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| South Carolina Confederate Flag Waiving in the Wind |
The gun attack that killed nine black churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina, is a violent reminder that racism courses through America’s veins even 50 years after an unarmed civil rights activist was killed by an Alabama state trooper, an incident that led to the historic Selma to Montgomery marches. The target this time was a storied African-American church and the victims included a state senator. The arrested suspect, Dylann Storm Roof, 21, apparently wanted to ignite a “civil war”. The incident should be seen in the backdrop of a rising trend of crimes in the U.S. against African-Americans, involving both persons in authority and members of the public. Charleston’s victims are simply the latest in a long list from recent years. They include Walter Scott, who was shot from behind by a police officer on April 4 in North Charleston; Michael Brown, shot by the police in Ferguson in August last year; Eric Garner, who died in New York in July 2014 after the police got him in a chokehold, and Trayvon Martin, shot in Florida by a neighbourhood watch volunteer in 2012. The election of Barack Obama as the first black President of the country in 2008 had raised hopes about the dawn of a post-racial era. But African-Americans are still being frequently targeted...
Racism is not history. Racialisation, making presumptions about people based on their identities from the perspective of White supremacy, is a continuing process that feeds people like the attacker in Charleston. The American polity, which claims to cherish freedom and fairness, should have addressed this societal flawlong ago. Instead, the political activism of the conservative right in the U.S. is deepening the flaw. It may not be a coincidence that what the shooter at Charleston told his victims — ‘you are taking over our country’— sounded much like the Tea Party slogan, ‘Take back our country’, which emerged as a rallying cry among the conservatives after Mr. Obama became President. To be sure, the U.S. is not the only country that has racism. What makes it more lethal here are the country’s gun laws.....
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