“I will never talk to her, ever again,” said Nadine Collier, referring to her 70 year-old mother, whom she lost last week in a mass shooting at a historic black church in Charleston.
“I’ll never, ever be able to hold her again. But I forgive you.”
Collier’s powerful words came at the first court appearance of Dylan Roof, who police say has already confessed to the killings. According to witnesses, Roof attended a Bible study at the church for about an hour before he began shooting and killed nine people. According to NBC News, Roof told police after his arrest that he “almost didn’t go through with it” because the parishioners were so kind toward him.
It’s pretty obvious what motivated his crime. Roof’s roommate told reporters that he was “big into segregation” and “wanted to make something spark up the race war again.” More to the point, as he committed the murders, Roof inveighed against blacks generally, using the language of the discredited junk racialist theories that can be found in darker corners of the Internet: “I have to do it,” he allegedly said. “You rape our women and you’re taking over our country. And you have to go.”
Roof provides the nation with an ugly reminder that real racism exists and of what it looks like. It does not include every disagreement with Barack Obama, as some people appear to believe. It is not an amusing bogey-man to be trotted out as a rhetorical crutch by those who cannot defend their political ideology using real arguments.
Racism is much more important than that. It is a terrorist ideology. Its adherents subscribe to a belief system that glorifies their kind at others’ expense. They are driven by hatred and immersed in junk theories and ideologies developed in recent centuries to justify various forms of slavery and oppression.
America and most Americans have come a long way since those theories flourished and terrorism against black people was routine. Modern society has attached a healthy stigma to this racial hatred. An ideology that once dominated America and its governing institutions has been shamed and banished to the shadows.
But the shadows are still there and at times cast wider society into the kind of darkness exemplified by last week’s murders in Charleston.
Roof spared one person’s life, instructing her to go and tell others what had happened. This, if true, suggests that the massacre was more than just a “hate crime,” as officials have described it, and was above all an act of domestic terrorism — intended to strike fear in others and to encourage like-minded denizens of the shadows to commit similar terror-inducing crimes.
Roof faces the death penalty if convicted, no matter what laws are applied. Still, charges of terrorism would seem appropriate and would send the right message to the public.
