Last Wednesday (June 17), a young white man sat for an hour in a Bible study in a historic black church in Charleston, S.C., then opened fire on the parishioners, killing nine. It was only the latest mass shooting in the U.S., but had additional significance given a long history of terrorist violence against African-Americans, including the bombing and burning of black churches. News Bureau social sciences editor Craig Chamberlain discussed the incident with Sundiata Cha-Jua, a professor of history and of African American studies at Illinois, whose expertise includes the study of lynching and other racial violence going back to the Civil War.
Why does this mass shooting resonate so strongly for many African-Americans?
While the media and politicians have acknowledged the heinousness of the Emmanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church massacre, they have largely presented it as an isolated incident and characterized it as unthinkable and unfathomable. However, from the context of African-American history, it is a familiar and easily explainable story.
Scholars of racial violence posit every African-American family has a “lynching story,” or more precisely, intimate knowledge of an episode of racial terrorism. Because African-American history is excluded from the K-12 curriculum and not a requirement in higher education, the U.S. public is generally unaware of the extent to which terrorism has been a fundamental strategy undergirding racial oppression in general, and especially the subordination of African-Americans. The indiscriminate murder of African-Americans and the destruction of their residences and institutions, including places of worship, has been a regular occurrence since the 1829 Cincinnati race riot.
Though pervasive and persistent, anti-black racial violence has changed over time. Different historical periods are characterized by the dominant use of particular expressions of violence. Whipping, mutilation and rape characterized enslavement; coercive violence known as “white capping” and “bulldozing, as well as rape, prevailed after Emancipation; lynching and rape were the major forms used during the lowest period for African-Americans, from 1877 into the mid-1920s, while police brutality and hate crimes have predominated in the contemporary period. So, for African-Americans, the massacre at “Mother” Emmanuel AME Church is a familiar story.
Why was the site of this mass shooting so significant?
With the possible exceptions of “Mother” Bethel AME in Philadelphia, founded in 1794, and Quinn Chapel AME in Chicago, founded in 1844, no other African-American religious institution has as long and rich a legacy as “Mother” Emmanuel in Charleston.
In 1818, Demark Vesey along with Morris Brown and others co-founded the church. From its origin, the church was a site of opposition to slavery and racial oppression. Vesey and 34 congregants were executed for their roles in an 1822 conspiracy to plan a slave revolt. The conspirators used the church’s Sunday school and Bible study classes to plan the revolt. In response to its role in the conspiracy, the slaveholding political leadership of the city and state razed the church, and then banned it in 1834.
After Emancipation, when the church was re-established, it became a focal point for Reconstruction-era political organizing, even sending its former pastor, Richard H. Cain to the U.S. House of Representatives. Clementa Pinckney, the pastor and state representative who was among those killed on June 17, embodied this legacy of struggle.
Mass shootings have become a regular occurrence, and we debate the potential causes. But in each individual case, it can be easy to focus ultimately on the killer and their presumed mental instability – and in this case, racism. Why might we want to look beyond that here?
Individuals are motivated by their ideology or worldview, as well as their personal psychology, but their actions are either encouraged or discouraged by the social and historical context. As his online manifesto reveals, Dylann Roof differs from the killers in Columbine, Newtown and Aurora in that he was a white supremacist and his actions were politically motivated and constituted an act of domestic terrorism.
What’s important here are the social context and the ways in which his racial views mirror and conform with, rather than contradict, the dominant white interpretation of contemporary race relations and of black people. Since President Obama’s election, whites have purchased guns at an alarming rate, supported conceal-and-carry and stand-your-ground legislation, and generally pursued policies designed to reduce blacks’ political participation and power. Roof’s view that whites need to “take back their country” is shared by the Tea Party and many mainstream conservatives.
In accordance with recent surveys of racial attitudes, Roof, like a majority of white Americans, believes “blacks are the real racists”; thus they, whites, are the main victims of racism. So, it’s especially important that we resist efforts to dismiss Roof as simply a sociopath. Although his actions were malevolent in the extreme, nonetheless many of his racial views are in alignment with those of a majority of U.S. whites.