @ Tacitus at 88,

    “she didn’t believe the flag presented an image problem for the state because she never had ‘one conversation with a single CEO about the Confederate flag.'”

    What does that even mean? Blacks have been very vocal about wanting the confederate flag taken down. Do they not matter? Wow. Just wow.

  77. tkreacher says

    Kayden #90

    None of the rich white men she spoke to thought there was a problem.

    Therefore no problem.

    The end.

    Well, not quite the end. Since they were all CEO’s, the were also speaking for their corporations. Corporations are also people, so it was actually double the number of people who were ok with it.

  78. Pen says

    @41 – slithey tothe

    I read this question as a disguised attack on PZ for always speaking against ~lotsastuff~

    I’m going to speculate that you don’t know that this is yet another of those issues (like gun control) where the European consensus is broadly different from the American one as are European laws. It’s a distinction that goes way, way beyond anything PZ may do or say. Also there’s no reason you should know that I’ve been involved in debates on the subject regularly all over FTB for a long time, tentatively advocating for the European position.

  79. Crip Dyke, Right Reverend Feminist FuckToy of Death & Her Handmaiden says

    @Moggie, #49:
    (quoting rq)

    rq:
    Six Victims From Charleston Shooting Identified, please let’s take a moment for them, too.

    Seems to me at least four of those six were women. So much for the “you’re raping our women”.

    So, yeah. I totally get where you’re coming from. And the point that I think you’re attempting to make is completely valid.

    However, when you write tersely and leave so much implied, you rely on societal expectations, some of them wrong and harmful, to complete your point.

    in this case, you’re relying on the idea that women never rape. Don’t ever use that as part of your argument, please? I don’t doubt that Roof believed that, and that therefore from Roof’s perspective that statement doesn’t make any sense as a motive for killing women (without further extensions, such as the Black women giving birth to Black boys).

    But to use it the way that you did, relying on it as a shared social understanding, you only make it seem that Roof was actually right about that. And like so many other things, this is a point on which he was horribly wrong.

  80. Pen says

    @ scienceavenger #59

    Then why are you asking, if you are from the south, you know how normalized this shit is.

    A good default assumption for this blog is that nobody is from wherever you are, they’re quite likely not even from the same continent and they have no idea how normalized any particular shit may be wherever you are.

    So, just to shock the Americans who know what the symbol means: last week in Britain’s most multi-racial district, the holiday funfair was flying a confederate flag over one of the rides. 99% or people here see it as something pretty that’s associated with the USA. My American husband said WTF, but I think he’s the exception.

  81. NitricAcid says

    People in Alberta fly the Confederate flag from their trucks as an expression of “Yee-haw cowboy” culture. If they have any political feelings about it at all, it’s a feeling of “local government standing up to a far-away capital that doesn’t understand or respect our way of life” type crap, or just “standing up to big government”.

  82. says

    This is horrible and tragic, and made even worse by the bigots trying to spin the whole thing as an evil secularist attack on Christianity.

    My secular humanist atheist thoughts are with the victims and their families.

  83. PatrickG says

    @ Tony and others re: historicity.

    I found this to be a pretty good (though incomplete) summary. This is a historical black church with a fuckload of history and activism.

    There is no chance he targeted this church on accident. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if we see a manifesto a la Brevik, and since he wasn’t gunned down by police (unusual!), I’m sure he’ll be making us all sick by explaining his “reasons” to the media.

    P.S. I only skimmed comments, mainly due to early coverage of this making me want to throw up (Jebus, Fox and Friends…), so if someone’s posted similarly, apologies for not catching it.

  84. jimmyfromchicago says

    @Nitirc Acid (96)–But isn’t Harper a small-government, pro-local conservative politician from Alberta? How do they expect to get a more sympathetic ear than his?

    One of the more pernicious, long-lived (and false) ideas about the Lost Cause is that “none of this is political” or that any political aspects are simply related to a moot issue (Southern independence), not ongoing racial politics.

  85. microraptor says

    @backupbob- well, you see none of those things were really threats. Up until yesterday, he was just a Responsible Gun Owner who wouldn’t do anything like that. He was just talking, which is absolutely not threatening at all and doesn’t indicate any possibility of actually acting on the things he was saying. Nope, can’t prove a thing.

  86. Nerd of Redhead, Dances OM Trolls says

    After reading about this today, the key points appear to be
    1) the church was targeted since it was a historic church for blacks
    2) the pastor, also a state senator, was his big target, since the senator was effect, and black.
    3) Roof hopes his actions will lead to further actions a la Timothy McVeigh and his bomb in OKC.

    I just hope this fizzles for Roof like the OKC bombing did for McVeigh. There shouldn’t be more deaths.

  87. says

    I just got off my plane. The woman in the seat next to mine was watching MSNBC, and they had a segment where they whimpered about all the mass murders in “places of worship”. On Twitter, some guy is trying to tell me that because the shootings were in a church, the shooter must have been an atheist. Dave Futrelle reports that that repellent snotweasel, Dean Esmay, is blaming the feminists.

    Why is it so hard to see the obvious? This was a racist crime in a racist country swimming in guns.

  88. says

    Let me tell you who else was regarded as a “quiet strange kid” in his youth: me.

    I don’t think I was mentally ill. I also wasn’t interested in murdering anyone.

  89. says

    Jim Atkins said:

    So how much you want to bet this guy was raised Baptist or some kind of fundamentalist?

    Microraptor said:

    Proof once again that the terrorists who pose the greatest danger to America are white Christians.

    I’d like to remind folks that a white atheist killed three young Muslims in North Carolina only a few months ago. A white atheist also organized a protest of hundreds of armed people at a mosque in Phoenix.

    Racism doesn’t limit itself to a single faith, god, or lack thereof.

    Also, there’s an extremely long history of white people focusing racist violence on black Christian churches. Those churches have served as centers of political and social organizing against white racism for ages. That’s why they tend to be targeted by racist violence.

    So, can we try to keep this focused on the actual issue at hand: racism? There’s plenty of opportunity out there to critique religion for its failings but this isn’t the proper context, especially given the history of black churches and white violence… and especially given that there are plenty of racist atheists in the world.

    Plus, consider the widespread state violence committed against black people which occurs on a daily basis: police shootings, disproportionate incarceration, racial profiling, etc. Religion isn’t the source of racist laws, racist policing, racist institutions, and racist behavior. This horrible man’s actions are one example of a general state of terror that black people and other people of color have to endure on a daily basis, coming from all angles. Church attendance is hardly the larger story behind this widespread social pattern.

  90. Lofty says

    PZ

    Let me tell you who else was regarded as a “quiet strange kid” in his youth: me.

    Yes but did you sport the super conservative pudding basin hair cut? At my school they were considered the real weirdos.
    /bad memories

  91. says

    And now, as I read further down the comment thread, I see that conservatives are (similarly) blaming atheism for the shootings. That’s terribly ironic and the same thing I said in last four paragraphs of my post above applies equally well to conservatives’ blaming atheism.

    Feh.

  92. Caroline says

    I saw some on twitter questioning whether or not the suspect was even white, because he looked you know , a little mixed. Seriously.

  93. pacal says

    chrisv #35

    What fool gave this punk a gun instead of a banjo and a bridge?

    Please explain what you mean by this.

    I believe this refers to two scenes in the movie Deliverance. In one scene one of the movies protagonists has a musical duel with a kid playing a banjo he is playing a guitar. The result is the instrumental piece Dueling Banjos. Later in the movie the protagonists see the kid with his banjo on a bridge.

    The Dueling Banjo scene can be found on Youtube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mpL0Q2OSRwQ.

  94. says

    So I’m listening to TWiBPrime’s coverage of this, and Aaron Rand Freeman (one of the hosts) talked about how, in order to protect himself, he no longer sees any reason to not protect himself against racism from white people by wondering, and generally not feeling immediately safe around white people. I agree with him 100%.

    Schroedinger’s Racist

    This is a thing that we HAVE to deal with, now. It’s real. I already fully expect women to not be sure right off the bat of me as a dude. I have no problem expecting the same from people of color and black people especially.

    This is where we fucking are in this country. Nothing’s changed. We can end segregation, we can elect a half-black man as president… none of that changes shit.

    We still. Live. In. A. White. Supremacy.

    And at this point, my response to anyone saying otherwise is to punch them in the jaw, because fuck them and their racist asses.

    I mean… and in this day and age, black people are still fucking told to “be peaceful”.

    Why? What have we white fucks ever done to make them feel safe enough to be “peaceful”? It’s we white people who need to “be peaceful”.

    Also, everyone needs to listen to TWiBPrime.

  95. ck, the Irate Lump says

    Oh, so when the police said they were looking for the guy with a truck with a “distinctive” license plate, they just didn’t want to say “confederate”. What a surprise.

  96. says

    timberwraith @105:

    I’d like to remind folks that a white atheist killed three young Muslims in North Carolina only a few months ago. A white atheist also organized a protest of hundreds of armed people at a mosque in Phoenix.
    Racism doesn’t limit itself to a single faith, god, or lack thereof.

    While all of what you say is true, if you look at the many examples of terrorism in the United States over the last few decades, many, many of them were committed by Right Wing Christian extremists:

    http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/publications/terror-from-the-right

    http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2014/12/04/3599271/austin-shooter-christian-extremism/

    http://www.rawstory.com/2015/01/americas-10-worst-terror-attacks-by-christian-fundamentalist-and-far-right-extremists/

    http://www.ifyouonlynews.com/religion/christian-terror-12-examples-of-terrorism-from-the-right/

    And of course there is a strong connection between right-wing extremism and the Christian Identity Movement.

    With so many terrorist acts being committed by Right Wing Christian extremists in the US, I fully understand why people might suspect that Dylann Roof’s religious beliefs played a role in his murderous actions.

    So, can we try to keep this focused on the actual issue at hand: racism? There’s plenty of opportunity out there to critique religion for its failings but this isn’t the proper context, especially given the history of black churches and white violence… and especially given that there are plenty of racist atheists in the world.

    I don’t see anyone dismissing the racism at the heart of Roof’s actions. But racism may not be the only motive at the heart of Roof’s deadly actions. Religious beliefs have played a role in enough acts of terror in the United States for this to be a reasonable topic to discuss in this situation.

  97. says

    Even I’m loathe to let any other narrative other than the one around racism slip in to this. We know he was white and was a racist. I haven’t seen anything yet confirm his religious identity other than the fact that he sat in the church for an hour before doing this.

    And even if his religious identity played a roll, racism is still not only the main motive, but the motive he expressed rather directly. He didn’t say anything about God or Jesus or being on a holy mission or whatever. Everything he said… his whole statement, was pure racism, and that was it.

    So for all I know, he could have been an atheist. Sure, odds are he was a Christian, given where he lived, but there’s zero evidence that religion had anything to do with what he did right now. It might have been the furthest thing from his mind. Hell… he might have even resigned himself to an eternity of Hell for this. We don’t know. All we know is that he was a White Supremacist and a terrorist. His religion hasn’t entered the picture yet, and even if or when it does, it still doesn’t change the fact that his stated motive was purely racist.

  98. tomh says

    @ #78 eeyore wrote, about the Texas confederate flag case:

    The bad news is it was only a 5-4 vote, meaning just one more Republican on the court and it likely would have been decided the other way.

    You can never tell. The deciding vote, to go along with Breyer, Ginsburg, Sotomayor and Kagan, was Clarence Thomas.

  99. says

    I’ve thought a lot about this issue. We need words to describe the brains and minds of people who have effectively broken them in the context of functioning in society. Brains and minds that are basically fine from the standpoint of hardware, but got messed up in how they function from culture and choice. Racists are racist because of role-models and choices and they are just as human as the rest of us. Pointing at bridges and banjos is a convenient means of refusing to stare at human awfulness and know it for what it is.

    The technical terms don’t work right now because society loves to have what is basically historically inspired scape-goating as slang. It’s similar to the problem that prevents the public and media from talking about Clementa Pinckney, Cynthia Hurd, Sharonda Coleman-Singleton, Tywanza Sanders, Ethel Lance, Susie Jackson, Depayne Middleton, Mira Thompson and Daniel Simmons. The media and society find shoving a killer and claims of mental illness in our faces more interesting because the dangerous person is sensational, the mental illness claim makes whites feel better, and we don’t have to think about dead black people.

    In the case of words like idiot, moron and similar they got strength because they used to be actual diagnoses and it was a convenient way to paint a label somewhere. The fact that they are no longer actual diagnosed conditions helps and so I don’t complain as much as I could (like I would psychopath or someone saying another person’s argument was ” schizophrenic “), but using them hides the truth from the person who uses them. The real enemy is the cultural beliefs and behaviors that create this situation. The real enemy the social isolation that lets this sort of thing become an echo chamber.

    And the real enemy is also the beliefs and behaviors that let us hide the problem from ourselves.

  100. says

    Oh and jokes? Fuck anyone using the “just joking” excuse in any context. I’ve been looking into the psychology of humor and humor transforms emotions.
    *More or less intense.
    *One emotion into another.

    Of particular note here is that very often (I would say most often in the case of racist, sexist and gendered jokes) humor transforms anger, fear and disgust. So when I see someone making those kinds of jokes I immediately start looking to see which of them the person is trying to ease. Are they trying to ease their disgust? Calm their fears? Hide their anger? It also attempts to look for and create camaraderie though social pressure.

    With enough practice you can learn to spot which one and drop a “so how long have you been afraid of black people?” “How long have you found people speaking Spanish disgusting?”. A paper like this, some other background material and some practice at dissecting a joke and there are many ways that situation can be twisted. No joke is “just a joke”. Not even satire. They are often social weapons, which explains the social mess.

    I’m not saying that everyone is in a social position where they can actually do something like this. But the tools are there. No racist should get to salve their feelings when they need to be confronted and dealt with, by themselves if possible, by society if necessary.

  101. says

    Nate @114:

    We know he was white and was a racist. I haven’t seen anything yet confirm his religious identity other than the fact that he sat in the church for an hour before doing this.

    Given his white supremacist leanings

    In a Facebook profile apparently belonging to Roof, a portrait showed him wearing a jacket emblazoned with the flags of apartheid-era South Africa and of the former Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, both formerly ruled by white minorities.

    combined with his Confederate license plate, I think it’s reasonable to suspect that he might have ties to a Christian extremist group. Note-I’m not saying he definitely is, but there are enough red flags that point to the possibility that Roof was a Christian extremist of some sort.

    Incidentally, the SPLC has identified at least 19 hate groups based in South Carolina.

  102. ck, the Irate Lump says

    NateHevens. He who hates straight, white, cis-gendered, able-bodied men (not really) wrote:

    There’s a video at that link.

    You watched the video? I was disgusted enough with the article that I didn’t bother. I did see some of the comments were surprisingly reasonable with some saying things to the effect that labeling this false flag is silly because a racist asshole shooting people isn’t surprising. It’s a low bar to be sure, but it is infowars, where no conspiracy is too far fetched.

  103. llewelly says

    Watch out, this will get ugly. These are all quotes from Mike Adams. Probably you could have predicted this.

    “this attack fits all the signs of a deliberate plot designed to ignite a race war in America.”


    • The attack was carried out by a white man. (Or at least a man who appeared to have white skin. These days, we don’t actually know whether this man “self identifies” as white or possibly another race, so we can’t be sure until we ask him… or her.)”

    “Watch for the media to somehow tie this into Rachel Dolezal and the newly-viral issue of “race self-identity.””

    That’s castle bravo grade projection there.

    “Watch for law enforcement authorities to “discover” and announce that the guy has visited Infowars.com and is an Alex Jones fan. ”

    http://web.archive.org/web/20150619014558/http://www.naturalnews.com/050115_church_shooting_Charleston_race_war.html

  104. says

    An NRA spokesperson has blamed Pastor Pinckney for his and the others’ deaths, because as state senator, Pinckney was for gun control.

    The sickness in American culture is endless.

  105. says

    A lot of restraint on Facebook today, so tempted to go off this person:

    There’s an important point that this speaker is missing about terrorism. He was correct when he said terrorism is political BUT the point of terrorism is to cause so much fear that it disrupts normal life and activity for its victims. This killer didn’t do that. It was a surprise attack, mass murder but not terrorism. This thug is on the way to being a fully fledged terrorist and he has the mind set to be one, but this crime was not terrorism. It was a hate crime mass murder. It’s a good thing that he was identified and arrested so that, if justice is served, he will never be able to complete his progress towards being a terrorist.

    So I was tempted sorely tempted, but I said:
    I am sorry Christine no. Your premise is flawed. The fact that he took them by surprise doesn’t mean that it wasn’t terrorism. Otherwise why do people stick around other than they didn’t know for suicide bombings which take people by surprise?

    Someone else succumbed, and I am sure that was more gratifying than edifying:

    you’re incredibly stupid.

    Don’t ask me why she formed that conclusion. I don’t know.

  106. chigau (違う) says

    pacal #110
    I know what chrisv was referring to.
    I am confident that many or most others in the thread also caught the reference.
    I wanted an explanation of why chrisv made that reference.

  107. Beatrice, an amateur cynic looking for a happy thought says

    I agree with NateHavens’ # 114.
    It is useless and probably counterproductive to speculate about the killer’s religious leanings. It distracts from the racism angle and it plays into Christians versus atheists sniping at each other which ones are more murderous in a case where religion is at this point an unknown factor.

    After the killer’s religion is revealed, there will be enough useless “told you sos”, no need to jump ahead.

    The so far known contributing factor, a major contributing factor : racism.

  108. PatrickG says

    @ Beatrice:

    Adding to your excellent comment, I’ll merely repeat what others have pointed out, and add proprietary sexism. Most certainly a lesser contributing factor, and certainly implicit/unconscious compared to racism, as far as I can tell, but very definitely present. Again, as has already been pointed out.

    But yeah, add me to the crowd asserting that speculation about religious motivations on the extremely limited evidence so far is pointless, and even counterproductive. Others’ mileage may vary.

  109. Beatrice, an amateur cynic looking for a happy thought says

    backupbob

    [quoting papers] A childhood friend with whom Roof had recently become reacquainted said Roof started railing about the Trayvon Martin case in recent weeks, complaining about black people “taking over the world” and about the need for someone to do something about it for the sake of “the white race.”

    So people around him knew he was dangerous, deeply racist and wanted to kill black people to start a civil war, and the kill himself….and did not report this to police.

    I don’t know, it’s tricky to weed out people who are liable to commit the atrocities they loudly praise from the people who won’t do that without enough of a social push (someone willing to commit a mass murder or terrorist attack on their own versus someone with the exact same views who would rather wait for a convenient Hitler (sorry)).
    If his place of living is as racist as it seems apparent from all the reports I read about racism and violence in (parts of) the US, then people like him must be a dime a dozen (like him in the sense of their views on non-white people). And yet the others will go through their whole lives doing “just ” smaller, more socially acceptable acts of racism. Of course, he could be an exemption, where his behavior was clearly dangerous, but what we hear now can also be results of hindsight. Oh yeah, now that I think about it, when we were discussing how worthless black people are, he was especially vehement about that… things like that

  110. says

    Tony
    Well, folks on Twitter say they have one if you can safely assume that he loved pizza cause who doesn’t?

    Pen

    So, just to shock the Americans who know what the symbol means: last week in Britain’s most multi-racial district, the holiday funfair was flying a confederate flag over one of the rides. 99% or people here see it as something pretty that’s associated with the USA.

    Similar in Germany. But I think it also makes an argument about the USA: The proud racist heritage has become so ingrained that people from outside see it as part of US American identity.

    +++

    Dave Futrelle reports that that repellent snotweasel, Dean Esmay, is blaming the feminists.

    Who else, who else…
    +++
    Yeah, it was everything but racism. Apparently, wearing racist regalia, ranting loudly against black people, commiting a premediated and anounced act of mass murder against black people at a place that is deeply linked with the civil rights movement does not make you racist. In that case, sure, racism is over. Because by now even if somebody acts with all the villainy that’s usually “requested” as proof of racism, it isn’t.
    Black people are denied their identity and suffering even in death.

    +++
    Caroline

    I saw some on twitter questioning whether or not the suspect was even white, because he looked you know , a little mixed. Seriously.

    Saw that, too. My eyes rolled so hard, I tore a muscle I think…

  111. rq says

    What Beatrice said. People share all kinds of fantasies with their friends, and sometimes we just think those people are a little weird. Most times they do nothing. Unfortunately Roof did act on his fantasies. People around him probably knew he was deeply racist (probably a little more racist than they were comfortable with themselves), but I doubt they recognized him as dangerous rather than, just, you know, weird. And a little too racist. And he was 21, which means he probably got the benefit of youth – ‘he’ll go to college and he’ll learn and he’ll change’.
    Fucking 21, though, how do you learn to hate so bad, so young?

  112. Gen, Uppity Ingrate and Ilk says

    Black people are denied their identity and suffering even in death.

    Giliell 132

    That is very powerful and very true.

    I know I’m hammering on and on about the flag issue, but there are two reasons for that. The first is that I’m absolutely sickened that there are people out there who… fetishize? Is that the right word? Who look up to the atrocities of Apartheid and think “boy, that sure was a great time and a good idea”. I mean, make no mistake, there are certainly many of those here in South Africa to my great dismay, white people who just cling to the past as some sort of Golden Age for the White Man and can’t see past their own benefit to the blood and tears and sweat and lives lost and slavery that actually bought them that unearned wealth. But that there are other people out there in the wider world, away from the toxic, self-reinforcing far right wing circles here in South Africa, who don’t look at that flag, at that time and go “Never again”… that’s just… I don’t even know how to describe how sickened and devastating that is to me.

    The other thing is, as we privileged whites in South Africa had to learn (and once again, make no mistake, very far from everyone here actually learned this, once again to my great frustration and dismay and disgust), that symbols matter. When you fly a certain flag, when you sing a certain anthem associated with a certain time and place, you’re saying that you identify positively with that time and that place. You’re basically saying ‘yeah, I’m fine with, nay proud of the things that were done under the auspices of this flag’. When that time and that place is as toxic and disgusting as Apartheid South Africa or the Antebellum/Civil War South, how can it not be see as an explicit endorsement of racism, segregation and white supremacy? I mean, what else is there to be proud of, that isn’t covered by the new flag/anthem?

  113. says

    I’m clearly in the minority thinking there’s a strong possibility that Dylann Storm Roof is a religious extremist. I know there isn’t any proof (and everything on him-the flags of South Africa and Rhodesia on his jacket; his espousing white supremacist ideology-is circumstantial at best), so I’ll shut up.

  114. mildlymagnificent says

    Giliell, professional cynic -Ilk- @132

    Similar in Germany. But I think it also makes an argument about the USA: The proud racist heritage has become so ingrained that people from outside see it as part of US American identity.

    See it not so often in Oz, but whenever I do, I see it as a gun-nut identifier. Unfortunately, that more or less automatically also includes racism.

  115. says

    Gen

    The other thing is, as we privileged whites in South Africa had to learn (and once again, make no mistake, very far from everyone here actually learned this, once again to my great frustration and dismay and disgust), that symbols matter.

    This.
    To tie it back to the Confederate flag and identity: If the outside world (who might not understand the symbols perfectly) realises that this shit is part of your culture and identity, you have a problem. At the risk of Godwining this: If the world thought that flying Swastika flags and the “Reichskriegsflagge” (black white red,with an eagle, official German flag during the Nazi eara when displayed without the eagle) were normal parts of German culture so that they’d fly them at the Beijing Oktoberfest, it would greatly worry me. Scrap that, it would probably make me panic.

  116. says

    More background on Dylann Roof-
    What we know about South Carolina shooting suspect Dylann Roof:

    Roof was arrested twice earlier this year, according to the Lexington County Sheriff’s Department, which tells TIME he had been booked at the Lexington County Detention Center on Feb. 28 and April 26, after being arrested by the Columbia Police Department. Local reports have said he was arrested at least once on drug charges. NPR has published the incident reports from the February and April arrests, which took place at the Columbiana mall in Columbia, S.C.

    A Facebook page in the name of Dylann Roof, featuring a photo released by Berkeley County authorities in South Carolina, suggests the suspect attended White Knoll High School and was from the city of Columbia.

    In the picture featured on the Facebook page, he is wearing a jacket bearing images of the flags of apartheid-era South African and the Republic of Rhodesia, the name for Zimbabwe when it was run by a postcolonial white minority in the 1970s.

    A man identifying himself as Roof’s uncle, Carson Cowles, 56, told Reuters that Roof’s father had recently given him a .45-caliber handgun as a birthday present. “I actually talked to him on the phone briefly for just a few moments and he was saying, ‘Well, I’m outside practicing with my new gun,’” he said.

    Derrick Pearson, a former classmate of the suspect told the Independent that Roof “mostly kept to himself.” An AP report citing a man who identified himself as an old friend of Roof, named Joseph Meek Jr., said Roof had recently made racist comments against African Americans that had come out of nowhere.

    Dylann Roof’s family says Charleston shooting suspect is introverted:

    Roof’s family members described the 21-year-old, who apparently received a .45-caliber pistol for his 21st birthday, as introverted. Roof’s uncle Carson Cowles told his sister, Roof’s mother, that the boy was overly withdrawn, Reuters reported.

    “I said he was like 19 years old, he still didn’t have a job, a driver’s license or anything like that and he just stayed in his room a lot of the time,” Cowles said.

    “I don’t have any words for it. Nobody in my family had seen anything like this coming,” he said. “I said, if it is him, and when they catch him, he’s got to pay for this.”

    Joey Meek, one of Roof’s childhood friends, said he alerted the FBI after recognising him in a surveillance camera image that was widely circulated by law enforcement agencies early on Thursday, Meek’s mother, Kimberly Konzny, told the Associated Press. Roof had worn the same sweatshirt while playing Xbox videogames in their home recently, she said.

    “I don’t know what was going through his head,” Konzny said. “He was a really sweet kid. He was quiet. He only had a few friends.”

    Related: Charleston church shooting: 21-year-old suspect captured as ‘holy city’ mourns

    Though police say Roof lived in Columbia, South Carolina, he apparently had ties to the nearby Lexington area. Roof had a mixed educational record in the Lexington school district, attending White Knoll high school in both the 2008-09 and 2009-10 school years. He repeated ninth grade both years, but was pulled and re-enrolled more than once. He also attended White Knoll elementary school for fourth grade in 2003-04.

    The Lexington school district said it was unable to find annual photos of Roof, and that it has no records of other schools he might have attended.

    Roof also had at least two run-ins with the law. The Lexington County district attorney’s office confirmed that Roof was charged with possession of a controlled substance in a 2 March incident, but the circumstances surrounding that arrest remain unclear.

    He was also arrested in April for misdemeanor trespassing in Lexington County.

    More still-
    Roommate says Charleston suspect planned shooting for six months:

    The roommate of the white, 21-year old man who allegedly massacred nine people at a historic black church in Charleston, South Carolina said Thursday that he thought the suspect had been planning the attack for about six months.

    Dalton Tyler told ABC News that he’d known Dylann Storm Roof for about seven months to a year. Tyler told the news outlet that he last saw Roof about a week ago and knew he’d been planning something like the Charleston church attack “for six months.”

    “He was big into segregation and other stuff,” Tyler told ABC News. “He said he wanted to start a civil war. He said he was going to do something like that and then kill himself.”

    Tyler described Roof as “on and off” with his parents, according to ABC News. Members of Roof’s immediate family have not given extensive comment on his alleged crime.

    A woman who on Thursday answered a cellphone belonging to Roof’s mother, Amelia, told Reuters “We will be doing no interviews ever.”

    A reporter for the Post And Courier newspaper tweeted that a man who answered the door at Roof’s Eastover, South Carolina home declined to speak with reporters and told them get off his property.

  117. rq says

    Tony
    I don’t think you’re a minority, it’s just not the most-visible thing he is that the media refuses to acknowledge. As Giliell says, I’m pretty sure he’s also a religious extremist (his sexist/misogynist views are a small bit of evidence for that), but it’s the racism that big-name media keep denying. (I think he might be conservative-atheist, but… that’s pure speculation.)

    Not reading anything more on his background, though. Don’t want to hear how he was so quiet and withdrawn and everybody noticed his racism but nobody ever, ever, ever did anything.
    He killed nine people for racist reasons. Stop looking at him, start looking at the cultural background in which he grew up.

  118. says

    rq @140:

    Stop looking at him, start looking at the cultural background in which he grew up.

    I wonder how much they’ll be able to turn up, especially since his family doesn’t seem very forthcoming with information.

  119. rq says

    Clarification on my 140:
    I don’t want to hear about his character anymore, but I do want to know about his reasons. Media seem afraid to talk about those honestly.

  120. rq says

    Tony
    They don’t need his family to get the cultural context in which he grew up.

  121. says

    rq

    As Giliell says, I’m pretty sure he’s also a religious extremist (his sexist/misogynist views are a small bit of evidence for that), but it’s the racism that big-name media keep denying. (I think he might be conservative-atheist, but… that’s pure speculation.)

    One thing is that if there are known religious ties then the media would have to stop the “attack on faith” narrative.
    Also, I’m with you. i’m sick and tired of how he’s constantly humanised and shit but none of his victims get that airtime.

  122. chrislawson says

    I’m Australian, but I know the history of the Confederacy and the racist, proslavery, wannabe-aristocratic culture behind it. I know this, so there’s sure as hell no excuse for anyone who grew up in the actual states that fought the Civil War to not know this. (I’m not claiming Australia is superior in this regard — we have plenty of people who live in a state of wilful ignorance about our own history.) Anyone who slaps a Confederate flag on anything as a matter of pride is contemptible. Southerners can still take plenty of pride from history — it’s just that they should be celebrating people like MLK and Harper Lee and Katherine Ann Porter and any number of great musicians and artists and antislavery activists. What I’m saying is, people can find plenty of historical Southerners worthy of respect without latching onto racist slaveholding warmongers, which suggests to me that the real thing behind Southern pride is not the southernness but the racism, slaveholding, and warmongering.

  123. rq says

    They don’t need his family to get the cultural context in which he grew up.

    By which I mean (a) his family is allowed to not give interviews if they don’t want to (at least not now, not immediately) and (b) so many other things can help paint a portrait of his views – Roof himself, for one, but he probably had a computer, some kind of friends (one of which… well… confederate fan there too), etc. The white supremacy that he indulged in is so much more than just his family.
    I like chrislawson‘s point about southern pride, too – so much more to it than the confederate flag, and yet somehow it’s the confederate flag that is essential to ‘southern pride’.

  124. rq says

    You know what I don’t get? Articles on the shooting that put up a photo of Roof right under (or above) the headline, rather than any one (or more) of the victims, or even the church where it happened. I really, really don’t get that.

  125. F.O. says

    So, the dangerous rampaging murderer has NOT been killed?
    Oh right. White.

    While it is sensible to assume that the guy is Christian, I would be inclined to think that religion doesn’t have much significance in this case, if not to reinforce his sense of identity.

  126. reddiaperbaby1942 says

    To Gilliell at #132:
    ” Black people are denied their identity and suffering even in death.”
    This is by no means new. An analogy I’m familiar with is the refusal by the Soviet Union to identify Russian victims of the Holocaust as Jewish. They were identified merely as Soviet citizens, thus at the same time erasing their Jewishness and increasing the number of “Soviet” victims. I think East Germany and Poland did the same thing, but about that I’m not sure.

  127. says

    There’s at least one good thing coming out of this: thanks to this idiot’s choice of targets, the history of that church, and its place in the anti-slavery movement, are now front page news (on NPR at least). And I’m pretty sure I’m not the only white guy who’s now hearing about that history, in some detail, for the first time.

  128. slithey tove (twas brillig (stevem)) says

    I was pleased to see Stewart’s reaction to the “event”, on The Daily Show, last night. No outrage, (at FauxNoise), just simple statement and recognition that “keeping Americans safe from terrorists” is misdirected. He then followed it with no mocking of other news, nor other comedy bits, just directly into the interview with Mahala, the 2014 Nobel Peace Prize lauriat. And her work to just speak simple statements to powerful people, and encourage regular kids to do the best they want and to ‘go for it’. No big huge idealistic utopia speeches to “inspire” kids, that adults will just dismiss as “unachievable”. Essentially exemplifying the motto, Big journeys are achieved with little steps.. IOW: to make things better for everyone, make something better for at least one person, then the next, so on and on.

  129. says

    The Confederate flag has unfortunately become associated with rebellion in the good sense in a lot of pop culture. What do a lot of people in their 30s and 40s think of when they see that flag? The Dukes of Hazzard, the title characters of which drove around in an orange Dodge Charger called the General Lee, with a Confederate flag on the roof. And they were the good guys in the story. The show was highly popular for much of its run. And that’s just one example of how the meaning of that flag, support for a racist territory, has been obscured.

  130. Alexander says

    Of all the news articles I’ve seen so far covering this, here’s one that isn’t afraid to call things as they are.

    http://crooksandliars.com/2015/06/dear-gop-south-carolina-blood-your-hands

    Dylann Storm Roof, the shooter, said, “You rape our women and you’re taking over our country. And you have to go.” Gee, I wonder where he got that idea? Fox News? Sean Hannity? Alex Jones? Anybody want to check in, talk about where this guy could possibly have got these nutty ideas?

     

    The right wing machine works their voters up into a froth of outrage and despair, until they believe they have to DO SOMETHING or the country they love will be destroyed! And naturally, they all have guns.

  131. David Marjanović says

    So, just to shock the Americans who know what the symbol means: last week in Britain’s most multi-racial district, the holiday funfair was flying a confederate flag over one of the rides. 99% or people here see it as something pretty that’s associated with the USA. My American husband said WTF, but I think he’s the exception.

    That’s nothing. I’ve seen a black man wear a T-shirt with a big confederate flag in it in Berlin (Germany, not Texas). :-S I think the first thing people think of when they see the stars & bars is US motorcycle culture and/or Marlboro freedom.

  132. says

    DAvid

    I’ve seen a black man wear a T-shirt with a big confederate flag in it in Berlin

    Why should a black guy in Germany necessarily know more about the history of that flag than a white guy? Chances are he got the same lousy education as the general population. He’s not automatically better educated on racism than anybody else, just more affected.

  133. fergl100 says

    “You’re raping our women”

    “someone needed to do something about it for the white race”.

    No racism here. Move along.

  134. Cas says

    There is something inconsistent with the Charleston shooter’s alleged evocation of the historical myth of black man as beast and rapist of white women, and the fact that he killed mostly black women. Did he only shoot black women because there were no more black men to kill? Because black women birth, care for and love black men? Or because he didn’t see black women as women at all, and, as something less than women (and certainly lesser than white women), felt us undeserving of the same valiance he conjured on behalf of the women he claim to be protecting?

    http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jun/18/charleston-shooter-black-women-white-women-rape

  135. Jackie the social justice WIZZARD!!! says

    Fox is encouraging black men to carry guns? Christ. They’re already getting shot by racist cops for Skittles, cell phones and BB guns. Arming them won’t save them from racists murderers. It will only be used as an excuse to kill more black men.

  136. says

    @167 Jackie, not only kill more Black men, but claim they were justified, as an armed Black man is even more of a threat than one with Skittles. Never underestimate the ability of whiteness to find ways to subjugate PoC. If we put half as much effort into fighting climate change, we’d all be flying in driverless solar cars.

  137. marcus says

    You folks are apparently not getting the “real news” from Fucks.
    This was a religiously motivated attack against Christians!
    Todd Starnes makes that very clear in his article.

    Chinn tells me the attack on the pastor and parishioners at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church is the worst attack on an assembled congregation in American history.

    Violence directed against the church has been growing over the past decade,” said Tim Miller, the president of LionHeart International Services Group. “My fear is what we saw in Charleston is one incident of many more to come.”

    “Church security really matters,” he told me. “Churches are becoming more and more a major target. Dealing with this is really important.”

    It does not identify the congregation as African-American anywhere in the article, obviously that point is irrelevant.

  138. Jonah Glou says

    I wouldn’t put too much stock in the specifics of the murderer reloading five times and calmly saying, “I have to do it. You’re raping our women and taking over the country. You have to go.” The story is admittedly hearsay, and too me the reported words sound a bit off, a bit too pat, like something got lost in the retelling. Reloading five times is also surprising, as that seems like an awful lot, and often a killer is stopped while reloading. I don’t think there’s an intention to mislead, just the usual unreliable transmission through us faulty humans.

    Not to take anything away from the guy being a horrible racist murderer. It just seems that people are putting a lot of weight on these specific words and the analysis of them. While we may never now for sure, I wouldn’t be surprised if direct testimony from the witnesses paints a different picture.

    Or maybe I’m wrong and they’ll confirm that he did and said exactly that.

  139. David Marjanović says

    Why should a black guy in Germany necessarily know more about the history of that flag than a white guy?

    Didn’t say he would. It just really drives the point home that people outside the US tend to have no idea.

    Not to take anything away from the guy being a horrible racist murderer. It just seems that people are putting a lot of weight on these specific words and the analysis of them. While we may never now for sure, I wouldn’t be surprised if direct testimony from the witnesses paints a different picture.

    Or maybe I’m wrong and they’ll confirm that he did and said exactly that.

    Or you could have read comments 79 and 100 and seen that independent evidence leads to the same conclusion anyway.

  140. ceesays says

    Jaonah Glou #170

    So you’re comfortable with calling a black witness a liar? How lovely for you.

  141. says

    ceesays @175:
    I wonder if Jonah would have believed this

    “I have to do it. You’re raping our women and taking over the country. You have to go.”

    If a man said it.

  142. rq says

    Cas
    Yes, he killed more black women than men, but I have a feeling this has more to do with the demographics of who attends bible studies rather than outright misogyny – not that he’s not misogynist, mind, but I think it has more to do with that than some sort of inconsistency in his beliefs.
    Plus, black women get erased from practically everything, even victimhood, soo…

  143. says

    Something that just struck me and has me more irritated about this act of terrorism-
    So many people in the US claim racism is dead.
    They never say when it died, though it’s apparently sometime after the death of MLK, Jr.
    They never say how it died, though they’ll hint that MLK, Jr had a big role to play.
    They never say who killed it, but they’ll invoke MLK, Jr, while ignoring the fact that he was assassinated.
    They never acknowledge that racist beliefs didn’t just “turn off” in the minds of millions of USAmericans in the wake of the Civil Rights Movement.
    But they continue to assert that racism is dead. So much so that when people say or do racist things or when racist policies impact PoC-whether it’s cops engaging in police brutality, racial policing practices, racial disparities in the labor or housing market, racial disparities in Hollywood, the sexual violence against African-American, Hispanic, and American Indian women, or the mass incarceration of black and brown people-they claim this shit isn’t racist. That’s infuriating enough on its own, bc it shows a profoundly limited understanding of racism.

    But here is a blatant example of racism. Dylann Roof stated his intentions. He wanted to start a race war. He wants segregation back. He wants black people dead.
    And yet you have politicians making claims like “we don’t know why he did it”. We have pundits claiming President Obama is to blame for this. We have assholes claiming it was actually the fault of Senator Pinckney for voting against guns. We have so many assholes avoiding the very real, very visible elephant in the room. The elephant that millions of people can see. The elephant that wasn’t quiet and unobtrusive.
    The elephant of blatant, naked, unbridled racism. The kind of racism that people talk about as being “dead”. The kind of racism that evokes lynchings by the KKK, the Tulsa Riots of 1921, and D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation. This overt racism is what many think of when they talk about racism, because so many people do not acknowledge the existence of structural, systemic, representational, or discursive racism. They only acknowledge behavioral racism.

    And yet, here we have a blatant case of behavioral racism and people *STILL* deny it exists!

    Fuck. Me!

  144. brucegorton says

    I work in news.

    When the story broke, and for several hours afterwards, we searched Charleston on our wires for images – and we go pictures of Hillary Clinton.

  145. cuervocuero says

    #96, #99.
    Alberta has more going on with the Stars and Bars US Confederacy symbol than ‘good ole boy’ Country and Western ‘culture’ identification.
    Post-Civil War, many Secessionist backers migrated to the Alberta part of the Northwest Territories rather than remain ‘in the Union’. Racism against brown skin of all hues is alive and well in all corners but especially the rural ones. There’s a white power group holed up in their compound not far from the city of Calgary that’s part malicious bathos and part terrorist to the locals. An intimate was treated to an overhead conversation in a diner near the compound where one ‘intellectual’ was instilling in another the virtues of reading “Mein Kampf”. I can add to that direct testimonials of family racists, some still showing their American immigre roots and some sprouted directly in Canadian manure.

    The Stars and Bars in Alberta at least isn’t rebel signage, It’s Rebel signage with the thinnest veneer of manners smeared over it. This might be why so many are hyperventilating at the gain of provincial power here by SOCIALISTS, a regime change of course instigated by ‘urban’ (ear piercing dog whistle) votes.

  146. says

    If there is a prize for clueless and offensive remarks, Republican presidential candidate Rick Perry wins. The tragedy in Charleston where a white man shot nine black people was, according to former Governor of Texas, Rick Perry, an “accident.” The cause was “prescription drugs,” and President Obama should not seize the day to bring up gun control.

    “This is the (modus operandi) of this administration, any time there is an accident like this,” Perry said. “The president is clear, he doesn’t like for Americans to have guns and so he uses every opportunity, this being another one, to basically go parrot that message.” […]

    “It seems to me, again without having all the details about this, that these individuals have been medicated and there may be a real issue in this country from the standpoint of these drugs and how they’re used,” Perry said.

    Raw Story link

    This is the same Rick Perry who says he has some experience with being addlepated thanks to prescription drugs. He blames his worst 2012 presidential debate performance on prescription painkillers.

    Other Republican presidential candidates fared badly when questioned about the shooting, but Rick Perry was the prize-winning dunderhead of the bunch. Jeb Bush said he couldn’t figure out if the shooter was racist or not. Mike Huckabee is in the growing group that thinks the shooting would not have happened if more people brought guns to church. Santorum went with the “attack on religious liberty” explanation.

  147. What a Maroon, oblivious says

    An accident? A fucking accident?

    I know the Republicans are competing to see who can be the most willfully ignorant, but that’s just obscene.

  148. johnx says

    these are not issues exclusive to the USAmerican south. The USAmerican north is rife with racism, and it’s merely a luck of geography that this kind of shooting occurred where it did, latitudinally.

    Hmm. Given the deeply racist history the south has, the history that particular church has (look into it), this comes across as an apologist white washing. Perhaps I misunderstood. The racist shoe fits ESPECIALLY well in the southern United States, sorry, not sorry because its true.

  149. ceesays says

    Johnx, 185:

    Why does your argument depend on isolating this action as ESPECIALLY applicable to the American South? It happened in the American South, but why is it so important that you felt the need to object to somebody saying that racism is a problem in other parts of the USA, too?

    I mean, it’s just a given. every mile of the USA is steeped in white supremacy. Are you under the impression that black people are not killed for existing above the Mason-Dixon line, or what? What’s going on here? why are you invested in this particular detail?

  150. ceesays says

    Tony!

    I’m wondering the same thing. I’ve been watching white people go out of their way to isolate this, individualize the shooter to a position of unresponsibility, try to imply that he’s not really white (SERIOUSLY!) and it’s … I don’t even have a word for it., but if I did, that very word would reflect the revulsion, horror, and fear.

    I haven’t lost connection with churchgoing black folks. I can read twitter. Churchgoing black folks are afraid to go to church. No matter which church, no matter where it is. It makes me sick. IT doesn’t matter that I’m an atheist, it seems. I’m just gutted by the idea.

  151. says

    johnx @185:

    Hmm. Given the deeply racist history the south has, the history that particular church has (look into it), this comes across as an apologist white washing. Perhaps I misunderstood. The racist shoe fits ESPECIALLY well in the southern United States, sorry, not sorry because its true.

    I disagree. The racism at play in the South may have been more overt in some areas than it was in the North, but the entire country was created for the benefit of white people. Socially, politically, and economically the entire country was set up by and for the benefit of white people (using People of Color as labor). This is evidenced *everywhere*. Blacks, Asians, Hispanics, Indians-none of these groups got any say in the creation of this country. None of those groups were afforded the opportunity to create laws or hold important offices where they could shape laws. They were literally shut out. As a result of that, even during the Antebellum South, even during the Civil War, even during Reconstruction, even during the height of Jim Crow, racism and the ideology of white supremacy existed throughout this country. It took on many different forms, but make no mistake, there was plenty of racism in the North. It wasn’t just a-or even mostly a-Southern thing.

    The racist shoe you speak of fits the entire country.

  152. says

    I’m sure it will come as no surprise to anyone that the false flag and it’s a hoax crowds are already well at work. The “Racism isn’t a problem anymore!” bones thrown to them aren’t enough, they need to believe in imaginary conspiracies to ignore real problems.

  153. F.O. says

    @Tony! The Queer Shoop #172
    I understand you anger, Tony, but probably Jonah deserves a better explanation.
    As far as I can tell he’s a newbie and you don’t know where he’s from.
    Unless you believe that he’s a concern troll or has a history of assholeness, in which case I reckon the best thing would be to call him out explicitly on that.

    @tkreacher #174

    I won’t say things I want to say, because charity.

    Passive-aggressive charity is no charity.
    If you have something to say, FFS say it, it is obvious that Jonah said something stupid and would benefit from understanding why.

    @ceesays #175

    So you’re comfortable with calling a black witness a liar? How lovely for you.

    Wow. Great strawmanning there. How lovely of you.
    “Person not accurately recollecting extremely traumatic events” is not the same as “liar”.

  154. Nerd of Redhead, Dances OM Trolls says

    “Person not accurately recollecting extremely traumatic events” is not the same as “liar”.

    Evidence required to show that the recollection is false, and not just claimed to be so by somebody trying to knock down the racism angle. In other words, the witness is charitably presumed to be correct until it is recanted. In which case, Jonah is showing no charity toward the eyewitness.

  155. chigau (違う) says

    I actually thought Jonah Glou was saying not to trust the reporters i.e. the journalists.
    As opposed to the actual witnesses.

  156. Maureen Brian says

    Jonah Glou @ 170,

    I suggest that you take five minutes out to consider what you said there.

    Hearsay is a third party’s account of what s/he has heard or claims to have heard from someone who was there. It will not be treated as primary evidence in the case.

    Witness evidence which is what we are talking about here, is the direct evidence of a person who was there. It will be presented in court.

    No amount of if-ing or but-ing about the potential of trauma to distort memory will turn them into the same thing. To even raise the question you would need a detailed knowledge of the people involved and of the whole situation. Do you have that?

    From the brief accounts I have read it seems obvious that these nine dead people were prominent citizens, active in their community and with all their marbles – as were the surviving witnesses. So you’d need a good reason to doubt their words: an unchecked bias is not a good reason but it’s the one I suspect you may have.

  157. says

    F.O. @190:

    I understand you anger, Tony, but probably Jonah deserves a better explanation.
    As far as I can tell he’s a newbie and you don’t know where he’s from.
    Unless you believe that he’s a concern troll or has a history of assholeness, in which case I reckon the best thing would be to call him out explicitly on that.

    There has been a wealth of coverage on this story (believe me, I’ve been up to my neck in so many news sites over the last few days as I wrote a blog post of my own ). Enough sources have referred to the survivor’s account and at this point there is no reason to doubt her. Or the reporters. If something comes out in the future to cast doubt on what Roof said, then so be it. Jonah came in here dismissive of either the claims of the survivor or the reporting on the claims of the survivor based on…what exactly?
    There’s enough dismissiveness going around about these events. We don’t need more. If Jonah has any evidence to back their distrust in the nature of what Roof said, they ought to mention that. I don’t believe there is any, especially since, in the last 36 hours, it has become known that Dylann Roof had been planning this attack for some time, had railed on about Trayvon Martin, and had expressed racist views to a friend. In addition, the image of the man shows him sporting two flags associated with white supremacy-the flags of Rhodesia and apartheid South African. On top of the image of this Confederate license plate. There’s more than enough evidence out there, and has been for more than 36 hours now (Jonah’s comment was made @11:48 today) for one to become informed on this subject.

  158. Nerd of Redhead, Dances OM Trolls says

    I didn’t get that impression, chigau (違う)

    Neither did I. What I saw appeared to be dismissal of eyewitness testimony. Of course, the testimony is filtered through the media, but enough of it, along with the corroborating evidence, got through to show that Roof is definitely a racist, making the racist remarks totally in character.

  159. ayarb003 says

    I thought one of the interesting quotes I read was that Dylan Roof reportedly “almost didn’t go through with it because everyone was so nice to him”. It makes me wonder what if he had been raised in a household or a community where this type of interaction had been a common occurrence. Somehow it sometimes seems that those who make the most adamantly hateful generalizations about a population, are those who have had very little personal interaction within that community.

  160. ceesays says

    ayarb003, 198:

    and the first thing I thought was “so. being polite and kind won’t save your life after all.”

    F.O., 190:

    Nope. I’d prefer not to speak to you on this subject. Have a pleasant day.

    chigau, 192:

    It’s a possible interpretation, and obviously not the one I read. What I read resonated strongly with gaslighting tactics – questioning another person’s experience and their ability to report on it. It’s an utterly shitty tactic, and so many people fall for it. But reading it again and looking at the way you interpreted it, the subject may have been “reporters reporting what witnesses said” rather than “witnesses said.”

  161. chigau (違う) says

    ceesays, Maureen, Nerd
    I did recognize the possibility of “are you quite sure that’s what happened”.
    But, these days I’m trying to go with ‘stupidity before malice’.

  162. says

    Can I say, right now, at this moment, I really and truly hope we’re all destroyed by a comet impact, and that the descendants of cockroaches get a chance at sapience?

    Because, right now, at this moment, reading this and other threads, with people trying to fucking defend this racist shitbeverage, I really think we’d be better off not having any kind of influence on this reality at all.

    That really might just be me.

    If you’ll excuse me, I’ll be in the corner lolsobbing all night.

  163. says

    In terms of whether or not the US American South is more racist…

    I was listening to yesterday’s TWiBPrime again today, and I remember one white caller from Atlanta, GA at first expressing frustration about how we can’t even have this one racist… about how she’d even feel better with a #notallwhitepeople than this complete abject denial of racism in total. Which was a legit point.

    Then she mentioned how in the south, in her experience, there’s a level of “acceptable racism” around, where white people will throw the n-word around at bars willy-nilly. While the hosts did not attack her, they did push back on that idea. I didn’t call in because after her call Elon James White asked that the phone lines be left open for black people dealing with this, which made perfect sense to me. But I actually agree with the caller, having grown up in Georgia, and I think she just chose her words poorly. Not “acceptable” but “accepted” or “expected” or… well… ingrained.

    My best example here is this:

    In Atlanta, GA, they have a public transport system called MARTA, or Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transport Association. Unfortunately, a holy hell of a lot of people, mainly white people, took to calling it “Moving Africans Rapidly Through Atlanta”… my dad, I’m ashamed to admit, was one of those people. But it wasn’t just him or his friends I heard this from. We all heard it for the first time at a bar we frequented often (they had a very good Darts area and my dad loves Darts) called Mazzy’s. The white stranger who said this to his white friend (also a stranger) opined that “it’s unfortunate it’s not MNRTA.” You can guess why. We often heard it basically anywhere in Georgia that MARTA was a known entity.

    I also once played a gig with a close friend in North Florida, and the racism at the club we played at was rather palpable (and we were playing Blues, which this racist, all-white crowd ate up… and along with my friend’s original tunes, we played songs from Robert Johnson, Bukkah White, Willie Dixon, Chuck Berry, etc). While I did not, as far as I can remember, hear the n-word, there was so much talk about “kids with their pants down” and “that hippity-hop” and “I won’t go to Urban areas” and “damn that section 8 housing”. I heard the word “thug” a lot, as well.

    Now I’m not saying that the North is any less racist than the South. I think that, however, perhaps it is true that the South is quite a bit less subtle about it. Up here on Long Island it’s much more… well… um… I don’t want to say “friendly racism”, but I’m not sure how else to put it. It’s still hostile, because all racism is hostile, but it wears a thin veneer of “friendliness” and “sympathy” and shit like that that it does not wear in the South.

    ————————————————————–

    On a related note, that same caller also prompted Aaron Rand Freeman (another host of TWiBPrime) to make a statement:

    Aaron Rand Freeman: I’m going to say something. A lot of the things that [the USA] thinks about black people are wrong. Or… in… lies. At their core. Actually, in… completely incorrect. But a lot of the things I hear about the… about the white-washed sections of this country are completely true. So… then… as a black person walking around, am I to generalize, as we’ve been generalized against? Like… and… ’cause… I get it… so if it’s not reasonable for every liberal white person to be swinging around at every racist white person that comes around, then is it… for me to protect myself – as White America has claimed to have to protect themselves against the Negro Menace and our Bikini Warriors and our Trespassers and all this other stuff – so then what am I supposed to do as a black person… when these things are actually true! When there are white people who get on and say ‘well you know, he was a little racist’… and people saying this over and over again that they know lots of racist people, but like… you know… they don’t think anything of it…

    Dara M. Wilson: Or they know people who say racist things because they don’t want to call their family members or their friends racist.

    Aaron Rand Freeman: …If the spree shooters are white people, and the racist things that they tell us don’t exist because we’re post-racial and ‘calm down black people’… are actually being said… then what am I supposed to think?

    Dara M. Wilson: And shouldn’t you then more be able to understand the pain that we feel when people are acting like this stuff doesn’t happen… when you know for a fact that it does? “Racism is over! we’re post-racial! Sometimes you go in a bar and everybody says ‘nigger’!”

    …The conversation goes on amongst Elon James White, Robyn Jordan, and Dara to basically ask “how do I know when someone is racist?”. And then Aaron finishes his thought:

    Aaron Rand Freeman: We can’t tell. Like I said. So I am… I am now… like I said I’m left with nothing but to assume. So… I’m calling out. I’m now going to assume more than I did last week. I’ve assumed pretty heavily, actually. I’ve actually warned Elon about certain fights he gets with people on the internet because I’m like “you’re arguing with some white guy from nowhere; he might come and shoot you”… and I’ve said this on the air before. So now I’m just generalizing even more. So I’m… I have to protect myself and my family because I care. I’m sorry! I have no other choice.

    I want to highlight this because I think it’s incredibly important. This, right here, is Schrodinger’s Racist. How can anyone expect any black person to assume the best of every white person they meat… ever? I was going to say “now” but that’s not really true, is it? The history of the US is White Supremacy. The US was built on the Slave Trade and racism has never gone anywhere. I would argue that it’s as bad as it has always been.

    I am fine with this. I’m fine with Schrodinger’s Racist. Just as I will never expect any woman to ever assume the best of me, I should never expect any black person to ever assume the best of me, either. And I do think this discussion needs to be had… as long as we white people don’t try to control it.

    ————————————————————–

    On a final note… please please please listen to yesterday’s TWiBPrime. If you’ve already heard it, listen to it again. It’s probably some the strongest and most important commentary I’ve heard on all of this. I cannot recommend it enough.

  164. says

    So I have a long comment that I apparently posted but it isn’t showing up? At least for me…

    It either got caught because of the links or the words. I transcribed a section of yesterday’s episode of This Week in Blackness Prime where the n-word was used twice. I didn’t censor it. Probably should have. I apologize. But if that’s why it’s not showing up, just a heads up that it probably got caught in a filter.

    Should I try again, censoring the n-word?

  165. ck, the Irate Lump says

    Cynical thought: It can’t be racist because the supreme court said racism is over. If it’s not, then the voting rights act is still needed. And if it’s still needed, then the “voter ID” measures could be overruled. If the voter ID measures are overruled, then the poor and minorities will have an easier time voting, and they don’t tend to vote Republican. Therefore, it cannot be racist.

    Hopefully, I’m just giving those idiots too much credit.

  166. says

    Okay. I’m going to repost with probable offending words censored…

    ————————–

    In terms of whether or not the US American South is more racist…

    I was listening to yesterday’s TWiBPrime again today, and I remember one white caller from Atlanta, GA at first expressing frustration about how we can’t even have this one racist… about how she’d even feel better with a #notallwhitepeople than this complete abject denial of racism in total. Which was a legit point.

    Then she mentioned how in the south, in her experience, there’s a level of “acceptable racism” around, where white people will throw the n-word around at bars willy-nilly. While the hosts did not attack her, they did push back on that idea. I didn’t call in because after her call Elon James White asked that the phone lines be left open for black people dealing with this, which made perfect sense to me. But I actually agree with the caller, having grown up in Georgia, and I think she just chose her words poorly. Not “acceptable” but “accepted” or “expected” or… well… ingrained.

    My best example here is this:

    In Atlanta, GA, they have a public transport system called MARTA, or Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transport Association. Unfortunately, a holy hell of a lot of people, mainly white people, took to calling it “Moving Africans Rapidly Through Atlanta”… my dad, I’m ashamed to admit, was one of those people. But it wasn’t just him or his friends I heard this from. We all heard it for the first time at a bar we frequented often (they had a very good Darts area and my dad loves Darts) called Mazzy’s. The white stranger who said this to his white friend (also a stranger) opined that “it’s unfortunate it’s not MNRTA.” You can guess why. We often heard it basically anywhere in Georgia that MARTA was a known entity.

    I also once played a gig with a close friend in North Florida, and the racism at the club we played at was rather palpable (and we were playing Blues, which this racist, all-white crowd ate up… and along with my friend’s original tunes, we played songs from Robert Johnson, Bukkah White, Willie Dixon, Chuck Berry, etc). While I did not, as far as I can remember, hear the n-word, there was so much talk about “kids with their pants down” and “that hippity-hop” and “I won’t go to Urban areas” and “damn that section 8 housing”. I heard the word “thug” a lot, as well.

    Now I’m not saying that the North is any less racist than the South. I think that, however, perhaps it is true that the South is quite a bit less subtle about it. Up here on Long Island it’s much more… well… um… I don’t want to say “friendly racism”, but I’m not sure how else to put it. It’s still hostile, because all racism is hostile, but it wears a thin veneer of “friendliness” and “sympathy” and shit like that that it does not wear in the South.

    ————————————————————–

    On a related note, that same caller also prompted Aaron Rand Freeman (another host of TWiBPrime) to make a statement:

    Aaron Rand Freeman: I’m going to say something. A lot of the things that [the USA] thinks about black people are wrong. Or… in… lies. At their core. Actually, in… completely incorrect. But a lot of the things I hear about the… about the white-washed sections of this country are completely true. So… then… as a black person walking around, am I to generalize, as we’ve been generalized against? Like… and… ’cause… I get it… so if it’s not reasonable for every liberal white person to be swinging around at every racist white person that comes around, then is it… for me to protect myself – as White America has claimed to have to protect themselves against the Negro Menace and our Bikini Warriors and our Trespassers and all this other stuff – so then what am I supposed to do as a black person… when these things are actually true! When there are white people who get on and say ‘well you know, he was a little racist’… and people saying this over and over again that they know lots of racist people, but like… you know… they don’t think anything of it…

    Dara M. Wilson: Or they know people who say racist things because they don’t want to call their family members or their friends racist.

    Aaron Rand Freeman: …If the spree shooters are white people, and the racist things that they tell us don’t exist because we’re post-racial and ‘calm down black people’… are actually being said… then what am I supposed to think?

    Dara M. Wilson: And shouldn’t you then more be able to understand the pain that we feel when people are acting like this stuff doesn’t happen… when you know for a fact that it does? “Racism is over! we’re post-racial! Sometimes you go in a bar and everybody says ‘n*****’!”

    …The conversation goes on amongst Elon James White, Robyn Jordan, and Dara to basically ask “how do I know when someone is racist?”. And then Aaron finishes his thought:

    Aaron Rand Freeman: We can’t tell. Like I said. So I am… I am now… like I said I’m left with nothing but to assume. So… I’m calling out. I’m now going to assume more than I did last week. I’ve assumed pretty heavily, actually. I’ve actually warned Elon about certain fights he gets with people on the internet because I’m like “you’re arguing with some white guy from nowhere; he might come and shoot you”… and I’ve said this on the air before. So now I’m just generalizing even more. So I’m… I have to protect myself and my family because I care. I’m sorry! I have no other choice.

    I want to highlight this because I think it’s incredibly important. This, right here, is Schrodinger’s Racist. How can anyone expect any black person to assume the best of every white person they meat… ever? I was going to say “now” but that’s not really true, is it? The history of the US is White Supremacy. The US was built on the Slave Trade and racism has never gone anywhere. I would argue that it’s as bad as it has always been.

    I am fine with this. I’m fine with Schrodinger’s Racist. Just as I will never expect any woman to ever assume the best of me, I should never expect any black person to ever assume the best of me, either. And I do think this discussion needs to be had… as long as we white people don’t try to control it.

    ————————————————————–

    On a final note… please please please listen to yesterday’s TWiBPrime. If you’ve already heard it, listen to it again. It’s probably some the strongest and most important commentary I’ve heard on all of this. I cannot recommend it enough.

  167. F.O. says

    @Tony! The Queer Shoop #194
    No need to convince me.
    I think that a much shorter version of what you wrote to me would have been a good answer to Jonah.
    Or even “Dude, the account has been confirmed by everyone and there is no reason to doubt it, do your homework next time”.

    Thanks for the reply, though, it was useful to me.
    I do understand your anger, the event and the media reaction is so appalling that I can’t even.
    I don’t even know what to hope for, what to wish for.

  168. says

    but there’s zero evidence that religion had anything to do with what he did right now.

    Sorry, but this… is like claiming that car ownership has nothing to do with drive by shootings. Religions is “always” involved, in some manner. Either, from the believer side, as a necessity to granting the one taking such actions to believe that they are justified, forgiven, or even, in the extreme cases, blessed, in some manner, for committing such an act, or… as much as I might wish otherwise, from the other side, general as some warped version of nihilistic self centeredness, in which some group is deemed to be a persistent threat, for which there is no punishment to be meted out, for assassinating them. The former is much more common, however, since groups are vastly better at convincing each other to commit horrors, and loners, and I would argue that you cannot be both self centered, and not, on some level, a loner. In the real world, in which you have to deal with other people, all actions have a consequence – either the law, or the mob, or conscience. All three are much easier to drive via the ideology of faith, than they are through personal self delusion.

    This is not to say that such personal delusion is not possible, just.. that it lacks the cohesive support structure that declaring oneself a defenders of “one’s race”, or “faith”, never mind “both”, give you. And.. There are only two options when you mix race and faith – either they must be lying about what faith they belong to, or, they must, by definition, be just as bad at it, due to their race, as they are at everything else you have opted to denigrate them for. They cannot be “Christian”, or, at least “good Christians”, and be an “inferior”. So goes the insane logic of mixing hate, of any kind, with religion. I can’t see “atheism” producing such a thing. Oh, some moron(s) deciding to form an ideology that has jack shit to do with atheism, then tacking it on as an after thought, sure, but.. with no cohesive set of excuses, justifications, etc., forming a core around which to build such a thing.. That’s sort of been, ironically, the whole damn point that things like atheism+, and the like argue about – we can’t even manage to agree on a coherent set of *positive* ideals to focus on, but we are supposed to be inspiring some ass none of us ever heard of, in the middle of one of the most god soaked patches of land on the planet, outside of the ME, to have “bad ideals”… How the F is that supposed to work? Is there some handbook that only Fox News knows about, but can’t, for some strange reason, show on TV, on how to inspire random flakes in places no atheist, with any survival instincts, has ever heard of, would set foot in, or give a damn about the existence of? Sure….

  169. Crimson Clupeidae says

    “He made a lot of racist jokes, but you don’t really take them seriously like that. You don’t really think of it like that.”

    And therein lies a big part of the problem. Like casual rape jokes, jokes that depersonalize…well, anyone….if you are part of the peer group of someone who does that, and you don’t speak up, you are part of the problem, regardless of how you say you feel about it.

    *rage*

    As far as the sexist part of it, I’m sure it’s there too, with regards to the shooter, but most of the victims were women, so…I dunno, I guess trying to make sense of it is too much to ask.

  170. says

    Patrick G @98 mentioned a manifesto. Yes, there is a manifesto.

    Dylann Roof […] left behind a collection of racist selfies and a racist manifesto explaining his actions.

    The photos have been authenticated and from WHOIS records it appears he registered the website they were found on, LastRhodesian.com. The manifesto has not yet been authenticated […]

    1. It proves that Dylann Roof was purely and completely driven by racism. […]

    2. It proves that Dylann was inspired by other racist hate groups and philosophies.

    3. It proves that Dylann was clear-headed, articulate, and knew full well who he was and what he wanted to do. […]

    Excerpt from the manifesto:

    […] The event that truly awakened me was the Trayvon Martin case. I kept hearing and seeing his name, and eventually I decided to look him up. I read the Wikipedia article and right away I was unable to understand what the big deal was. It was obvious that Zimmerman was in the right. But more importantly this prompted me to type in the words “black on White crime” into Google, and I have never been the same since that day. The first website I came to was the Council of Conservative Citizens. There were pages upon pages of these brutal black on White murders. I was in disbelief. At this moment I realized that something was very wrong. How could the news be blowing up the Trayvon Martin case while hundreds of these black on White murders got ignored?

    From this point I researched deeper and found out what was happening in Europe. I saw that the same things were happening in England and France, and in all the other Western European countries. Again I found myself in disbelief. As an American we are taught to accept living in the melting pot, and black and other minorities have just as much right to be here as we do, since we are all immigrants. But Europe is the homeland of White people, and in many ways the situation is even worse there. From here I found out about the Jewish problem and other issues facing our race, and I can say today that I am completely racially aware. […]

    I think it is is fitting to start off with the group I have the most real life experience with, and the group that is the biggest problem for Americans.
    N•••••s [my edit] are stupid and violent. At the same time they have the capacity to be very slick. Black people view everything through a racial lense. Thats what racial awareness is, its viewing everything that happens through a racial lense. They are always thinking about the fact that they are black. This is part of the reason they get offended so easily, and think that some thing are intended to be racist towards them, even when a White person wouldnt be thinking about race. The other reason is the Jewish agitation of the black race. […]

    Daily Kos link

  171. says

    An excerpt from the Roof manifest (link in comment 207):

    Negroes have lower Iqs, lower impulse control, and higher testosterone levels in generals. These three things alone are a recipe for violent behavior. If a scientist publishes a paper on the differences between the races in Western Europe or Americans, he can expect to lose his job. There are personality traits within human families, and within different breeds of cats or dogs, so why not within the races?

  172. says

    Lynna:
    One thing to note-while the manifesto does fit with our understanding of Roof’s beliefs, at this point I don’t believe it has been confirmed that the manifesto belongs to him.

  173. says

    Tony, you are right. Journalists are still working on the verification issue. The manifesto reads like it comes from Roof, but some caution is advised regarding authorship. We don’t know yet.

    I was struck by the explanation for choosing Charleston that comes toward the end of the manifesto.

    The photos on that same website can be verified. Yes, that’s Roof all right. There are two photos that feature the number 1488. On another site, a reader commented:

    1488 is a combination of two popular white supremacist numeric symbols. The first symbol is 14, which is shorthand for the “14 Words” slogan: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.” The second is 88, which stands for “Heil Hitler” (H being the 8th letter of the alphabet).

    The writings on the other hand, the purported manifesto, is sort of a mishmash of the USA brand of white supremacy with some neo-Nazi stuff, though the manifesto seems to swing back and forth between admiration for neo-Nazi stuff and dissing Hitler’s Germany.

    Roof apparently believed what he read on the internet about blacks murdering whites, if we take the description of his awakening in the manifesto as being written by Roof. All kinds of awful racism finds a home on the internet. Roof mentioned specific conservative websites.

  174. says

    Online records show the website was first registered under the name “Dylann Roof” in February.
    The person who registered the site, lastrhodesian.com, used an address in South Carolina that arrest records show is Roof’s last known residence.
    The site’s metadata also shows that it was last updated on June 17 — the day of the shooting.

  175. broboxley OT says

    roof is a racist terrorist full stop.
    A note on the confederate flag and southern pride. I went to pick up my daughter and her friends all about 16-18 at the Cobb Country Georgia fair. Her friend a black young man named robert was wearing a tshirt with southern pride on the front and the battle flag on the back. I asked him why he was wearing that. I also noted that the creators of that flag would insist on owning a black man like him. He stated that old folks thought that. It meant nascar, country music, outlaw cars and bbq. He said he was proud to wear it. I told him I hoped it didnt cause him any problems and he stated only old people didnt get it. I guess I don;t.

  176. says

    broboxley @212:
    It’s interesting that that black guy said that. I wonder if he’s aware of the origin of that flag:

    As a people we are fighting to maintain the Heaven-ordained supremacy of the white man over the inferior or colored race; a white flag would thus be emblematical of our cause. … As a national emblem, it is significant of our higher cause, the cause of a superior race, and a higher civilization contending against ignorance, infidelity, and barbarism. Another merit in the new flag is, that it bears no resemblance to the now infamous banner of the Yankee vandals.
    —William T. Thompson (1863), Daily Morning News

    ****

    In other news-
    If that manifesto was indeed written by Roof, then Dylann Roof was radicalized by the website of a group that has been associated with GOP politicians:

    In a rambling manifesto uncovered by Twitter users @HenryKrinkle and @EMQuangel, Roof discusses his hatred of groups including Jewish and Latino people. But his deepest hatred is reserved for African-Americans.

    After noting his animosity over the Trayvon Martin protests, Roof writes:

    But more importantly this prompted me to type in the words “black on White crime” into Google, and I have never been the same since that day. The first website I came to was the Council of Conservative Citizens. There were pages upon pages of these brutal black on White murders.

    As of Saturday, the Council of Conservative Citizens’ (CCC) website had either been taken down or was experiencing technical problems and couldn’t be accessed. But internet archive site Wayback has a copy of it online.

    The website is a hodgepodge of re-written media stories with facts either twisted or fabricated to give the viewer an impression that there is a constant barrage of black-on-white crime.

    “Fifteen new black on white murders: Where is the outrage from the mainstream media?” a May 15 headline screams.

    “Racial spree shooting in Texas, 1 killed, 2 injured:
    Beautiful 19 year old woman slaughtered in racial hate crime attack,” reads another from May 6.

    The concentration of stories that cause the false perception whites are under attack by blacks is significant, because Roof told his victims, “I have to do it. You rape our women and you’re taking over our country. And you have to go.”

    The SPLC procured a list of 38 politicians, most of whom are from Mississippi and all but three of whom are Republican, who had been involved with the CCC between 2000 and 2004. Some, like Republicans John Moore and Dean Kirby of Mississippi, are still in office.

    According to the SPLC:

    The CCC is the modern reincarnation of the old White Citizens Councils, which were formed in the 1950s and 1960s to battle school desegregation in the South. Today, the CCC idedicates itself to educating whites on what it sees as an epidemic of black on white crime in the United States. The CCC website has been a touchstone for the radical right to get “educated” on this issue – and it appears this was the first stop for Roof on his dive down the white nationalist rabbit hole.

  177. broboxley OT says

    Tony @214 he was born and raised in the greater Atlanta area, but georgia schools being what they are….

  178. says

    I have an addition to my comment on jokes at #119 above that I avoided earlier because I thought it was too off topic, but it is now on topic thanks to Larry Wilmore. I tend to avoid the positive kinds of race related humor because I often don’t trust my filters, but this is what I have seen.

    All jokes are serious business because of what they do, but not all jokes that have to do with race are bad. I won’t pretend to know the formula perfectly, but I do know this:
    *You must be explicitly sure that the people in that race group that you know would be ok with humor like this. In mixed company err on the side of not doing it.
    *A joke that makes a person feel better about something race related that does not use the race group as a tool can work. The joke probably always has to do with making the person in that racial group feel better about the race-related pain, preferably at the expense of racists or racism.
    *The bad jokes use the form of racism, do not make the person in that racial group feel better and make racists feel better about their racism.

    Fucking humor, how does it work?

  179. PatrickG says

    @ Lynna: I’d intended to come back and post a link to the manifesto, as well as the whois and domain details, but see you beat me to it. I’m looking forward preemptively disgusted by how it will most likely be ignored and/or hand-waved away by most outlets.

    @ Tony:

    If that manifesto was indeed written by Roof, then Dylann Roof was radicalized by the website of a group that has been associated with GOP politicians:

    Unpossible! Don’t you know Racism is Dead™? We had a Day of Jubilee™ when the Supreme Court decreed we no longer needed Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act! Plus, Party of Lincoln!

    More seriously, what blows my mind is how easy it is to tie explicitly racist organizations into the existing power structure, whether that be politicians, media figures, commercial institutions, and the like. Yet people cover their eyes, stop up their ears, and repeat “Post-Racial America” as a mantra to just make it all go away. And it keeps fucking working. And organizations like the SLPC keep howling into the wind while they get called a hate group.

    But remember, the important thing is that we not offend white people, especially Southerners, because heritage. /spits

  180. says

    Slight tangent here-
    That same hate group that may have influenced Dylann Roof-the Council of Conservative Citizens-was once addressed by Tony Perkins of the hate-group the Family Research Council.

    Then there are the ties the Council of Conservative Citizens has to Tony Perkins.

    Today, Perkins is the president of the anti-gay hate group Family Research Council. He has intimate access to the media, mostly via Fox News, although it’s not uncommon to see him on other cable news networks, speaking against equality and for conservative “family values,” which in reality are neither.

    Perkins espouses lies, like, as GLAAD reports, “gay young people ‘have a higher propensity to depression or suicide because of that internal conflict; homosexuals may recognize intuitively that their same-sex attractions are abnormal.'”

    But before that, Perkins from 1996 to 2004 was a Louisiana State Representative.

    The SPLC reports that “in 2001, Perkins was photographed addressing a gathering of the white supremacist Council of Conservative Citizens. The group, a direct descendent of the segregationist White Citizens Councils of the 1950s and 1960s, has called African Americans a “retrograde species of humanity.” Perkins, who later denied knowledge of the group’s racist views, spoke in front of a Confederate flag (seen here, courtesy of Right Wing Watch).”

  181. Thumper: Who Presents Boxes Which Are Not Opened says

    This happened while I was away, so I’ve been reading up on it, and I note that the FBI have classified it as a hate crime and are refusing to classify it as terrorism. A White Christian shooting up a Black church; of course it’s not terrorism. But an Asian Muslim shooting up a Church, well now, that’s different.