How America Created Dylan Roof

[Buzzword]

“The great evil of slavery was this narrative of racial difference, this ideology of white supremacy, that black people weren’t fully human, that they had deficits and deficiencies that meant that it was okay, that it was moral and just, to enslave them.”
-Bryan Stevenson

Last week, America saw an example of homegrown terrorism: Dylann Roof, the 21-year-old white boy who gunned down nine members of the historically Black Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in South Carolina. It looks like the moral debt of a society that has always promoted an “us versus them” mentality. It looks like the refusal to believe what deep down, we all know to be true: America created Dylann Roof.


We are responsible for Dylann Roof, molding him in the image of white supremacy that has been the bedrock of our nation for hundreds of years. It is up to us, to all human beings, regardless of color, to do something about it. Please, don’t give in to denial. Rev. Clementa Pinckney, Tywanza Sanders, Cynthia Hurd, Rev. Sharonda Coleman-Singleton, Myra Thompson, Ethel Lance, Rev. Daniel Simmons, Rev. DePayne Middleton-Doctor, and Susie Jackson deserve more respect than that.

How America Created Dylan Roof

We laid white supremacy into the bedrock of this country, so we must cut deep indeed in order to remove it.
Of course, doing so requires a supreme educational system which exposes each new generation to the horrors of our past instead of glossing over them, and which exposes them to more than just what their small-town preacher can spew from the pulpit.

The truly ironic factor in play here is that we HAVE the capacity to do both already because of technological development.

But as many have already pointed out, our cultural maturation has not kept pace with our technological development.

Thus, instead of the Internet becoming a grand forum of positive, productive discussion for the betterment of the entire human race, it has given bigots and reactionaries a much larger voice than they would have had otherwise.

So our fight now is to tear away, shake off, dig up and burn the racism so inherent in our politics, economics, and culture.

And this will make people uncomfortable.

Especially older people, who cling to any and all illusions of a stable past, with whatever prejudices, bigotries, and hatreds that went along with it.

But it is necessary if we are ever to truly become the nation which sheltered white believe we already are:
A nation in which all people truly ARE equal, are TREATED equally under law and in society, and have universal access to the same opportunities for education, political action, and economic and financial security.