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A South Carolina church shooting left nine African-Americans
dead and the nation searching for answers, but the specter of unresolved racial
issues continues to loom large, with one political scientist telling RT that
America remains a racist country.
As debate over the
meaning of Wednesday’s shooting in
Charleston, which took place at a historic African-American church, heats up,
political scientist Dr. Wilmer Leon, who also hosts a Sirius XM radio program
called “Inside the issues,” told RT that the roots of such violence date back
to America’s beginnings.
“This is an act of terror,” he said. “It
fits into a much broader historical narrative in this country, of how Africans
in America – and then African-Americans – have been treated since we arrived on
these shores in 1619 at Point Comfort near Hampton, Virginia.”
RT.com report continues:
During the attack, a
white 21-year-old man, Dylann Storm Roof, allegedly told his victims they were
targeted because of their race. Friends and acquaintances of Roof also told the
media that Roof was known to make racist comments. One told the New York Times
that he wanted “to start a civil war.”
Leon told RT that when
the media, and also Americans in general, do not discuss the broader historical
background of such attacks, it’s much easier to dismiss the shooter’s actions “as
the actions of an irrational white young man.”
“What fails to get
addressed when you don’t put it in a historical context is – this is America.
This has been America since we arrived on these shores in 1619, and very little
has changed,” he said. “Whether it’s the proliferation of
extrajudicial killings by police officers over the last few years that we’ve
seen, that has a much broader historical context – lynchings in this country.”
“When you don’t put it in
that broader context you can never get to the crux of the issue,” he
continued,“and the crux of the issue is that America has been, and continues to
be, a racist country.”
On Thursday, the
Associated Press published a
partial list of attacks that have targeted black churches dating back to 1958.
Some were burned or bombed, including an infamous attack on a church in
Birmingham, Alabama in 1963 that killed four black girls.
The most recent attack
documented by AP, prior to the one in Charleston, involved an arson fire that
took place in Springfield, Massachusetts after President Barack Obama was first
elected in 2008.
Leon isn’t alone in
believing that there is a significant racial component to the shooting that is
not new to American history. On Friday, President Obama also highlighted the
issue during comments he made to reporters.
“The apparent motivations
of the shooter remind us that racism remains a blight that we have to combat
together,” he said. “We have to be vigilant because it still lingers…
It betrays our ideals and tears our democracy apart.”
However, Obama also
pointed to other recent shootings that have shaken America, such as those at
the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newton, Connecticut, which saw 20 children
and six adults killed. Another at a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, saw 12 people
die and dozens more injured.
Moving forward, though,
he made the case for discussing gun control as a policy solution.
“We should be able to
talk about this issue as citizens without demonizing all gun owners who are
overwhelmingly law abiding, but also without suggesting that any debate about
this involves a wild-eyed plot to take everybody’s guns away,” Obama said.
Speaking to RT, Leon said
Obama was“unfortunately remiss” when initially discussing potential
solutions to such violence in the wake of the attack, arguing that change has
to come from both political leaders and activists. Many commentators even
described Obama as resigned to the idea that there would be no solution to the
problem in the foreseeable future.
“It has to really now
come from the grassroots, since leadership at the top is unwilling to pick up
this mantle, to call this what it is, and to deal with it in the manner in
which it needs to be dealt with,” he said.
Charleston Mayor Joseph
Riley Jr. recently added that while Roof’s arrest offers a chance for those
victimized by his violence to heal, it also marks a time when honest
discussions about race need to happen.
“We in America were not
taught African-American history,” he said. “It was never in the
history books, and we don’t know the story.”
A PARTIAL LIST OF ATTACKS ON BLACK
CHURCHES IN THE US
AP reports:
Churches have long played
a key role in black communities in the United States. Once, in parts of the
nation, church buildings were the only places blacks could gather without fear
of violence or harassment. Because of that, an attack on a black church took on
special significance.
Here is partial list of
attacks on black churches since the dawn of the civil rights era:
-June 29, 1958: A dynamite bomb damages Bethel Baptist Church,
pastored by the civil rights leader Fred Shuttlesworth in Birmingham, Alabama.
A white supremacist was convicted more than two decades later.
-Sept. 15, 1963: 16th Street Baptist Church, Birmingham, Alabama:
A bomb planted outside the sanctuary kills four black girls getting ready for
Sunday morning worship. The city's segregated public schools were being
desegregated at the time. Three Ku Klux Klansmen were later convicted; one
remains in prison.
-Summer 1964: About three dozen black churches are burned or
bombed in Mississippi during the drive to register black voters called Freedom
Sumer.
-June 1996: Then-President Bill Clinton appoints a task
force to investigate a spate of church fires, particularly at black churches in
the rural South. Of 670 incidents that were investigated nationwide by October
1998, 225 involved black churches.
-Nov. 5, 2008: An arson fire burns Macedonia Church of God in
Christ in Springfield, Massachusetts, hours after Barack Obama is elected as
the nation's first black president. Two white men plead guilty and a third is
convicted by jurors in what was described as a hate crime.
-June 17, 2015:
Nine people gathered for a prayer meeting are shot to death at The Emanuel
African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina. A white
gunman with apparent sympathy to white supremacy is arrested.
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