Charles M. Blow at The New York Times writes—In Charleston, a Millennial Race Terrorist:
Who radicalized Roof? Who passed along the poison? We must never be lulled into a false belief that racism is dying off with older people. As I’ve written in this space before, Spencer Piston, an assistant professor of political science at Syracuse University, has found that “younger (under-30) whites are just as likely as older ones to view whites as more intelligent and harder-working than African-Americans.”
Racism is to social progress what cockroaches are to nuclear fallout — extraordinarily resilient.
Furthermore, there is a widely published photo of Roof sitting on his car with an ornamental license plate with Confederate flags on it. That is the same Confederate flag that flies on the grounds of the state Capitol. What signal is South Carolina sending?
There is the thread of couching his cowardice as chivalry, framing his selfish hatred as noble altruism in defense of white femininity from the black brute. So much black blood has been spilled and so many black necks noosed in the name of protecting white femininity, and by extension, white purity. Roof is only this trope’s latest instrument.
E.J. Dionne Jr. at
The Washington Post writes—
Charleston and the politics of evasion:
We Americans are exceptionally good at evasion when we want to be. Our skills in this sphere are particularly impressive on the matter of race and the subject of guns.
Nonsense, you say. Have we not been talking about race and racism for our entire history? [...]
But anyone who has ever been involved in an uncomfortable conversation of one kind or another — meaning all of us — knows that it’s possible to talk and talk and never get to the nub of the matter. There are strategies of evasion within even what appear to be probing dialogues. [...]
Right off the top, anyone who wants to discuss the implications of this shooting is scolded for “politicizing a tragedy.” We are told we must heal and mourn first, that it’s “disrespectful” to the victims to ask what this slaughter means and what we must do as a nation. How manipulative: Mourning the deaths of good people — and honoring the astonishing spirit of forgiveness modeled by their families — is used as an excuse to delay reflection on why this happened until the moment of urgency passes. In a media culture with a short attention span, there is no surer way to contain and marginalize the hard questions.
There are more excerpts from pundits below the fold.
Jason Morgan Ward at the Los Angeles Times writes—Dylann Roof and the white fear of a black takeover:
For most of the South's history, the fear of African Americans "taking over" has permeated mainstream political culture. That paranoia ran deepest in states like South Carolina, where African Americans constituted a majority of the population well into the 20 century. Whites in Charleston certainly acted on those fears in 1822, when they executed Denmark Vesey, a founding member of Emanuel AME Church, for plotting a slave rebellion. After emancipation, white supremacists stoked fears of "Negro domination" to overthrow South Carolina's interracial Reconstruction government. The architects of Jim Crow enacted disfranchisement measures such as poll taxes and literacy tests as safeguards against the seemingly ever-present threat of another black takeover.
It is fitting, if coincidental, that authorities apprehended Roof just across the state line in Shelby, N.C., the birthplace of the man who arguably did more than anyone to sear the specter of Negro domination into the national consciousness.
Thomas Dixon's "The Clansman," a novel set in Reconstruction-era South Carolina, inspired the 1915 blockbuster film "Birth of a Nation" and glorified white supremacist violence as a heroic response to black civic participation. Few remember Dixon's apocalyptic final novel, "The Flaming Sword," which depicted a Marxist-inspired, all-black "Nat Turner Legion" overrunning the South in the 1930s. Dixon died before he could complete his planned trilogy, in which a white "Patriot Union" would presumably take America back.
Timothy Egan at
The New York Times writes—
Apologize for Slavery:
The first black man to live in the White House, long hesitant about doing anything bold on the color divide, could make one of the most simple and dramatic moves of his presidency: apologize for the land of the free being, at one time, the largest slaveholding nation on earth.
The Confederate flag that still flies on the grounds of the Statehouse in South Carolina, cradle of the Civil War, is a reminder that the hatred behind the proclaimed right to own another human being has never left our shores.
An apology would not kill that hatred, but it would ripple, positively, in ways that may be felt for years.
As the son of a Kenyan father and a white mother who died more than a century after slavery ended, Barack Obama has little ancestral baggage on this issue. Yet no man could make a stronger statement about America’s original sin than the first African-American president.
Robert Lee Mitchell III at
The Independent writes—
Charleston shooting: The nine victims were murdered by a terrorist, not a 'whacked out kid':
Yesterday an act of domestic terrorism took place at the AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina. At the media briefing that took place afterwards, none of the state authority figures dealing with the massacre uttered those two words, though.
Instead, the portrayal of the white shooter was one we've come to know all too well. The contrast it has with mass murderers of other racial profiles is enough to take your breath away, if it wasn't so typical. Black people are still being terrorised in America – this time by someone who is thought to have once decorated himself in the apartheid-era flags of South Africa and Zimbabwe. At a time like this, language matters even more than it usually does. [...]
However, it doesn't look like Dylann Storm Roof will be referred to as a domestic terrorist by the authorities or the media, but “one of these whacked out kids,” as South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham stated on The View yesterday (he then went on to say "I don’t think it’s anything broader than that. It’s about a young man who is obviously twisted”).
Elspeth Reeve at
The New Republic writes—
Does Jeb Bush Know Anything?:
Jeb Bush has worked in politics for 35 years, and has been a potential presidential candidate for at least 10, but there's still so much he doesn't know. He doesn't know what's causing climate change. He doesn't know whether the Iraq war was a good idea. He doesn't know if a racist shot up a church because black people were in there. There's something a little odd about running a "Who's to say?" campaign for a job that by definition answers that question with "me." [...]
In many cases, admitting your own ignorance is an act of bravery. For Jeb Bush, it's probably the opposite. Today's Republican presidential candidate has to take conservative positions to win the nomination and then, just a few months later, moderate them to appeal to swing voters. So you could imagine he might see an advantage in a different tactic: claiming you just don't know what to think in the primary and then come to an understanding in the general.
Whatever the reason, "I don't know" is one of Bush's favorite phrases.
Theo Anderson at
In These Times writes—
Why Bernie Sanders Is the Perfect Candidate for This Moment in American Politics:
Through all those years, while economic inequality was mostly off the nation’s political agenda, it was Sanders’ abiding passion. In Outsider in the House, a book he wrote in 1997 about his congressional race the previous year, Sanders wrote, “In America we have the most inequitable distribution of wealth in the entire industrialized world. The middle class is shrinking, the working class is scraping by, and the poor are ever more deeply mired in poverty.”
Sanders was either way behind the times or way ahead of them. Fifty years ago, the movements for civil rights and economic justice, steadily building for years, culminated in the last great wave of social-reform legislation: the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the programs of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society agenda, including Medicare, Medicaid, Head Start and food stamps.
Now, 50 years after the Great Society, we are—perhaps—in the midst of another moment of building momentum to address racial and economic inequalities. The Occupy movement’s rise in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis was the first sign of the changing times. [...]
Sanders is a radical because he unapologetically asserts a vision of what government by the people and for the people can actually accomplish—and has accomplished. That vision has animated the progressive movement for more than a century. But relatively few have had the national megaphone that he will hold over the next year. His policy proposals include a jobs program to rebuild roads, bridges, airports and schools; hiking the federal minimum wage; breaking up the biggest banks; reforming the tax code and eliminating corporate loopholes; and investing heavily in renewable energy sources.
“If I do something … I want to do it well,” Sanders told the Brookings audience in February. The measure of whether he succeeds, though, will not be whether he wins the Democratic nomination or even whether he wins a certain percentage of the vote. A better measure will be whether he can help shift our national dialogue and revitalize the progressive movement.
Clarence Lusane at
The Progressive warns—
Bernie Sanders Should Address Racial Injustice:
Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders’ campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination has to win critical support from black voters for him to have a chance. He is not trying hard enough.
Sanders has so far ignored African-Americans to focus on economic populism. He believes that the answer to all problems, racial or otherwise, is to address issues of corporate power and to grapple with wealth and income inequality.
His campaign has therefore overlooked racial inequities. At his campaign launch, on his website, and in other public statements, he simply does not address subjects, even economic ones, that are a priority to black voters.
His support from the black community, as with others, will be contingent on three areas of the campaign: hiring, campaign language, and, most important, policy proposals. So far, he has little to show in any of these areas.
Bill Blum at
TruthDig writes—
My Weekend With Bernie: Three Issues Candidate Sanders Didn’t Address at His L.A. Fundraiser:
For American progressives, as the 2016 presidential election approaches, the question of the hour is simple: Is Bernie Sanders, the independent socialist senator from Vermont, the real deal, or is he just another election-year diversion before the inevitable anointment of Hillary Clinton as the Democratic Party’s nominee?
To help answer the question, I attended a Sanders-for-president fundraiser Saturday morning in the San Fernando Valley section of Los Angeles. Having done so, I’m still in the undecided column, although I’m leaning in Bernie’s direction. The reason I remain unconvinced has more to do with three vital issues Sanders avoided at the fundraiser, rather than anything he actually said. [...]
Offering a broad set of remedies ranging from single-payer health care to free tuition at public universities and paid family leave, Sanders called for a “political revolution” to mobilize the American people. “The antidote” to the prevailing corporate control of government, he thundered, bringing the crowd (at least those sufficiently nimble to stand) to its feet, “is tens of millions of people looking at Washington politicians and saying, ‘We know what’s going on’ ” and it has to stop.
But is Bernie Sanders really the candidate we need to spark a revolution?
Ruth Hopkins at
The Guardian writes—
My Native identity isn't your plaything. Stop with the mascots and 'pocahotties':
Besides being descended from and related by blood to one of the more than 566 tribal nations recognized by the US government, Natives today agree that blood quantum is not the sole determinate of Native identity: kinship is key, because no true Native is an island. We have grandparents and cousins, blood roots and homelands. Pretendians lack kinship ties to tribal people.
Pretendians also have not lived through the systemic oppression that actual Native people face on a daily basis. They lack connections to reservations or urban Native communities who battle the effects of historical trauma. Pretendians aren’t the survivors of genocide; rather, it was their colonial ancestors who set up housekeeping on stolen lands built over the corpses of our dead, and Pretendians have benefitted from it. Insisting on inclusion when unqualified just exploits the people that Pretendians seek to imitate.
Some Pretendians even go as far as falsifying tribal citizenship for the purposes of monetary gain and defrauding governments for treaty benefits, while about 25% of Native Americans live at or below the poverty line—10% above the national average.
Others claim Native heritage so they can speak for us. Ellie Reynolds, the conservative blogger who claimed to be Oglala Lakota (and an avid Washington football supporter), was exposed as a fake in May. She had no right to speak on behalf of the Oglala, let alone any other native. Meanwhile, real Natives have difficulty finding a media platform at all.