In the post civil rights era, it is obligatory that every white racist has a "best black friend".
The Republican Party keeps a database of such "trot out in case of emergency negroes" who are human chaff for their white supremacist, anti-black, anti-brown, anti-poor, policies. Clarence Thomas fulfills this role on an elite and institutional level.
Many individual white folks, on both sides of the political divide, in a society that is highly segregated along racial lines (75 percent of white Americans do not have one non-white friend) somehow manage to have a "best black friend" as well. This phantom black friend is not present in their day-to-day lives; he or she is just summoned when self-serving questions about racism or racial propriety are introduced.
White supremacist mass murderer and terrorist Dylann Roof also has a best black friend. His name is Christon Scriven.
He recently spoke to the BBC where he made the following assertion about Dylann Roof:
"Everybody's making him out to be racist but here I am in front of you today as a Black man and telling you that I look at him no different today than what I looked him last week because he never said anything racist to me..."
As I alluded to
in an earlier essay. Human beings of all colors have the capacity to deny the facts--especially when it involves someone dear and close to them having been arrested for a heinous crime.
But, given Dylann Roof's white supremacist manifesto, penchant for wearing the flags of Rhodesia and Apartheid era South Africa, telling racists jokes, and posing with Confederate flags, it is hard to believe that he was not also emitting such noxious signals of white supremacy while in the company of his "best black friend" Christon Scriven
And perhaps just as disturbing, Dylann Roof told Christon Scriven about his plans to commit mass murder at a local college. Guess what? Criston did not tell the police.
The Culture of Cruelty has warped the ethics, morality, and values of young people on both sides of the colorline. The neoliberal nightmare and the Culture of Disposability is their world: they have never known any other one.