Charleston, America

The American capacity to deny history might be heroic if it weren’t so persistently in the direction of social repression. The port of Charleston, South Carolina was the major entry and distribution point for kidnapped Africans forced into slavery in the American colonies. Slaves built the city of Charleston and were the force that drove the colonial economy of South Carolina. By 1709 South Carolina had the first slave patrols in the colonies, self-appointed groups that policed the movements of Blacks. By 1837 the Charleston slave patrols became the first official municipal police department in the U.S. Today Charleston’s role in the horrors of slavery has been sanitized through the storyline of the ‘progress’ of history. But with the blood of nine Black innocents freshly spilled, this history doesn’t wash away so easily.

The racist sociopath who committed the murders, Dylann Roof, made it clear that there was ‘nothing personal’ in the commission of his crime. His stated motive, to start a race war, was categorical— by reports the murderer knew none of his victims until shortly before he murdered them. In contrast to the willful obfuscation of the professional promoters of White supremacy among the chattering classes, the fact that the murders were categorical, were motivated by racism, makes them political. The murderer’s broader motives are White supremacist boilerplate, the generalities that signal tribal allegiance, not response to actually occurring offenses. Given American history, these motives are near perfect reversal of the facts of three centuries of torture, rape, murder and exploitation of enslaved and nominally free Blacks by Southern Whites.

Rest in Peace: Rev. Clementa Pinckney, Cynthia Hurd, Sharonda Coleman-Singleton, Tywanza Sanders, Myra Thompson, Ethel Lee Lance, Susie Jackson, Daniel Simmons and Depayne Middleton.

The White resentment evidenced by Dylann Roof is over lost privilege that was never lost. The flag flying over the South Carolina State House isn’t the Confederate flag as has so often been reported, it is the Confederate battle flag— a potent and purposeful statement that the culture of racist repression was never defeated. And while the existence of the Emanuel AME Church where the murders occurred is evidence of resilience in the face an unbearably tragic, and purposely inflicted, history the theme of a reversal of this history, of ‘the country being taken over,’ is so radically delusional that discourse— a ‘conversation’ and symbolic acts, stands little chance of providing the needed link to social circumstances as they are actually being lived. The willful, insistent peace that led those murdered to welcome their assassin into their midst appears to be the ultimate target of Dylann Roof.

Of the official ‘remedies’ being put forward one makes symbolic...