We’ve seen this before.
Birmingham, June 1963
In June 1963, the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama was bombed during a prayer service, and four black girls were killed. Bombed because it was a gathering place for civil rights leaders. Bombed because some white people hated all black people and decided to make them suffer. Bombed because they wouldn’t “stay in their place.”
It is 2015, and we have seen over the past year case after case where unarmed black people have been shot down by white cops, or beaten by white cops. We have seen black people marching more now than they have in decades. And now, just as these issues are occurring, a black church was shot up, its pastor, State Senator Clementa Pinckney, gunned down. Reverend Pinckney, after Walter Scott’s murder by a cop was caught on a bystander’s smartphone, called for body cameras for all cops. Like many black pastors, he was fervent in his calls for equality and justice in a state where the flag of racist treason, the Confederacy’s Stars and Bars, flies over the state capitol because “it represents our heritage,” which is the white power structure’s way of saying “we’re still in charge here.” Now, Reverend Pinckney is dead, and that flag is not flying at half-staff this morning. The fact that it flies at all is a grave insult that belies the words of Governor Nikki Haley and Charleston mayor Joseph Riley when they talk of the tragedy and heartbreak of these events.
The President spoke about how tiring it was to have to give statements after mass shootings. He called for us to consider why this sort of thing only consistently happens in America and said, again, we need to speak about gun control and how easy it is for someone who wants to commit violence to get a gun and kill with it. He quoted Dr. King after the Birmingham bombings. And then he left.
The problem has gone far beyond gun control. When police are committing the crimes, gun control is useless. When a father with no criminal record buys it for his son who does have a criminal record, universal background checks won't work. The problem is twofold. First of all, our refusal, as a nation, to own up to our racial history and its effect on today's America. Our list of crimes against people of color is immeasurably long, and it has yet to stop being written. The whitewashing of history books in the South regarding slavery and the civil rights era, Voter ID laws and reduced voting times aimed squarely at the poor and people of color, the white police who kill people of color and then lie about it in their reports, yet avoid any charges or punishment; the still-existing ghettos, continued white flight, the stripping of public education so people of color can enter a freaking lottery to gain entrance to a wealthy white school, the disparity in sentencing for equal crimes, the drug war, I could go on for days.
The second is our culture of violence. We love our violence in America. We love our guns, and our knives, and our wars. We've long since moved past the time where America reluctantly went to war. Hunting is fine. Defense is fine. Protecting our nation from those who would do us harm is fine. What isn't fine is buying thirty guns and thousands of bullets at a time. What isn't fine is going to shooting ranges and using people of color's pictures as your targets. What isn't fine is every. single. time. there is a tragedy like last night, we collectively mourn how awful it is and then move on like there isn't anything wrong with a country where you can't look at a news item anywhere without hearing about people being shot and killed, whether it's a Chicago street corner, a car in Caldwell, Idaho, or a church in Charleston, South Carolina.
We have an awful intersection of racism and violence in this nation, and we need to address both, seriously, as rational adults. Why are we so violent in our everyday actions? Why do white people continue to be okay with constant, subtle racism, such as the frequent invocation of "all that black on black crime" (hint: there's just as much white on white crime) and then scream loudly "not all white people!" when a Charleston happens (which, by the way, when one race has held the balance of power throughout an entire nation's history, it can't cry reverse racism, because the default position is tilted towards white people in America)? We have a presidential candidate like Donald Trump stirring the pot by saying that Mexico is sending us all of their rapists, murderers, and drug dealers, when our nation already has a strong bias against Hispanics.
We can't keep ignoring it. We can't keep pretending that these are aberrations. There are too many mass shootings and there are too many incidents of racially-motivated or influenced murders of people of color by whites. Until we act to remedy our behavior and confront our ugly history and do something to fix it, there will be more days and nights like this. More innocent people will die needlessly, and we will continue to make a mockery of the great ideals we were founded on.