For years, the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Caroline has served as a rallying ground for African Americans.
Great African American leaders, including Martin Luther King Jr and Coretta Scott King, have come to the church, not only as an act of faith but as a political act that reaffirmed their identity within American society.
Dylann Roof’s murder of nine people at the church on 17 June 2015 was an act of hate but the national conversation it generated was almost entirely about the Confederate flag. This discussion has been a sad reminder not only that such symbols continue to exist in the mainstream but that even blatant and brutal acts of racism are unable to create meaningful dialogue in parts of society about discrimination, profiling, guns laws and, perhaps most importantly, the media narrative about race.
The conversation about the Confederate flag was sparked by pictures of Dylann Roof with white supremacist symbols including the flag. While these are a pretty clear indication of Roof’s sympathies, what they fail to tell us is why Roof was drawn to the ideas represented by these symbols. Roof’s manifesto on his website ‘The Last Rhodesian’ answers this question for us. Roof looked up the 2012 shooting of Trayvon Martin after hearing people speaking about it. Roof, only a year older than Martin was at the time, could not understand the sympathy people had for Martin and instead began researching about black on white crime. In the echo chamber of the internet he was able to find fellow white supremacists who reinforced his views, eventually deciding to target Emanuel AME because of its links to civil rights.
And so following the incident, we heard the call for the removal of Confederate flag instead of a discussion about why a 21-year-old decided to murder nine people. Simply fighting for the removal of the Confederate flag works to reinforce the idea that racism is a relic of the past and all that remains for this generation to do is to remove the physical evidence of it.
The conversation about race is America is inadequate today. We have few mainstream political voices speaking against voter ID laws that discriminate against African Americans, about gerrymandering that reduces the voting power of African Americans, about mass incarceration of African Americans, about racial profiling, the education system that fails so many young African Americans and, until very recently, the shooting of black men by the police. It was hard watching a deflated sounding President Obama speaking from Washington about the shootings admitting that “politics in this town foreclose a lot of the avenues right now” to ending mass violence and preventing people with the intent to inflict harm from having access to guns.
Instead, we have the Republican Party and Republican South Carolina governor Nikki Haley with the bragging rights to “removing racism” after voting to take down the flag outside the State House. We have liberals who can feel like the outrage of their Facebook post and/or Tweet has really made a difference and a certain Murdoch-run, right-wing media outlet that can continue to talk about the fact that it’s 2015 and racism doesn’t really exist anymore.
Symbols are important but an honest conversation and real action on structural racism are more important – not only because they make taking down the flag a foregone conclusion.
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