Yesterday, a white supremacist terrorist went to a Black church in Charleston and murdered nine people, six women and three men (read about them. My thoughts go out to their loved ones). This level of premeditated violence and hate is hard to comprehend, particularly at a place that is supposed to be peaceful and safe.
Survivors report he said, “I have to do it. You rape our women and you’re taking over our country. And you have to go.”
I keep thinking about that. And how wrong he is. Black women are as valuable as white women and women of any other race. There is no “our” and “their.” White men are more likely to rape white women overall than are Black men. Black people are certainly not “taking over” the country. I know I shouldn’t try to find logic in the thought process of someone like him, but, I can’t help but also ask, why kill mostly women if that is his line of reasoning? And at a church?
His words bring up longstanding problems in our society: the perceived value of white women’s bodies over Black women’s and white men justifying their violence against Black people over (usually just lip-service instead of actual) concern for white women.
Dr. Estelle Freedman’s book Redefining Rape: Sexual Violence in the Era of Suffrage and Segregation as well as Dr. Danielle McGuire’s book At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance–A New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power are good resources for learning about this in the late 1800s and 1900s in the USA. They show how our country, our legal system is built on the oppression of all women and men of color.
We can see that in how laws and the justice system today protect white men (especially wealthy and heterosexual) at the expense of everyone else. That has to change.
I also want to share what Courtney E. Martin, a writer and thinker whom I greatly admire, shared today on her Facebook page:
“I’m thinking about how, yes, the shooter is probably mentally ill, but how our racist society is, too, and how we can’t pretend he is an anomaly. He is the son of white people, the son of America, the son of our education system and our culture and our history. We made him. White Americans, especially, made him. So how can we stop making him? How can we take responsibility for the history and the present? And what is my role in that unmaking and that claiming of responsibility?“
As a white person too, I think about that. What can I do to challenge racism and to make it so that public spaces, churches, schools, and workplaces are safe and equitable for all? I implore any white people reading this to think about it too (if you aren’t already). We have to help make the change.
