The Charleston shootings and the state of the nation

Nine African Americans, gathered together for Bible study at
their church in Charleston, South Carolina, are dead, thanks to the rage of a
young white racist. And a symbol of the racism he harbored, the Confederate
flag, remains at full-staff on the grounds of the state capitol.

It’s tempting to point to that flag, flying throughout the
days of mourning in Charleston, as yet another example of Southern racism. But
the flag and its flaunting symbolize much more than the bigotry that exploded
from the gun in Emanuel AME Church.

They’re a symbol of more than the racism that led to the
destruction of a previous Emanuel AME Church building 133 years ago,
retribution for a church leader’s militancy. They symbolize more than the
racism that killed four little girls in a church in Birmingham 52 years ago.
More than the racism that killed Martin Luther King Jr. in Memphis 47 years
ago.

They’re a symbol of the racism that thrives everywhere in
this country right now, some of it openly violent, some of it confined to
swagger and smirking among friends and co-workers, some of it acted out in
discrimination in hiring, in education, in housing.

They’re a symbol of the racism of a busload of young white
fraternity members in Oklahoma singing out their supremacy. Of
Rochester-area students taunting black high-school athletes.Of a town supervisor joking about “city cousins.” Of
suburban residents protesting proposals to let black students from the city
attend their schools. Of police officers reading more into the
body language of an African-American male than that of a white male.Of politicians searching for ways to limit African-American voter
turnout.

Racism has many forms, but none of it is harmless. And that
it is so prevalent today – 150 years after the end of the Civil War, 67 years
after President Truman ordered the desegregation of US armed forces, 61 years
after Brown v. Board of Education, 51 years after the passage of the Civil
Rights Act – is proof of how deeply it is embedded in American culture. And how hard it is to eradicate.

Equally hard, of course, is dealing with the tools used so
often to act out that racism.

“I’ve had to make statements like this too many times,” President
Obama said the day after the shootings in Charleston. “Communities like
this have had to endure tragedies like this too many times.”

“We don’t have all the facts,” Obama said, “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.”

Each occurrence of gun violence is a tragedy, and those like
the Emanuel AME Church violence come with the additional challenge of racial
hatred. They leave us grieving not only for the victims and their families and
friends but also for America. Not only does this country, through its laws, its
political leaders, and its media, permit such events, it encourages them.

In these early days after events like the Charleston
killings, there is outrage. But it won’t last long. After so many of these
tragedies, we become numbed into resignation.

“At some point,” Obama said in his address, “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. And it is in our power to do something about it.”

But we won’t. If the massacre of twenty 6- and 7-year-olds in
a school in Newtown, Connecticut, wasn’t enough to get action, the killing of a
group of African-American churchgoers isn’t going to do it. Not in this
country.

On his show the night after the Charleston shootings, a frustrated
Jon Stewartdispensed with jokes. “I honestly have nothing other than just
sadness, once again,” he said, “that we have to peer into the abyss of the
depraved violence that we do to each other in the nexus of a just gaping racial
wound that will not heal yet we pretend doesn’t exist.”

And Stewart said he was “confident… that by acknowledging it,
by staring into that, and seeing it for what it is, we still won’t do jack shit.
Yeah. That’s us.”

The Charleston tragedy, the New York Times editorial
board wrote on Friday, “leaves the nation at an all too familiar
juncture – uncertain whether to do something positive to repair society’s
vulnerabilities or to once again absorb an intolerable wound by going through
what has become a woeful ritual of deep grief followed by shallow resolve to
move on toward… what? Toward the inevitable carnage next
time.”

The Times writers didn’t mask their anguish and their fury.
The accessibility of guns and the “odious racism that haunts society’s darkest
corners,” they wrote, are combining with “the public’s general sense of
impotence, as needed solutions are left up to a political system undermined by
retrograde and timorous officials more interested in their own survival than in
the broader welfare.”

Is it possible to change that? One of the nine victims last
week apparently had faith that it is. The extensive coverage by our sister
alt-weekly in Charleston, City Paper, included this
report: Just a few weeks ago, the Rev. Clementa Pinkney – Emanuel’s
pastor and one of the nine victims of the church shooting – had helped lead a
“Requiem for Racism” after the death of Walter Scott, an unarmed 50-year-old
black man shot by a police officer in nearby North Charleston.

Pinkney said he hoped the event would “help each of us to
look deeply into our own hearts and minds and inspire us to root out any forms
of violence and bigotry in our own lives.”

Maybe Pinkney’s own death will inspire some of that rooting
out. I’d like to have faith that it will. But at the moment, I’m more inclined
to Jon Stewart’s assessment.

We still won’t do jack shit.

This article appears in Jun 24-30, 2015.