The Charleston Massacre, the Legacy of the Confederacy, and the Ongoing Hegemony of Modern White Supremacy in the United States--FURTHER UPDATES AND ANALYSIS

http://fair.org/home/wapo-dont-say-terrorist-about-white-people-like-ourselves/

Don’t Say ‘Terrorist’ About ‘White People Like Ourselves’

by Jim Naureckas

June 22, 2015

The Washington Post

Dylann Roof appears in court: A Washington Post writer argues against calling him a “terrorist.”

Corporate media are demonstrably reluctant to use the word “terrorist” with regards to Charleston shooting suspect Dylann Roof–even though the massacre would seem to meet the legal definition of terrorism, as violent crimes that “appear to be intended…to intimidate or coerce a civilian population.”

Generally, news outlets don’t explain why they aren’t calling Roof a terrorist suspect; they just rarely use the word. But the Washington Post‘s Philip Bump gave it a shot in a piece headlined “Why We Shouldn’t Call Dylann Roof a Terrorist” (6/19/15), and his rationale is worth taking a look at.

Bump starts out by acknowledging that “a terroristic act, which this was, is treated and identified differently when the actor is a young white man.” He contrasts the treatment of the Charleston massacre with the attack on the Mohammad cartoon contest in Texas:

In each case, someone hoping to prove a political point attacked a gathering because of who was in attendance. In the case where the only deaths were the attackers, we call it terrorism. In the case where the only deaths were the innocent people, we debate it.

“But,” Bump then says, “we shouldn’t call Dylann Roof a terrorist.” His argument for this:

Roof wants to be a terrorist—for us to admit that he terrorized us. He likes the attention, telling the police as he admitted to his acts that he wanted to make sure they were “known.”… What if we just call him a racist, grotesque person. What if we laughed at him instead of telling him he scared us?

This makes as much sense as arguing that you shouldn’t charge someone with kidnapping because the person they abducted wasn’t a kid. “Terrorism” is the name of a crime, and the relevant question isn’t whether we like the etymology of the term, but whether the murders fit the elements of the definition—which has to do with intent to intimidate or coerce, not with whether anyone actually felt “terror.”

On some level, Bump understands that “terrorism” is a legal term with serious legal consequences, and that the fact that it’s unevenly applied based on the race and religion of the perpetrators is a real problem:

When Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was arrested in Boston in 2013, the debate was over how to treat him given that he was a terror suspect—as manifested by Sen. Lindsey Graham—not over whether or not he was a terror suspect. That’s part of why Tsarnaev and the Texas cartoon attackers were so quickly identified as terrorists.

This, Bump notes, “reflects the same racial chasm that Roof wanted to exacerbate.”

He also notes that the word has become politicized by the “War on Terror”—”which is, in essence, a war on certain groups of Middle Easterners and Muslims.” As Bump observes, “Calling more non-American people terrorists also serves to bolster the arguments of those calling for more military intervention.” Which leads him to conclude that “the problem…isn’t that we’re too slow to call Roof a terrorist. It’s that we’re often too quick to call everyone else a terrorist.”

Yet Bump doesn’t seem to have written a column about how “we’re too quick to call everyone else a terrorist”; he didn’t seem to have any problem referring to the Boston Marathon bombing as “terrorism,” for example. (“The key component to any terrorist attack is luck” was the lead sentence for a piece he wrote on the Tsarnaev brothers, for instance—The Wire, 4/22/13.) So why write this piece, urging people to do what most journalists are already doing—avoiding saying “terrorism” in connection to Charleston?

Washington Post‘s Philip Bump: “When I see Dylann Roof, I remember being a white male his age”

The answer seems to be in a remarkably revealing passage in the middle of the piece, where Bump acknowledges that he identifies with Roof because they share a skin color:

Most Americans are white, and we see white people like ourselves. When I see Dylann Roof, I remember being a white male his age, barely out of my teenage years and experiencing weird anger in a difficult time…. We can identify much more easily with who he is.

Huh. You would think a self-respecting journalist, recognizing this kind of irrational bias in himself, would try to avoid letting it influence his work—would certainly not want to call for giving a criminal suspect special journalistic treatment based on this identification. Yet there’s not really any other explanation offered in the column as to why it was written about Roof and not about Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.

Bump closes his column by rejecting the arguments that referring to the Charleston massacre as “racial terrorism” would “help…America come to terms with the fact that the ideology he assumed is dangerous and urgent” and put Roof in line for stiffer penalties. “Fine,” he says—but

each of these is predicated on our insistence that terrorism is somehow a higher order of evil than simply murdering elderly people for being black even as they held their Bibles in a church. It implies that his mass murder was one thing, but that his scaring us was made things more problematic. Perhaps we should demonstrate to him—and every other angry young man like him—that we aren’t scared of his dumb Internet rhetoric. Not in the least.
And let’s reel in our use of the word “terrorism” back in.

Let me note parenthetically that the law constantly takes intent into account—it’s the difference between murder and manslaughter, to name just one example—so suggesting that there’s something odd about taking the intent of a murder into account is specious.

But the real debate here is not about whether terrorism is worse than mass murder with no political motive; it’s whether we’re going to call some acts of politically motivated murder “terrorism” while withholding that label from other murders that are equally politically motivated—when we know that this label has real consequences, legally and politically.

“We aren’t scared by his dumb Internet rhetoric,” says Bump. If he’s still using “we” to mean “white people like ourselves,” it is  certainly true that whites generally don’t feel personally afraid of white supremacist terrorist who target African-Americans. They’re much more likely to be afraid of Muslim terrorists who target Americans in general—even though right-wing extremists (not all of whom are white supremacists, of course) killed five times as many people in this country as Muslim extremists in the decade after 9/11, according to a study from the  US Military Academy (New York Times, 6/16/15).

If you really think the word “terrorism” is being used too much, you should argue against it in the cases where it’s actually frequently used—which is mostly in cases involving Muslim suspects. But that would mean going against conventional wisdom, possibly with some professional cost. To argue instead that journalists are right to avoid the label with regard to a suspect with whom “we can identify much more easily”—well, there’s never much of price to be paid for endorsing institutional prejudices.

---

Jim Naureckas is the editor of FAIR.org.
Messages can be sent to the Washington Post at letters@washpost.com, or via Twitter @washingtonpost. Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective.

http://www.salon.com/2015/06/21/the_racist_disease_we_never_discuss_dylann_roof_

The racist disease we never discuss: Dylann Roof, over-policing and the real story about safety in America

People of comfort get freedom and security. People of color and the poor get neither

 

by Corey Robin

SALON

 

Charleston, S.C., shooting suspect Dylann Storm Roof is escorted from the Cleveland County Courthouse in Shelby, N.C., Thursday, June 18, 2015. Roof is a suspect in the shooting of several people Wednesday night at the historic The Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston. (AP Photo/Chuck Burton)(Credit: AP)

In response to Wednesday’s murder of nine African Americans at Charleston’s Emanuel AME Church, President Obama said, “Innocent people were killed in part because someone who wanted to inflict harm had no trouble getting their hands on a gun.”

I’ll admit: When I first read that statement, I thought Obama was talking about the police. Unfair of me perhaps, but it’s not as if we haven’t now been through multiple rounds of high-profile killings of African Americans at the hands of the police.

Indeed, until Wednesday’s murders, it seemed as if the national conversation about public safety had dramatically and fruitfully shifted. From a demand for police protection of white citizens against black crime—which dominated political discussion from the 1970s to the 1990s—to a scrutiny of the very instruments of that presumed protection. And how those instruments are harming African American citizens.

It’s tempting to seize on this moment as an opportunity to broaden that discussion beyond the racism of prisons and policing to that of society itself. In a way, that’s what Obama was trying to do by focusing on the threat posed not by the state or its instruments but by private guns in the hands of private killers like Dylann Roof.

But that may not be the wisest move, at least not yet. So long as the discussion is framed as one of protection, of safety and security, we won’t get beyond the society that produced Dylann Roof. Not only has the discourse of protection contributed to the racist practices and institutions of our overly policed and incarcerated society, but it also prevents us from seeing, much less tackling, the broader, systemic inequalities that might ultimately reduce those practices and institutions.

Since the 1960s, when law and order became the rallying cry of the country’s rightward turn, particularly around issues of racial inequality, the notion that safety and security are the primary political goods has migrated across the ideological spectrum. In 1975, the influential libertarian philosopher Robert Nozick declared that a “minimal state”—“limited to the functions of protecting all its citizens against violence, theft, and fraud, and to the enforcement of contracts”—was the only legitimate form of government.

Though critical of the minimal state, liberals have also come to believe that “the ‘first’ political question,” in the words of British philosopher Bernard Williams, is “the securing of order, protection, safety, trust, and the preconditions of cooperation. It is ‘first’ because solving it is the condition of solving, indeed posing, any others.” Meeting those requirements of order, protection, safety, and so on is what distinguishes a legitimate state from an illegitimate state.

Providing for the safety and security of citizens, in this view, may not be a political question at all. It is instead the ground upon which we ask and answer all political questions. Before we can talk about justice or equality, before we can debate the kinds of schools we want or the amount of retirement or medical care we need, we have to be safe in our bodies and secure in our rights (minimally defined). Like the faith in God that once lay at the foundation of political order, the provision of safety and security is supposed to lie beneath or beyond politics. Whether we’re black or white, rich or poor, men or women, everyone needs it, all are entitled to it, no one can dispute it.

Unless we address those deep inequalities and systemic injustices that this security consensus declares to be secondary or ancillary, however, we’re not likely to provide for that security in any kind of universal way. If anything, we’ll make some men and women less safe and less secure.
Not only are blacks systematically under-protected against crime but so are they—and the poor more generally—over-policed by the state. That’s no accident, argues Georgetown Law professor David Cole, for “our criminal justice system affirmatively depends on” inequalities of class and race. It grants broad constitutional rights—against unreasonable searches and seizures, say, or to the defense of counsel—to all citizens. But it interprets those rights in such a way that they are enjoyed by wealthier, more privileged citizens. People of comfort get freedom and security; people of color and the poor get neither. Yet pay for both. “By exploiting society’s ‘background inequality,” Cole notes, the country “sidesteps the more difficult question of how much constitutional protection we could afford if we were willing to ensure that it was enjoyed equally by all people.”

To assume that the state can provide for the safety and security of the most subjugated classes in America without addressing the fact of their subjugation is to assume away the last half-century of political experience. If anything, the discourse of safety and security has made those classes less secure, less safe: not merely from freelance killers like Dylann Roof or George Zimmerman, who claim to be acting on behalf of their own safety and that of white society, but also from the police. As Cole writes, the proliferation of criminal laws and quality-of-life regulations that are supposed to make poor and black communities safer often serve as a pretext for the most intrusive and coercive modes of policing in those communities.

The net of traffic regulations is so wide that everyone will fall within it, and as a result police officers have virtually unfettered discretion to decide whom to stop. That discretion will often be guided by the same prejudices and stereotypes that guide bus and train sweeps. And as a result, minority drivers on the nation’s highways simply do not have the same Fourth Amendment rights as whites.

Far from providing the ground upon which a more expansive vision of social policy can be built, the discourse of safety and security ensures that politics never gets off the ground at all. When we make the safety and security the sine qua non of politics—whether in the form of Nozick’s minimal state or Williams’ “Basic Legitimation Demand”—we start refracting all political problems through that lens. As the political scientist Marie Gottschalk has recently argued:

Problems such as crime, poverty, mass unemployment, and mass incarceration are no longer seen as having fundamental structural causes that can be ameliorated via policies and resources mobilized by the state. Rather, these problems are regarded as products either of fate or individual action….Anyone deemed unable or unwilling to change must be banished—either to the prison or to the prison beyond the prison represented by probation, parole, community sanctions, drug courts, and immigrant detention.

Berkeley Law Professor Jonathan Simon goes further, claiming that our entire society is now organized around the principle “governing through crime.” Social problems are treated as crimes, citizens as victims or criminals, and solutions as punishments.

Given the historic vulnerability of African Americans to the despotic power of whites, whose crimes against them so often went unpunished, it makes perfect semse that the demand for justice should sometimes assume a penal form. Not merely under slavery and Jim Crow, but also today, when the police and private citizens kill blacks with seeming impunity. Of all the things Dylan Roof said to and about his victims, that “you have to go” is by far the most chilling. Seldom have the words of a murderer been so well chosen: not only do they reveal his belief that it is his power, his right as a white man of all of 21 years, to select who is and is not a part of the body politic, who must be gotten rid of and what remains, but they also give voice to an ancient dispensation in this country, a conviction that the only solution to the Negro Question is expulsion or elimination. It was Jefferson who spoke darkly—part warning, part incantation—of “convulsions which will probably never end but in the extermination of the one or the other race” and who said of the black slave: “when freed, he must be removed from beyond the mixture.”

“Justice justice shall you seek,” says Deuteronomy. That puzzling second cry for justice reflects the conviction that a crime unpunished may be, in certain instances, more than an individual wrong. It can also disclose a systemic derangement of power—in this case, a deep and grievous loss of social standing among African Americans. But that’s the point: crimes like Dylan Roof’s or the recent spate of police murders should take us past the politics of safety and security to the abiding social domination that lies behind them.

In 1833, John C. Calhoun, a slaveholder and a racist who had been Andrew Jackson’s Vice President and was now representing South Carolina in the Senate, defended the honor of his state by claiming that “no State has been more profuse of its blood in the cause of the country.” Calhoun was referring to South Carolina’s sacrifices during the American Revolution, but his comments can be usefully read against the grain of this week’s events.

Dylann Roof shed blood for the sake of a racism that, if not quite the cause of the country, is nevertheless not exclusive to South Carolina or the South. To counter that bloodshed, we need to move beyond a politics of safety and security that would seek only to punish or prevent it. For that politics of prevention and protection, of safety and security, has indeed become the cause of the country. A cause that is all too friendly to racial inequality—and all too hostile to a politics that might overcome it.

Corey Robin is a professor of political science at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center. Author of The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin and Fear: The History of a Political Idea, he is currently writing a book about Clarence Thomas.
 
https://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Panopticon-Review/342702882479366
 
All,

I have been waiting fervently since last wednesday night to see/hear a black person in this country actually SAY ALOUD IN PUBLIC what the great majority of us are no doubt actually thinking and feeling about the brutal racist/white supremacist terrorist act of mass murder in Charleston, SC. and what it ACTUALLY MEANS to us. I was beginning to think/dread that no black human being would actually be given the opportunity to step forward and actually appear IN PUBLIC MEDIA to once again SAY ALOUD what we REALLY THINK AND FEEL about this truly heinous act.

FINALLY we don't have to wait any longer because MS. ROXANE GAY has come to our rescue and said aloud what desperately needs and deserves to be said so there will be no more "misunderstanding" about what this mass murder was really  about and what it really means.

SO THANK YOU SISTER GAY...WE TRULY NEED AND DEEPLY APPRECIATE YOUR WORDS AND THEIR MEANING WHETHER ANYONE ELSE IN THIS DELUSIONAL COUNTRY "UNDERSTANDS" OR "GETS IT" OR NOT... 
 
Kofi

http://www.nytimes.com/…/why-i-cant-forgive-dylann-roof.htm…

The Opinion Pages | Contributing Op-Ed Writer

Why I Can’t Forgive Dylann Roof
by Roxane Gay
JUNE 23, 2015
New York Times

Edel Rodriquez

I DO NOT forgive Dylann Roof, a racist terrorist whose name I hate saying or knowing. I have no immediate connection to what happened in Charleston, S.C., last week beyond my humanity and my blackness, but I do not foresee ever forgiving his crimes, and I am wholly at ease with that choice.
 
My unwillingness to forgive this man does not give him any kind of power. I am not filled with hate for this man because he is beneath my contempt. I do not believe in the death penalty so I don’t wish to see him dead. My lack of forgiveness serves as a reminder that there are some acts that are so terrible that we should recognize them as such. We should recognize them as beyond forgiving.

I struggle with faith but I was raised Catholic. I believe God is a God of love but cannot understand how that love is not powerful enough to save us from ourselves. As a child, I learned that forgiveness requires reconciliation by way of confession and penance. We must admit our sins. We must atone for our sins. When I went to confession each week, I told the priest my childish sins — fighting with my brothers, saying a curse word, the rather minor infractions of a sheltered Nebraska girl. When I didn’t have a sin to confess, I made something up, which was also a sin. After confession, I knelt at a pew and did my penance, and thought about the wrong I had done and then I tried to be better. I’m not sure I succeeded all that often.

Ever the daydreamer, I spent most of my time in Sunday Mass lost in my imagination. The one prayer that stayed with me was “Our Father” and the line “and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.” I always got stuck on that part. It’s a nice idea that we could forgive those who might commit the same sins we are apt to commit but surely, there must be a line. Surely there are some trespasses most of us would not commit. What then?

Forgiveness does not come easily to me. I am fine with this failing. I am particularly unwilling to forgive those who show no remorse, who don’t demonstrate any interest in reconciliation. I do not believe there has been enough time since this terrorist attack for anyone to forgive. The bodies of the dead are still being buried. We are still memorizing their names: Cynthia Hurd, Susie Jackson, Ethel Lance, DePayne Middleton Doctor, Clementa C. Pinckney, Tywanza Sanders, Daniel L. Simmons Sr., Sharonda Coleman-Singleton and Myra Thompson.

We are still memorizing these names but the families who loved the people who carried these names have forgiven Dylann Roof. They offered up testimony in court, less than 48 hours after the trauma of losing their loved ones in so brutal a manner. Alana Simmons, who lost her grandfather, said, “Although my grandfather and the other victims died at the hands of hate, everyone’s plea for your soul is proof that they lived in love, and their legacies will live in love.” Nadine Collier, who lost her mother, said: “You took something very precious away from me. I will never talk to her ever again. I will never be able to hold her again. But I forgive you and have mercy on your soul.”

I deeply respect the families of the nine slain who are able to forgive this terrorist and his murderous racism. I cannot fathom how they are capable of such eloquent mercy, such grace under such duress.

Nine people are dead. Nine black people are dead. They were murdered in a terrorist attack.

Over the weekend, newspapers across the country shared headlines of forgiveness from the families of the nine slain. The dominant media  narrative vigorously embraced that notion of forgiveness, seeming to believe that if we forgive we have somehow found a way to make sense of the incomprehensible.

We are reminded of the power of whiteness. Predictably, alongside the forgiveness story, the media has tried to humanize this terrorist. They have tried to understand Dylann Roof’s hatred because surely, there must be an explanation for so heinous an act. At the gunman’s bond hearing, the judge, who was once reprimanded for using the N-word from the bench, talked about how not only were the nine slain and their families victims, but so were the relatives of the terrorist. There are no limits to the power of whiteness when it comes to calls for mercy.

The call for forgiveness is a painfully familiar refrain when black people suffer. White people embrace narratives about forgiveness so they can pretend the world is a fairer place than it actually is, and that racism is merely a vestige of a painful past instead of this indelible part of our present.

Black people forgive because we need to survive. We have to forgive time and time again while racism or white silence in the face of racism continues to thrive. We have had to forgive slavery, segregation, Jim Crow laws, lynching, inequity in every realm, mass incarceration, voter disenfranchisement, inadequate representation in popular culture, microaggressions and more. We forgive and forgive and forgive and those who trespass against us continue to trespass against us.

Mr. Roof’s racism was blunt and raggedly formed. It was bred by a culture in which we constantly have to shout “Black lives matter!” because there is so much evidence to the contrary. This terrorist was raised in this culture. He made racist jokes with his friends. He shared his plans with his roommate. It’s much easier to introduce forgiveness into the conversation than to sit with that reality and consider all who are complicit.

What white people are really asking for when they demand forgiveness from a traumatized community is absolution. They want absolution from the racism that infects us all even though forgiveness cannot reconcile America’s racist sins. They want absolution from their silence in the face of all manner of racism, great and small. They want to believe it is possible to heal from such profound and malingering trauma because to face the openness of the wounds racism has created in our society is too much. I, for one, am done forgiving.

Roxane Gay is the author of “An Untamed State” and “Bad Feminist” and a contributing opinion writer.


A version of this op-ed appears in print on June 24, 2015, on page A23 of the New York edition with the headline: Why I Can’t Forgive the Killer in Charleston.  

http://www.truth-out.org/…/31517-dylann-roof-is-not-an-extr…
 

Dylann Roof Is Not an Extremist
Tuesday, 23 June 2015
by Zoé Samudzi,
Open Democracy | Op-Ed

 A demonstrator wears the Confederate flag outside a Democratic presidential debate in Greenville, S.C., Jan. 29, 2004. (Ruth Fremson/The New York Times)

I am the daughter of two Zimbabwean immigrants. My parents were born in what was then Rhodesia, an apartheid state ruled by a white minority government.

My parents have not told me much about life in Rhodesia outside of my mother's time spent in an internment camp and my father's brush with political activism in his youth. They are now both naturalized American citizens, and I am sure they would prefer to not resurrect memories of growing up under apartheid.

When I saw Dylann Roof wearing a jacket with a patch of the flag of the Union of South Africa (a South African apartheid flag), I was shocked and disgusted. But when someone pointed out that the other flag was that of Rhodesia, one I had never seen until Thursday (and one that my mother did not initially recognize), I was sick to my stomach - even more so when I learnt his blog was called "the last Rhodesian".

This past Wednesday evening, Roof entered Emmanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church - a church in Charleston, South Carolina with historical importance to the Black community - and opened fire, killing nine churchgoers.

American white supremacy had, in a way, come full circle.

We're missing something when we debate the nature of Roof's actions and whether they constitute a hate crime or terrorism. Why would he emblazon his jacket with apartheid South African and Rhodesian flags and have an affinity for southern Confederate iconography and beliefs if a common thread did not link all three things together?

The common thread is settler colonialism, and American white supremacy as settler colonial nostalgia. Roof wearing those apartheid patches on his jacket while simultaneously embracing the white supremacist narratives of the American Confederate South is nostalgia for this projected past.

Settler colonialism is a process in which foreign families move into a region claimed by those foreigners as their own, or on behalf of an imperial power: the United States and Rhodesia were colonized by the British, and South Africa by the Dutch. This colonization is often characterized by the displacement and/or forced assimilation, genocide of indigenous populations, and the imposition of power dynamics of  settler (i.e. white) supremacy.

While settler colonial processes are unending, colonialism in its golden era was a time of global white leadership and dominance, where indigenous people were raped and enslaved and resources were plundered. The antebellum south was a slave economy in which white owners had unfettered access to Black bodies.

The legacy of the Confederate States of America was the preservation of this racist ownership and use of enslaved Blacks as a labor force. Nostalgia for this era of Black servitude represents a longing to return to a time of uncontested white male leadership and dominance, a return to the America "that used to be."

While the media may try to construct Roof as some kind of lone anomalous monster or extremist who committed an horrific hate crime in a vacuum, he is not an extremist. He is a terrorist, but he is not an extremist.

As a first generation American of Zimbabwean origin, my interactions with whiteness include both American and Rhodesian settler colonial forms, though in a new and jarring way. The similarities between these structures became more apparent when I learnt about the role that Rhodesia plays in American white supremacist militia and paramilitary culture.

Rhodesia is viewed as the land "lost" by the white savior-colonizers, spurring on "macho adventure fantasies as well as terror fantasies of black hordes wiping out virtuous white minorities."

I see little difference between the Transatlantic slave trade, state-sanctioned segregation and American apartheid, the entitled land theft of Manifest Destiny, the slaughter of indigenous people, medical experimentation on Black bodies, the state's infiltration and assassination of resistance groups and leaders of color, and Dylann Roof's slaughter of nine innocent Black people in that church.

The conversation that white America is having is incomplete. Beyond many people's failure to admit his act was one of terrorist violence (indicting the state as a perpetrator of terrorism as a result), there is a failure to recognize that his actions are consistent with the violence and racism that has characterized America since its creation.

Roof's whole-hearted embrace of Confederate ideologies, his hatred of Blacks and Latinos, his naming of the "Jewish problem," and his perception of East Asians as a "model minority" and the group in most active collusion with white supremacy may all be considered fringe and extremist views, but they are all political understandings that exist within mainstream conservatism and within mainstream whiteness more broadly.

President Obama called racism "a blight that we have to combat together." We do not need a continued insistence on moving forward in solidarity when we still do not have a proper understanding of the past.

We need white Americans to be jolted from their racialized ignorance and fragility and to begin to be honest about what America historically has been and continues to be: honesty that the shining "city upon a hill" is ideologically and functionally similar to other racist settler colonial projects around the world.

While Dylann Roof's manifesto was unspeakably racist and admittedly painful to read, white self-identified liberals or progressives should read it. The description of white supremacist racial processes is surprisingly astute (though his understanding unfortunately led him to violence rather than an active challenge of their legitimacy and function). In particular he takes to task white liberals who move to areas to attend better schools. His criticism of "white flight" to suburbia points out that many white liberals are not vastly different from him in their internalizations of white supremacy (though their expression differs drastically).

While all non-Black people of color must address anti-Blackness in their own communities, white liberals should very carefully analyze their own politics and the ways in which their white privilege ultimately maintains structures of racial oppression.

There are some very tangible things that white liberal and progressive allies can do to challenge white supremacy in the spaces they occupy. They can stop allowing casual racist jokes and comments to go unchallenged. They can share anti-racist narratives from Black people and people of color rather than simply similar comments made by white liberals. They can be mindful of the demands that they as "allies" make from Black people (e.g. demanding support and information, which takes away a person's time and energy).

But the most crucial thing white people can do is to engage mindfully with people of color in discussions of racism: to recognize the assumptions they carry as a result of socialization are likely steeped in white supremacy to some degree, and to really listen to and trust what people of color tell them about racism. Only through honest discussions about white supremacy and actively taking responsibility for identity-privileging structures can white Americans play their role in upending and ultimately dismantling still existing settler colonial structures.

This piece was reprinted by Truthout with permission or license. It may not be reproduced in any form without permission or license from the source.

Zoé Samudzi is a social psychologist working on public health issues relating to HIV prevention among transgender women of color. She passionately theorizes about race and gender hegemony, specifically about the nature of white masculinity. Twitter: @ztsamudzi.

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Is the FBI Ignoring White Violence by Refusing to Call Dylann Roof a Terrorist?
Monday, 22 June 2015
by Amy Goodman, Democracy Now!
Video Interview

Civil rights activist Kevin Alexander Gray and Richard Cohen, president of the Southern Poverty Law Center, discuss whether the shooting in Charleston was an act of domestic terrorism. "Dylann Roof was a human drone, and every Tuesday morning the Obama administration uses drones to kill people whose names we don't even know and can't pronounce," Kevin Alexander Gray says. "So I don't know if I feel comfortable with the idea of expanding this word 'terror.'" But Richard Cohen calls the shooting "a classic case of terrorism." "It's politically motivated violence by a non-state actor and carried out with the intention of intimidating more persons than those who were the immediate victims," Cohen says. "I think in some ways it's important to talk about terrorism in that way, not so we can send out drones, not so we can deny people their due process rights, but so we can understand the true dimensions of what we're facing."

TRANSCRIPT:

AMY GOODMAN: But I wanted to go to the issue of the massacre being terrorism. Speaking at a news conference on Friday, the FBI director, James Comey, refused to label the Charleston massacre as a terrorist act.

JAMES COMEY: I wouldn't, because of the way we define terrorism under the law. Terrorism is an act of violence done or threatened to - in order to try to influence a public body or the citizenry, so it's more of a political act. And again, based on what I know so far, I don't see it as a political act.

AMY GOODMAN: So, that was the FBI director, James Comey. It's surprising many, because the Department of Justice said they were investigating whether they would call this a terrorist act, and he came out against it. Again, we're joined by Kevin Alexander Gray, activist from Columbia, the capital of South Carolina, and Richard Cohen, who is president of the Southern Poverty Law Center. Kevin Alexander Gray, your response to him saying this is not a terrorist act?

KEVIN ALEXANDER GRAY: Well, you know, most people would say a crime like this, you're trying to terrorize people. But when we start talking about the so-called expansion of the war on terrorism and expansion of the use of that word, and especially when, in a post-9/11 world, it has meant denying due process rights to a whole lot of people - Dylann Roof was a human drone. And every Tuesday morning, the Obama administration uses drones to kill people whose names we don't even know and can't pronounce. So, I don't know if I feel comfortable with the idea of expanding this word "terror."

Let's convict this young man or try this young man for murder, nine counts of murder. I am opposed to the death penalty. I would like to see him go to jail with life without parole. But, you know, the law - when you start using terms like "terrorism" in this country, for me, it's always had a racial tinge to it going into it. So that's problematic. And it's been an expansion of the denial of due process with the use of the term. So I'm a little troubled by it. I just - you know, I believe -

AMY GOODMAN: Let me - let me turn to Richard Cohen and ask your response -

KEVIN ALEXANDER GRAY: - that there ought to be a standard of law, one standard law.

AMY GOODMAN: Richard Cohen, your response to whether this is terrorism?

RICHARD COHEN: Well, I understand Mr. Gray's reservations, but I do think it is a classic case of terrorism. It's politically motivated violence by a non-state actor and carried out with the intention of intimidating more persons than those who are the immediate victims. And I think in some ways it's important to talk about it as - and terrorism in that way, not so we can send out drones, not so we can deny people their due process rights, but so we can understand the true dimensions of what we're facing. We're not facing just kind of the lone nut who walks in some place and kills a bunch of people. We're talking about someone who sees himself as part of a larger movement, intended to, you know, deny all black people their rights. So I think there is some consequence in thinking about it that way.

AMY GOODMAN: Juan Cole recently tweeted that since 2002 right-wing white terrorists have killed more Americans than Muslim extremists. Richard Cohen, the minute the Boston Marathon killings took place, "terror," the word "terror," was everywhere, unquestioned, the horrific event that took place in Boston, the horrific attack. But here, it's different. And can you talk about how it's framed over the years? You have been tracking white supremacist groups for decades at Southern Poverty Law Center. And by the way, how much have they increased in the last years?

RICHARD COHEN: Well, actually, the number of organized white supremacist groups has fallen fairly significantly over the last few years. But I don't think that means that the level of white supremacist activity has fallen. We still see a high level of violence. And what we're seeing is people drifting away from the organized groups, you know, and retreating to the anonymity of the net. You know, there's a website out there called Stormfront. Right now it has 300,000 registered users. Those are people who have signed up to post their hatred. And that's an increase of about 50 percent over the last five years.

I want to go back to the earlier question that you asked, the earlier point that you made. You know, after 9/11, we saw all of the resources at the federal level go towards jihadi terror, and, you know, kind of ignoring our homegrown terrorism. That began to change last year somewhat after the killings in [Overland] Park, Arkansas, by a well-known white supremacist. But I still think it's really important for the government, at all levels, not to put all of their eggs in the jihadi basket and to recognize that we have as much, or if not more, to fear by what we call sometimes homegrown terrorists.

AMY GOODMAN: Richard Cohen and Kevin Alexander Gray, we thank you both for being with us.

RICHARD COHEN: Thank you, Amy.

AMY GOODMAN: Richard Cohen, president of the Southern Poverty Law Center, co-author of the editorial published in today's New York Times - we'll link to it - "White Supremacists Without Borders." And Kevin Alexander Gray, community organizer in the capital of South Carolina, Columbia, edited the book Killing Trayvons: An Anthology of American Violence. And, in fact, it was Dylann Roof, if in fact he wrote this manifesto, who tracks his hatred to the Trayvon Martin case. He said that opened his eyes and changed him forever.

This is Democracy Now! When we come back, a Democracy Now! exclusive: A new candidate enters the presidential race. Stay with us.

This piece was reprinted by Truthout with permission or license. It may not be reproduced in any form without permission or license from the source.

Amy Goodman

Amy Goodman is the host and executive producer of Democracy Now!, a national, daily, independent, award-winning news program airing on over 1,100 public television and radio stations worldwide. Time Magazine named Democracy Now! its "Pick of the Podcasts," along with NBC's Meet the Press.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/21/us/dylann-storm-roof-photos-website-charleston-church-shooting.html?emc=edit_na_20150620&nlid=7889556&ref=cta

A website with a white supremacist manifesto features dozens of photos of Dylann Storm Roof, the man accused of killing nine people at a church in Charleston, S.C., posing with weapons, burning an American flag and visiting Southern historic sites and Confederate soldiers’ graves.
 

It is not clear who wrote the words and who took the pictures, but it traces the evolution of the author’s racist worldview and concludes with a section labeled “An Explanation.”
 

“I have no choice,’’ it reads. “I am not in the position to, alone, go into the ghetto and fight. I chose Charleston because it is most historic city in my state, and at one time had the highest ratio of blacks to Whites in the country. We have no skinheads, no real KKK, no one doing anything but talking on the internet. Well someone has to have the bravery to take it to the real world, and I guess that has to be me.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/21/us/dylann-storm-roof-photos-website-charleston-church-shooting.html?emc=edit_na_20150620&nlid=7889556&ref=cta

BREAKING NEWS

Website With Racist Manifesto and Photos of Charleston Shooting Suspect Surfaces

Saturday, June 20, 2015 11:56 AM EDT
 
U.S.

Dylann Storm Roof Photos Found on Website

by FRANCES ROBLESJUNE 20, 2015
New York Times


A photo from a white supremacist website showing Dylann Storm Roof, the suspect in the Charleston, S.C., church shooting

COLUMBIA, S.C. — A website with a white supremacist manifesto features dozens of photos of Dylann Storm Roof, the man accused of killing nine people at a church in Charleston, S.C., posing with weapons, burning an American flag and visiting Southern historic sites and Confederate soldiers’ graves.

It is not clear who wrote the words and who took the pictures, but it traces the evolution of the author’s racist worldview and concludes with a section labeled “An Explanation.”

“I have no choice,’’ it reads. “I am not in the position to, alone, go into the ghetto and fight. I chose Charleston because it is most historic city in my state, and at one time had the highest ratio of blacks to Whites in the country. We have no skinheads, no real KKK, no one doing anything but talking on the internet. Well someone has to have the bravery to take it to the real world, and I guess that has to be me.”

In one picture, Mr. Roof is shown posing with wax figures of slaves. In others, he posed with a handgun. He is alone in all the photos, which appear to have been taken at a slave plantation, Sullivan Island, S.C., and at the Museum and Library of Confederate History.

The website links to several pages of long racist rants. Some describe Hispanics as enemies and say that “Negroes” have lower I.Q.s and low-impulse control. The writings are not signed.

The domain site was registered in February under the name Dylann Roof. Mr. Roof, 21, from Columbia, S.C., is a high school dropout and unemployed landscaper. He is accused of waging a racially motivated rampage at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston.

Violent Racist Attack On Black South Carolina Church by avowed White Supremacist Leaves Nine Dead

http://www.nytimes.com/…/church-attacked-in-charleston-sout…
 

All,

While far too many of us have been stupidly wasting time sitting around debating whether a clearly deceptive, manipulative, and mentally unstable white woman pretending to be black is fit or not to be seen as a "honorary kneegrow", the ongoing vicious white supremacist murders of black people continue relentlessly throughout the whole damn country.

The only question left now on a national scale is how are we going to defend ourselves, our families, and loved ones against these attacks?

Kofi

http://www.usatoday.com/…/charleston-south-caroli…/28902017/

Police: 9 dead in shooting at black church in Charleston, S.C.
by Melanie Eversley
June 17, 2015
USA TODAY
 

CHARLESTON, S.C. — Nine people have died in a shooting at a historic black church in Charleston, S.C., police said early Thursday morning.

"I do believe this was a hate crime," Police Chief Gregory Mullen said.

Eight people died on the scene at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church and one person was pronounced dead at a hospital, Mullen said.

Among the dead was the state senator who was pastor of the church, Democrat Clementa Pinckney, WCBD reported. Pinckney, 41, was married with two children and had served in the state Senate since 2000, according to online biographies.

People were taking part in a prayer meeting at the time of the incident, Mayor Joe Riley said during the press conference.

"This is inexplicable," Riley said. "It is the most intolerable and unbelievable act possible... The only reason someone could walk into church and shoot people praying is out of hate."

Said Police Chief Mullen: "This is a tragedy that no community should have to experience. It is senseless. It is unfathomable that someone would walk into a church when people are having a prayer meeting and take their lives."

Emanuel is the oldest AME church in the South and has one of the oldest and largest black congregations south of Baltimore, according to its website. Denmark Vesey, executed for attempting to organize a major slave rebellion, was one of the founders.

Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church sits at
The Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church sits at 110 Calhoun St. in Charleston, S.C. (Photo: Facebook)

The shooting took place at about 9 p.m. ET, Charleston police said. The gunman is still on the loose, they said.

The suspect is a clean-shaven white male about 21-years-old with sandy blond hair, and is wearing a gray sweatshirt or hoodie, blue jeans and Timberland boots, officials said.

Pinckney was a native of Beaufort, S.C., and graduated magna cum laude from Allen University in 1995. He received a master's of divinity degree from the Lutheran Theological Southern Seminary and a master's degree in public administration from the University of South Carolina. He was elected to the South Carolina House in 1996, when he was 23, and was elected to the state Senate in 2000.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/18/us/church-attacked-in-charleston-south-carolina.html?emc=edit_na_20150618&nlid=7889556&ref=cta&_r=0
 

U.S.

Nine Killed in Shooting at Charleston Church
By ASHLEY SOUTHALL
JUNE 17, 2015
New York Times

Police gathered outside the Emanuel A.M.E. Church after a shooting on Wednesday in Charleston, S.C. Credit Richard Ellis/European Pressphoto Agency

A white gunman opened fire Wednesday evening at a historic black church in downtown Charleston, S.C., before fleeing, the police said, and nine people were killed.

The Charleston Police Department said the shooting occurred at the Emanuel A.M.E. Church about 9 p.m.

Officials did not release information about possible victims. Chief Greg Mullen said the police believed it was a hate crime.

The police described the gunman as a clean-shaven white man about 21 years old who was wearing a gray sweatshirt, bluejeans and Timberland boots.

Around 10:45 p.m., police officers at the scene drew their weapons and later escorted a man in handcuffs, who appeared to match that description. But officials said later that they were still searching for the gunman.

Reporters said families of the possible victims were arriving at the scene.

A reporter at the scene late Wednesday said the police pushed back members of the news media after receiving a bomb threat.

Helicopters with searchlights circled overhead, and a group of pastors knelt and prayed across the street.

A man knelt across the street from where police officers gathered outside the church. Credit Wade Spees/The Post and Courier, via Associated Press

“The question is, ‘Why God?’,” a man wearing a shirt bearing the name of the Empowerment Missionary Baptist Church said during the prayer.

The church is one of the nation’s oldest black churches. The current pastor, the Rev. Clementa C. Pinckney, is also a state senator. It was not clear if he was at the church at the time of the shooting. The Gothic Revival-style church was built in 1891 and is considered a historically significant building, according to the National Park Service.


Worshipers down the street from the church on Wednesday. Credit David Goldman/Associated Press

The congregation was formed after black members of the Methodist Episcopal Church in the city broke away “over disputed burial ground,” according to the website of the National Park Service. In 1822, one of the church’s co-founders, Denmark Vesey, tried to foment a slave rebellion in Charleston, the church’s website says. The plot was foiled by authorities and 35 people were executed, including Mr. Vesey.

The church houses the oldest black congregation south of Baltimore, the Park Service said.

Gov. Nikki R. Haley said in a statement that she and her family are praying for the victims.

“While we do not yet know all of the details, we do know that we’ll never understand what motivates anyone to enter one of our places of worship and take the life of another,” the governor said. “Please join us in lifting up the victims and their families with our love and prayers.”

Late Wednesday, the campaign staff of Jeb Bush, who is seeking the Republican nomination for president, said he was canceling appearances planned for Thursday in Charleston because of the shooting.

A version of this article appears in print on June 18, 2015, on page A15 of the New York edition with the headline: South Carolina Police Search for Shooter at Black Church. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe

"This is the product of what happens when those who spout divisive and bigoted rhetoric speak to people who do not respond to words with thought but to words with action. This is the epitome of a hate crime ... This is sadly familiar, it is a shame that in the 21st century this happens.”

http://www.pmnewsnigeria.com/2015/06/18/white-gunman-at-large-after-killing-9-black-persons-at-charleston-church/
 

White gunman at large after killing 9 black persons at Charleston church  print
Published on June 18, 2015 by pmnews  
  · 

Worshippers embrace following a group prayer across the street from the scene PHOTO: abcnews

CHARLESTON, S.C. (Reuters) – A white gunman was still at large after killing nine people during a prayer service at a historic African-American church in Charleston, South Carolina, the city’s police chief said on Thursday, describing the attack as a hate crime.

Officers with dogs searched the streets for the suspect, whom police described as a 21-year-old white man with sandy hair wearing a sweatshirt, jeans and boots.

Gunfire erupted inside Emanuel AME Church in downtown Charleston on Wednesday night, Police Chief Gregory Mullen said.

The gunman had yet to be caught hours after the attack and was considered extremely dangerous, he said.

“To have an awful person come in and shoot them is inexplicable, obviously the most intolerable and unbelievable act possible,” Charleston Mayor Joe Riley told reporters. “The only reason someone could walk into a church to shoot people praying is out of hate.”

The shooting called to mind a 1963 bombing of an African-American church in Birmingham, Alabama, that killed four girls and galvanized the civil rights movement of the 1960s.

The Charleston church is one of the largest and oldest black congregations in the South, its website says. It has its roots in the early 19th century, and the current building, completed in 1891, is considered a historically significant building, according to the U.S. National Park Service.

The attack follows the April shooting of an unarmed black man in North Charleston by a white police officer. The officer has been charged with murder in that case, one of a number of deaths of unarmed black men in encounters with police that have raised racial tensions in the United States.

A man looks on as a group of people arrive inquiring about the shooting  PHOTO: nydailynews

Soon after the shooting, a clutch of men stood in a circle in front of a hotel near the church, one of many landmark buildings in the city.

“We pray for the families, they’ve got a long road ahead of them,” Reverend James Johnson, a local civil rights activist, said during the impromptu prayer service.

The FBI, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and other agencies have joined in the investigation, Mullen said.

Eight victims were found dead in the church, Mullen told reporters, and a ninth person died after being taken to hospital. One other person was wounded and was being treated at a local hospital, Mullen said.

None of the victims were immediately identified. But the Reverend Al Sharpton, the New York-based civil rights leader, said in a tweet that the Reverend Clementa Pinckney, the church’s pastor and a member of the state Senate, was among the dead.

After the shooting, a bomb threat was reported near the church, Charleston County Sheriff’s Office spokesman Eric Watson said, and people who were gathered in the area were told by police to move back.

Mullen said that the all-clear had been given after checks following the bomb threat.

A police chaplain was present at the scene of the shooting, and a helicopter with a searchlight hovered overhead as officers combed the area.

Following the attack on the church, Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush, the former governor of Florida, cancelled an appearance in Charleston that had been scheduled for Thursday morning.

“Governor Bush’s thoughts and prayers are with the individuals and families affected by this tragedy,” his campaign team said in a statement.

https://twitter.com/CityCharleston/status/611474085571375104/photo/1
 

All,

This is the white male suspect in the mass murder of nine people at a historic black Charlston, SC church last night.  He has not been caught and is still at large...

Kofi
 

City of CharlestonVerified account ‏@CityCharleston
Anyone with information about this incident call 1-800-CALL-FBI.

Here’s a closer view of the CCTV images released by the police of the suspect and his car.

CCTV still of shooting suspect Suspect sought in connection with the Charleston shooting.

CCTV still of shooting suspect Suspect sought in connection with the Charleston shooting. Photograph: Charleston PD/REX Shutterstock/Charleston PD/REX Shutterstock

The suspect was seen leaving the church in the pictured black four door sedan. Photograph: Charleston PD/REX Shutterstock/Charleston PD/REX Shutterstock      

CHARLESTON SHOOTER IDENTIFIED:
Name: Dylann Storm Roof--5′ 9″120 pounds. 21 years old. White male. Driving a 2000 Hyundai ELantra GSLicense plate: LGF330

http://www.nytimes.com/…/us/charleston-church-shooting.html…

Charleston Church Shooting Leaves 9 Dead; Gunman Is Sought
By JASON HOROWITZ, NICK CORASANITI and ASHLEY SOUTHALL
JUNE 18, 2015
New York Times

Charleston police released a photograph taken from surveillance footage of the man who is believed to be the gunman. Credit Charleston Police Department, via Reuters

CHARLESTON, S.C. — The suspect in the shooting that killed nine people at a historic black church in this city’s downtown has been identified by city and federal law enforcement officials as Dylann Storm Roof, 21, of the Columbia area.

The identification comes as an intense manhunt was underway for the gunman who opened fire on Wednesday night at a historic black church in this city’s downtown.

The chief of police of Charleston, Greg Mullen, called the shooting a hate crime, and an official with the Justice Department said that a federal investigation had been started and that it could be conducted in cooperation with the state inquiry.

Chief Mullen said that law enforcement officials, including the F.B.I. and other federal agencies, were assisting in the investigation of the attack, which left six women and three men dead.

Charleston police released a photograph taken from surveillance footage of the man who is believed to be the gunman.

RELATED:
Charleston Church Shooting Leaves 9 Dead; Gunman Is Sought
JUNE 18, 2015

The gunman walked into the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, Chief Mullen said, and attended a prayer meeting for about an hour before opening fire. Initial police reports said he entered the church about 9 p.m. and began shooting. Among the dead was the Rev. Clementa Pinckney, who was also a state senator.

Sylvia Johnson, a cousin of Mr. Pinckney, told NBC News that she had spoken with a survivor of the shooting who told her the gunman reloaded five times. The survivor, she said, told her that the gunman had entered the church and asked for the pastor. Then he sat next to Mr. Pinckney during the Bible study before opening fire.

“I have to do it,” the gunman was quoted as saying. “You rape our women and you’re taking over our country. And you have to go.”

Calling the shooting the work of “a hateful and deranged mind,” Mayor Joseph P. Riley Jr. said it was hard to imagine churchgoers at “a prayer service and a Bible service, and they’re speaking about the Holy Scriptures and praying,” while someone is “sitting there contemplating the act of murder.”

Eight people died at the scene, Chief Mullen said. One person died on the way to the Medical University of South Carolina.

Photo An image taken from surveillance video shows a car that police believe was driven by the suspect. Credit Credit Charleston Police Department, via Reuters

The police released pictures from surveillance footage of the man who is believed to be the gunman, and the police said he had been seen leaving the church in a black, four-door sedan that was also captured on video.

“We are leaving no stone unturned,” Chief Mullen said. He would not say what type of gun was used in the shooting.

City officials did not release information about the victims and did not say how many people were in the church during the shooting. Hospital officials declined to comment, but family and friends were being directed to an assistance center near the church

Mr. Pinckney’s sister was also among those killed, said J. Todd Rutherford, the minority leader of the State House of Representatives.

PHOTO: A prayer vigil near the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church early Thursday. Credit David Goldman/Associated Press

Mr. Rutherford, who had served in the State Legislature with Mr. Pinckney, 41, since 1998, recalled him as a tireless leader with a booming voice and a mission to serve.

“He was called to the ministry when he was 13, ordained at 18, elected to the House at 23 and the Senate at 27,” Mr. Rutherford said. “He was a man driven by public service.”

State Senator Lawrence K. Grooms said Mr. Pinckney had had “a voice you could pick out of a crowd, a booming voice.”

“He was my friend, he was my colleague, but he was also my brother in Christ,” said Senator Grooms, who drove down from the Statehouse as soon as he heard the news last night.

In a statement, the president of the N.A.A.C.P., Cornell William Brooks, said, “There is no greater coward than a criminal who enters a house of God and slaughters innocent people engaged in the study of scripture.”

Gov. Nikki R. Haley of South Carolina asked the state’s residents to pray for the victims and their families. “We’ll never understand what motivates anyone to enter one of our places of worship and take the life of another,” she said in a statement.

Mr. Riley said the city was offering a reward for information leading to the arrest of the gunman, whom the police described as a cleanshaven white man who was about 21 with sandy blond hair and wearing a gray sweatshirt, bluejeans and Timberland boots.

Law enforcement officers from the F.B.I.; the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives; the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division; and other agencies were assisting. Chief Mullen said the police were tracking the gunman with police dogs.

Photo
A man knelt across the street outside the Emanuel A.M.E. Church after a shooting on Wednesday in Charleston, S.C. Credit Wade Spees/The Post and Courier, via Associated Press

Around 10:45 p.m., police officers escorted a man in handcuffs who appeared to match the attacker’s description. But officials said later that they were still searching for the gunman.

In the first hours after the shooting, the police blocked reporters and passers-by from approaching the church, opposite a Marriott Courtyard hotel, because of a bomb threat. Many among the news media cluster were political reporters in town to cover campaign events of Hillary Rodham Clinton and Jeb Bush.

Helicopters with searchlights circled overhead, and a group of pastors knelt and prayed across the street.

“The question is, ‘Why God?’ ” a man wearing a shirt bearing the name of the Empowerment Missionary Baptist Church said during the prayer.


Video Charleston Chief on Church Killings
Greg Mullen, the police chief of Charleston, S.C., says that a shooting on Wednesday at a historic African-American church that left nine dead was “unfathomable.” By Reuters on Publish Date June 18, 2015. Photo by David Goldman/Associated Press.

Later, a group of church leaders gathered at the corner of Calhoun and King Streets, a few blocks from where the shooting occurred, and held an impromptu news conference. Tory Fields, a member of the Charleston County Ministers Conference, said he believed the attacker had targeted the victims because of their race.

“It’s obvious that it’s race,” he said. “What else could it be? You’ve got a white guy going into an African-American church. That’s choice. He chose to go into that church and harm those people. That’s choice.”

The church is one of the nation’s oldest black congregations. The Gothic Revival building dates from 1891 and is considered a historically significant building, according to the National Park Service.

The congregation was formed by black members of Charleston’s Methodist Episcopal Church who broke away “over disputed burial ground,” according to the website of the National Park Service.

In 1822, one of the church’s co-founders, Denmark Vesey, tried to foment a slave rebellion in Charleston, the church’s website says. The plot was foiled by the authorities and 35 people were executed, including Mr. Vesey.

The church houses the oldest black congregation south of Baltimore, the National Park Service said.
Late Wednesday, the campaign staff of Mr. Bush, the former governor of Florida who is seeking the Republican nomination for president, said he was canceling appearances planned for Thursday in Charleston because of the shooting. Mrs. Clinton was in Charleston on Wednesday, but an aide said she had left the city before the shooting.

Bakari Sellers, a former member of the South Carolina House of Representatives, said he had been at a fund-raiser Mrs. Clinton attended in the early evening when he heard about the shooting only blocks away. He said the mood among the attendees, several of whom knew the church and its pastor well, quickly turned from hope to “darkness and despair.”

An earlier version of this article misstated the status of Bakari Sellers in the South Carolina House of Representatives. He is a former member, not a current one.

Jason Horowitz and Nick Corasaniti reported from Charleston, and Ashley Southall from New York. Penn Bullock contributed reporting from New York.

DYLAN STORM ROOF

Charleston Church Shooting Leaves 9 Dead; Gunman Is Sought

The city’s chief of police called the shooting on Wednesday night at the historic Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church a hate crime.

nytimes.com|By NICK CORASANITI