Tag: Dylann Roof

Categories
Editorial Opinion

Lessons From the Orlando Tragedy

Readers of this week’s issue will note a couple of pieces, including this one, devoted to the unspeakable weekend tragedy in Orlando, in which at least 50 people died during an armed assassin’

s murderous spree at a gay-oriented night club and another 50-odd were injured, some critically.

There is good reason for such close attention here and on the part of other media, world-wide, and it is similar to that which followed in the wake of the June 2015 slaughter of nine African-American worshippers during a Bible study session at an historic black church in Charleston, South Carolina. That previous attack, carried out by a youthful racist obsessed with loyalties to his state’s Confederate past, instantly transformed a racial landscape that had been changing all too slowly and greatly accelerated what Martin Luther King once described as the bending of the arc of history toward justice.

Before the Charleston atrocity, the Stars and Bars of the old Confederacy flew unimpeded in dozens of places where they hang no longer — including the state Capitol at Columbia, South Carolina, the very birthplace of secession and the cradle of the Confederacy, that would-be nation of breakaway Southern states devoted to the creed of official racism and the institution of human slavery. 

In a true sense, the young assassin’s senseless act, intended by him to ignite a race war on behalf of Confederate ideals, accomplished the exact opposite — the final putting to rest of the Confederacy and its flag as anything but tawdry reminders of a brutal racist past.

In like manner, the savage massacre at Orlando’s Pulse Club has surely ended the lingering debate as to whether the quest for rights, equality, and dignity by members of  the LGBT community should be regarded as within the mainstream of the nation’s ongoing civil rights struggle. By their martyrdom, the souls sacrificed in Orlando to murderous bigotry have, we pray, propelled that recognition and ended that debate. Gay Americans should now be seen by everyone, as, increasingly, they see themselves — not as outliers seeking toleration but as proud citizens in the forefront of extending liberty.

And, though both the Charleston and Orlando horrors have provoked rethinking the nature and promise of American democracy, they both serve, too, as bleak reminders of a national gun culture run amok. After Jonesboro and Columbine and Sandy Hook and Aurora and so many others, this fresh atrocity is testament to the long overdue need to change the rules for selling and using firearms, especially semiautomatic, combat-like weapons such the AR-15, used for the purpose of mass murder in Orlando and elsewhere. There is no need to expunge the Second Amendment from the Bill of Rights, which is what the NRA and other gun-industry lobbyists accuse reformers of trying to do. A good start to setting things right would be the extension of background checks and a resumption of the undeniably Constitutional Clinton-era ban on the sale of such weapons, which was allowed to expire in 2005, during the second presidential term of George W. Bush. It is no accident that the frequency of massacres, as well as their body counts, have increased since that time.

Categories
Letter From The Editor Opinion

Have Yourselves an Angry Little Christmas

CREDIT: Reuters

Reuters

In the 14 years I’ve been the Flyer editor, I’ve gotten lots of hate mail. It mostly used to come in envelopes filled with pages of scrawled handwriting. I read them and put them in the wastebasket, chalking it up as a natural by-product of writing for a liberal paper in the conservative South. Lately, the angry folks have switched to email, and it comes in waves.

My last column, for example, about Donald Trump, drew missives from folks who, like Trump, claimed to have seen the Muslims in New Jersey celebrating 9/11 on television. A couple of the writers threatened to come “look me up” and “straighten me out” about my “lies” about their hero. Nice.

The angry, crazy xenophobes have always been with us. You don’t have to look to the Spanish Inquisition or Nazi Germany for examples. In the U.S. the Irish, Catholics, Jews, and African Americans have all been targets of racism and discrimination through the decades. The enslavement of black Americans is a permanent stain on our history, as is the institutional racism that persisted long after the Civil War.

Dylann Roof read white supremacist literature that falsely claimed African Americans were killing whites at a high rate. (Trump recently retweeted similar false statistics.) Roof took his revenge at a church in South Carolina. Robert Lewis Dear was spouting antiabortion rhetoric to police after his murderous rampage in Colorado Springs. The two Islamist terrorists who killed 14 innocent people in San Bernardino last week had been radicalized by ISIS’ loathsome doctrine of hatred. Hate and ignorance comes in all colors.

Does anyone doubt that we’ll see a new surge of anti-Muslim violence in the U.S. in the wake of the California attack and Trump’s fascistic response to demonize all Muslims? I don’t. And so it goes. We ramp up the anger and inevitable violence in the U.S., giving more propaganda ammunition to Muslim extremists. Trump is playing his followers right into their hands.

And we just keep upping the ante. The president is called a “pussy” on Fox News, and worse on countless websites. Not even his wife and children are spared. I pray his security team is on full alert. I researched a couple of my emailers and found white supremacist websites that are terrifying. We can only hope the feds are monitoring them.

Yes, the hateful xenophobes and racists have always been there, but now we’re all connected via social media, so we’re exposed like never before to viewpoints that are an affront to human decency. “Unfriending” on Facebook is rampant, assuring that we silo ourselves even further into echo chambers for our own beliefs. And sensationalist media coverage just keeps turning up the heat. The annual “War on Christmas” insanity has become as much a part of the season as mistletoe. Damn you, Starbucks, and your satanic cups. (I’m not buying that Christmas blend, either.)

“Happy Holidays!” How dare you? It’s “Merry Christmas,” you heathen.

Is there anything we can’t turn into a reason to fight each other? I’m beginning to doubt it. My advice: Pray for peace and prepare for anything.

Categories
Editorial Opinion

Fireworks Ahead

This issue of the Flyer precedes a 4th of July weekend, and the revolutionary impulses that attended the birth of this nation 239 years ago will be symbolically re-enacted in thousands of fireworks shows across the country and here in Memphis.

This time of year has often witnessed turbulent, world-changing events — the American declaration of independence and the start of the French Revolution, both in July, being only two of many. And the period leading up to this year’s observance of Independence Day has certainly provided an astonishing sequence of political fireworks.

Whatever deluded impulse provoked a young racist assassin to gun down nine innocent African Americans in a church two weeks ago in Charleston, South Carolina, his unspeakable action generated nationwide grief and outrage and an apparent determination to do away with the remaining barriers to some form of racial reconciliation in this country. That would seem to include the physical vestiges of nostalgia for the Confederacy, at least in places of official sanction. And for those among us, many good of heart, who find this thought unbearable, let us merely point to the extraordinary transitions that have occurred in recent years at the University of Mississippi, which has managed to divest itself of such outmoded symbolism with no great loss to local pride or alumni loyalty.

Simultaneous with this development has been a landmark Supreme Court decision upholding the recognition of same-sex marriage throughout the 50 states. It is fair to say that no prior ruling of the court, not even its 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision mandating desegregation of schools, has had the transformative effect that is implicit in Obergefell v. Hodges, with its stripping away of long-standing stigma.

And, though it was destined to be overshadowed in pyrotechnic intensity, the Supreme Court’s ruling one day earlier in the case of King v. Burwell may have long-range consequences just as lasting as any of the aforementioned by quashing a technical and pedantic challenge to the Affordable Care Act.

“Obamacare Cheats Death Again” was the headline of an emailed lament to his constituents this week from state Senator Brian Kelsey of Germantown, who has been in the vanguard of the legislative effort to forestall the ACA in this state, including Insure Tennessee, the Medicaid-expansion proposal by Governor Bill Haslam to channel billions of dollars into the state for the relief of Tennessee’s financially beleaguered hospitals.

Kelsey’s text, wherein he vowed to fight on legislatively, conceded it would do no good “to continue to file lawsuits” against the ACA. Kelsey and other opponents of the ACA such as Lt. Gov. Ron Ramsey, may delay the inevitable, but Obamacare would seem to be here to stay.

And that’s yet another of the several revolutions that are under way as of July 4, 2015.

Categories
News News Feature

A Week of Change

In a week of monumental events signaling — and legally upholding — transformational change in America, my imagination was drawn to a 21-year-old man-child sitting in an isolated jail cell in Charleston, South Carolina. What must admitted mass murderer Dylann Roof be thinking, I wondered. He set out to tear apart, through one heinous and violent act, the moral fabric of this democratic republic established nearly 239 years ago. He is not the first to try — and fail — to do so, and he won’t be the last.

What Roof missed — now that he’s just another misguided, murderous idiot behind bars — was hearing the resounding echoes of social and economic triumph two United States Supreme Court rulings finally addressed in declarative fashion. What Roof missed was a president of the United States rising to oratorical heights in a speech meant to speed the healing process surrounding the pain, anger, and disillusionment Roof’s act of racial intolerance created. He missed the inspiring words that celebrated the resiliency of our country in times of unspeakable tragedy. He missed “Amazing Grace.”

In his incarcerated absence, Roof may have been unaware of the high court’s solid majority vote upholding the legality of the Affordable Care Act. For millions of people in this country, including thousands in Tennessee, the fight to insure the poor, the elderly, and those on the borderline of a healthy existence will continue. They will have new paths toward being able to secure medical treatment for afflictions and diseases that otherwise would have sentenced them to lives of pain or unneccessarily premature death. Unfortunately, the SCOTUS decision on Obamacare by no means ends the political opposition to it, but it gives legal clarity to what is an earnest attempt to level the health-care playing field for the haves and have-nots.

The same antagonistic forces that have long opposed “Obamacare” have vowed to continue to seek a constitutional amendment overturning the court’s ruling. Word to the wise: Barring more conservative appointments to the high court, an unlikely prospect, that ship has sailed.

Roof, in the personal “manifesto” that surfaced after his arrest, expressed his loathing for African Americans, Latinos, and Jews. Oddly, none of his hate-filled rants targeted gays or same-sex marriage. Not that Roof will be in a position to witness such unions, but that issue was also addressed by the Supreme Court last week, and the court struck down barriers against gay marriage instituted by state governments. The majority decision used the words “human dignity” — a number of times — to bolster its judicial opinion. The same phrase was often used by abolitionists in arguing against the evils of slavery.

While young Mr. Roof rots in prison awaiting his likely execution, he will find plenty of the kind of seething anger and racial and sexual intolerance he had hoped to ignite by sparking a race war. He will have plenty of time to ponder how his cowardly and pathetic actions served as a sad precursor to what became a magnificent week in American history.

I hope he will agonize about the hour he spent inside the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church — a Judas in the House of the Lord. I hope the parishioners’ words of prayer and forgiveness that he heard while plotting his mayhem will be seared in his memory for whatever time he has left on this earth.

Mr. Roof, you picked the wrong place, the wrong time, and the wrong people. You failed.

And as long as the United States remains strong enough to tolerate dissent and disagreement, as long as “we the people” are willing to listen to opposing opinions about the issues that divide us, as long as we recognize injustice and fight to right the wrongs that befall the least of us, then people like Dylann Roof will be forgotten footnotes in the great American story.

As a nation, we are a work in progress, an ongoing saga of success and failure, where perfection will never be achieved. But last week demonstrated we’re still valiantly searching for it.

Categories
Letter From The Editor Opinion

White is the New Black

Yo, white people. We need to talk. Pull up a chair, pour yourself a glass of Pinot Grigio or sweet tea or whatever. We’ve got a problem and it’s going to take a while to get to the bottom of it. I’m talking about racism in this country.

Not your personal racism, of course. Or mine. We’re cool. And not just in that hackneyed, “I have black friends” way. Though, of course, we do. And we’ve taught our kids not to hate, not to discriminate on the basis of race. They all have black friends, too. More than we do, actually. They’re cool. Good, open-minded kids. We’re not racists. It’s not really our problem.

Yes, it is.

It’s not enough to declare ourselves and our families non-racism zones. We need to look at what’s going on outside our cocoons and take some responsibility for it. Too many black kids are still being born in situations where they have little to no chance of “pulling themselves up” by their bootstraps. They don’t even have boots. Their schools are substandard. Their food is junk. They’re trapped in a cycle of poverty and neglect and violence. It’s not because they’re lazy; it’s because they know nothing else.

Yeah, I know, you hear it said all the time: Blacks need to take responsibility for single-parent homes, “black-on-black” crime, poor schools, gangs. That’s self-defeating, divisive, and gets us no closer to solving the problem. The power to fix that situation lies with all middle- and upper-income folks, black, white, and brown — those who have escaped the ghetto and those who never had to worry about it. We need to work together to address the effects of institutional racism that still linger in the United States, and in the South, particularly.

And if we are going to insist black people take responsibility for “black problems,” we white people need to step up and take of our “white problems.” Problems like Dylann Storm Roof and the thousands of kids like him, and the thousands more adults who shape kids like Dylann. They’re out there — ignorant and angry, raised on a steady diet of racism and hatred, waving the Confederate battle flag like a cudgel, listening to wing-nut radio, devouring Nazi/racist web propaganda. We white people need to call that shit out. Now.

Getting rid of Confederate flags is a symbolic start, but more is needed. When we hear — or hear of — someone saying or writing such vile things, we need to pull off their hoods (real or cyber) and push them into the light. If your kids’ private school or your country club is not diverse, well, maybe it’s time to speak up and push for a change. If your kids don’t have interactions with other races, don’t be shocked when they’re caught on a cellphone video singing racist frat songs.

In a radio interview this week, President Obama said, “It is incontrovertible that race relations have improved significantly during my lifetime and yours, and that opportunities have opened up, and that attitudes have changed. … What is also true is the legacy of slavery, Jim Crow, discrimination in almost every institution of our lives … casts a long shadow and that’s still part of our DNA that’s passed on. We’re not cured of it.”

No, we’re not, as events in Charleston last week made clear.

Categories
News News Feature

Committed to Lies

People in search of comfort may turn to scripture after last week’s massacre of nine black churchgoers by a lone white gunman in Charleston, South Carolina. I am drawn to John 8:32, in which Jesus tells his disciples: “Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” Emancipation by veracity is a beautiful, if elusive, concept. It puts freedom within anyone’s reach. But this nation is committed to lies, never more so than when it comes to racism.

Confessed killer Dylann Roof explained his racist motivations in an online manifesto. In it, he calls black people violent and inferior. He says the authors of slave narratives spoke highly of the institution. He writes that integration sent white people running to the suburbs in search of whiter schools and fewer minorities.

If racism is a continuum, Roof is at the far right end. America’s systems and institutions — all of them — are not as far to the left as we tell ourselves. Typing that — being honest — fills me with anxiety. To state unflinchingly, as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. did, that America is racist is to open yourself up to attack.

The (direct or indirect) beneficiaries of racist systems have a powerful incentive to be dishonest. So they lie and insist that racism doesn’t exist. How do they lie? Let’s count just a few of the ways.

They lie when they refuse to unflinchingly describe what happened.

This was not an attack on Christianity. It was a calculated terrorist attack on black parishioners at Emanuel A.M.E. Church by a white racist young man. Do not blather about mental illness or speculate that the killer was on drugs. Do not paint him as an outlier. Do not disconnect this racism and this violence from the less graphic but still racist violence of segregated neighborhoods, hyper-policed communities, needless voting restrictions, and attacks on public-sector jobs.

But instead of candor, we get obfuscation, as offered by South Carolina’s Governor Nikki Haley during a press conference last week. “We’ve got some grieving too. And we’ve got some pain we have to go through,” she said, through tears.

Conveniently, the Republican did not elaborate. Is it the pain of grief? Or is it African Americans’ collective pain of political disenfranchisement, economic exclusion, and mass incarceration, all of which are rooted in racism?

They lie when they ignore the echoes.

According to a survivor, Roof said: “You rape our women and you’re taking over our country, and you have to go.”

Said Republican presidential candidate Rand Paul in April, when announcing his campaign: “We have come to take our country back.”

Slightly milder iterations of Roof’s racism are as close as the worst of conservative talk radio, where fears of a colored menace — or perhaps a rebellion like that planned in 1822 by Emanuel A.M.E. founder and former slave Denmark Vesey — loom large.

Similar rhetoric pours from the mouths of right-wing politicians. And it is parroted by too many conservative voters, many who would insist they are not racist because they don’t use the n-word and have a black friend.

Roof wrote in his manifesto: “The first website I came to was the Council of Conservative Citizens.” The Council of Conservative Citizens, a white supremacist group, is a sponsor of “Political Cesspool,” which airs on Memphis radio.

We lie when we say never again.

I am unmoved by interracial unity marches and vigils and the unsatisfying, fleeting displays of kumbaya that follow such tragedies. Arguments over removing the Confederate flag from its place of honor miss the point. The symbols hurt, but the spirit that upholds those symbols kills. And because there is no appetite for exorcism, the demon of racism remains.

The lies dishonor the dead.

They are Susie Jackson, 87; Rev. Sharonda Coleman-Singleton, 45; Rev. DePayne Doctor, 49; Ethel Lance, 70; Rev. Daniel Simmons Sr., 74; Cynthia Hurd, 54; Tywanza Sanders, 26; Myra Thompson, 59; and state Senator Clementa Pinckney, 41, a pastor of Mother Emanuel. But we will not remember their names, just as we do not remember the names of the four black girls bombed to death in 1963 in a Birmingham church by white racists.

I feel like I can have hope or honesty, but not both. The truth is that this massacre could lead America to atone for racism. In the truth lies liberation that could unshackle African Americans from the nation’s bottom rungs. But we can’t handle the truth.

We prefer to lie.