Admittedly, I have been focusing so much of my “creative” energy on penning fake news stories, that the idea of sitting down in front of my keyboard to go old school and write a more traditional op-ed is a bit of a daunting task. It takes a certain level of hubris to offer one’s straight-up opinion as something worthy to be paid attention to, and over the last few months I’ve enjoyed being able to bury my opinions in the words I put into other people’s mouths. In fact, the cause of this piece — Dylann Storm Roof and his racist, murderous rampage he inflicted on the congregation at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina — was something I’ve already covered in my traditional, satirical way. But I won’t lie, I was inspired by watching Jon Stewart’s heartfelt monologue on the shooting, and I wanted to just put my own earnest feelings on this issue out there.
As I read through the volume social and traditional media posts about the shooting, I felt like if for nothing than for my own sanity, I simply had to speak a bit more bluntly and for myself, and not through a whacko conservative radio host I made up or something. What drove me to write this op-ed was seeing the concerted and deliberate effort by many on the right to take this horrific event and spin it away from its true context — racism in America — and into an attack on Christianity. Hell, I even saw that some fuckstain on the NRA board of executives had the temerity to imply that the murdered pastor at the church was somehow responsible for his own death and the deaths within his flock because he wasn’t packing, and his church was a gun-free zone.
When the confessed criminal implicitly states what his motives are, it takes a really cynical prick to ignore that statement and dive straight to playing the victim card yourself. This wasn’t an assault on Christians. If it were, Roof could have gone to any number of the churches in Charleston that were populated by more white people, right? This was about race. Anyone who can’t draw a direct line from racism to the Civil War to the Civil Rights movement to Ferguson, to Baltimore, and now to Charleston is doing so because they are ignorant, willfully or otherwise.
Pretending that Roof’s assault wasn’t a violent, politically-motivated attack is like pretending that Ted Cruz isn’t a smug prick. You’re welcome to your delusion, but no one should foster it. I happen to not like to use the word “terrorist” so much because I think it gives these bastards’ crimes more weight than they should have, because at the end of it all they’re just warped assholes who have decided that murder is the language they want to speak to the world in. But I’m a realist, and the reality is that terrorists and terrorism are words that are on the tips of everyone’s tongues, especially since 9/11, so yes, this act should absolutely be considered an act of terrorism.
It’s not just terrorism though. It’s a specific kind of American terrorism. It’s the same kind of terrorism that gave birth to the Klan in the first place. It’s the American terrorism that had crosses burned on lawns, church basements bombed, Freedom Riders beaten or killed, and generally gave cover to the most violent factions of the most virulently racist subsets of our culture. It’s a tie that binds us all together, because each successive generation has been confronted with racial tensions, but has managed to kick the can down the road just enough to where after we have a 21-year-old man declare that he was trying to start a race war there are people on Fox News and Senator Lindsey Graham insisting this is about Christianity, and why are they doing that?
Because they’re white, and the majority of Christians in this country are white. Hell, the majority of people in this country are white. But the point is they need to wrench the narrative back to the point where their viewers and constituents are the victims. Forget that this bastard was taught how to feel this way by people in his life. Forget that he likely fell in with other like-minded racists. Forget that there are images of him all over the internet proudly proclaiming his racism. Fox News wants you to believe this white guy, who prayed with his victims was actually attacking his own religion too. What an utter crock of shit.
From this point forward, anyone you see downplaying the racial element of this story should be considered at best a confused and tacit racist, and at worst a full-blown descendant of Nathan Bedford Forrest. I use the word tacit specifically because perhaps they don’t realize it, but they’ve been duped into pushing a racist narrative by downplaying race. This was first and foremost and only about race. It wasn’t about religion. It wasn’t about mental health — though if you ask me even though psychologists don’t call it as such, I think white supremacy is a mental disease of some order — and it wasn’t even about guns so much as just being another example of how far too easily acquired they are.
This story is about racism. It’s about slavery. The three-fifths compromise. The Fugitive Slave Act. Dred Scott. The underground railroad. The Civil War. The Ku Klux Klan. Sharecropping. Jim Crow. Lynch Mobs. White flight. Segregation. Memphis Burning. Rodney King. Michael Brown. Tamir Rice. Eric Garner. The War on Drugs. It is all related. For centuries we treated them like property, for another century we treated them like an inconvenient nuisance that we could just pat on the head, condescend to, and sweep under the rug. Then we figured out how to move them from the plantations to the penitentiary — bust them for low-level drug offenses, pass three strikes laws, and put them away, never to be confronted with your disgusting, inhumane treatment of actual human beings again.
Just as we stand on the shoulders of those who came before us to continue progress, we are also passed a baton from generation to generation that has not gotten us nearly far enough toward that finish line. We’ve come so far, but if you can read this paragraph and not connect at least a few dots — get your eyes and your conscience checked.
The right will of course claim that this line of argument only further separates us. Fuck that. There’s a difference between having human decency and compassion and intellectual honesty and trying to pit different racial groups against each other. Conservatives often carp about liberals for pointing out the racial aspects of stories, but there’s a reason we do — because it matters. Because ignoring cancer doesn’t make it go away. Cancer may kill you regardless of how hard you try to kill it, but in the end, you’ll never beat it without first doing everything you can to purge it from your body, and you can’t purge something you don’t even acknowledge exists.
It’s time to purge the Dylann Roofs from our midst, and the only way to do that is to knock out the places in society that foster his breed of hatred. The only way you do that is exposing them and talking about them. What you don’t do if you want to fix it is ignore it and then scream at the people who aren’t ignoring it that they are the real racists. And now I need to go make up some more words to put into people’s mouths.
We can do better, America. Let’s do better. Or not. McDonald’s sells breakfast all day now, so maybe we already won, I guess.
The post From the Plantation to the Penitentiary to Charleston: The Willful Ignorance of a Nation appeared first on The Political Garbage Chute.