Very soon after Dylann Roof murdered nine blacks in Charleston, it became clear to me that the nation was reacting in ways that would make similar killings more likely. I thought it was important to explain to as large an audience as possible that what were doing was a mistake. I have been shut out of mainstream journalism for at least 25 years, but I still have a small number of contacts in the business. It was in the hope that I might be able to get back into the pages of a “respectable” magazine that I wrote the following article. I wrote it as soberly and as factually as I could, with the goal of explaining to a general audience why increasing numbers of Americans reject—and even despise—conventional thinking about race and race relations. I sent the article to an acquaintance of many years who writes for a prestigious national magazine, and asked if he would be willing to pass it along to his editor without telling him who had written it. He did so, and the editor showed interest. I wanted to remain anonymous and to use a pen name but the editor wanted to know who I was. He decided not to publish the article. My correspondence with him was brief and unsatisfactory, and he never explicitly said that the piece could have published if it had been written by someone else. In any case, it will not appear in that prestigious magazine. Our country will eventually have to come to grips with what drove Dylann Roof to murder. The sooner our rulers think seriously about these questions the better. My attempt to speed that process failed, and I am grateful to The Unz Review for accepting this article for publication.

The massacre at the Emanuel AME Church has shaken our country more than any event since the attacks of September 11. And like those attacks, it has prompted an outpouring of emotion and a strong desire to take action.

Within just ten days of the killings, Amazon, eBay, Sears, Walmart, Google Shopping, the Apple app store, and the gift shops at Fort Sumter and the Gettysburg battlefield announced they would no longer sell Confederate-flag merchandise. The Alabama State Capitol and the chapel at the Citadel took down battle flags they had displayed for years. Many have called for a renewed emphasis on America’s past sins of slavery, lynching, and Jim Crow, as a way to combat hate.

These actions express the shock and outrage that Americans rightly feel, but I do not believe they will help prevent future racial violence. I think they will make it more likely.

I have never met Dylann Roof. He is reported to have been a high school dropout and drug taker, who expressed confused and even incoherent opinions about race. He is also a mass murderer. However, for professional reasons, I am acquainted with a large number of young white men—and some women—who share enough of his views to give me what I believe is a good sense of his motives.

If we want to prevent more Dylann Roofs, we should try to understand him. This may seem futile and even immoral. Some would say that pure evil cannot be understood, and that trying to understand Roof is tantamount to excusing him. These objections are understandable but misplaced. First, some of his views are spreading. They should be grappled with, not simply condemned. Second, by understanding what drove Roof to mass murder we may be able to make mass murder less likely. If we examine the anxieties, vulnerabilities, and resentments behind his views—and those of other young whites—it may be possible to palliate them in ways that do not violate our values and that could prevent future violence.

The press routinely describes Roof and others like him as “white supremacists,” but this is not a useful term. It implies a desire to rule over or dominate other races, and there is no evidence Roof wanted that. Roof, and the many people I know who think to some degree as he does, are profoundly disaffected from American society. The ones I know are unlike Roof in that they are educated, sophisticated, attractive professionals, but like Roof, they reject and even despise conventional attitudes about race. Their thinking is not, however, a modern-day survival of the slave-holder or segregationist mentality. It has similarities, but it is rooted in current circumstances. It is a new way for whites to think about race. “White supremacist” is an outmoded expression that does not cast light on today’s realities.

To understand Dylann Roof, we must set aside much of the framework that shapes the way we think about race. One difficult concept to grasp is that although everyone, beginning with Barack Obama, has agonized over the “hatred” that led to the church killings, Roof did not hate black people in any conventional sense.

Roof reportedly told racist jokes, but someone who hates black people does not have a lot of black friends on Facebook, or choose a black man, Christon Scriven, as his favorite drinking companion. Scriven may have been Roof’s closest friend; the two often got falling-down drunk together. Even after the shootings Scriven told an interviewer, “My opinion about Dylann doesn’t change. . . . I still love him as a friend.” A black school mate, Antonio Metze, also confirmed that Roof had black friends.

This is consistent with Roof’s behavior at the time of the killings. He reportedly seemed almost to regret what he was doing. “I have to do this,” he explained. After his arrest, he told a police officer that he was trying to start a “race war.”

Dylann Roof therefore did not “hate black people” in the comprehensive, visceral way we imagine lynch mobs hating black people. If we set aside the extent to which his behavior was the result of drugs and mental instability, he acted for abstract, even political reasons. Why did Roof see blacks as an enemy army even if, as individuals, they could be his friends?

We can look for the answer in his “manifesto.” He starts by saying that he was “not raised in a racist home or environment,” and that at school, blacks and whites exchanged innocent racial jokes.

He then explains what put him on the road to disaffection:

The event that truly awakened me was the Trayvon Martin case. I kept hearing and seeing his name, and eventually I decided to look him up. I read the Wikipedia article and right away I was unable to understand what the big deal was. It was obvious that Zimmerman was in the right. But more importantly this prompted me to type in the words “black on White crime” into Google, and I have never been the same since that day. The first website I came to was the Council of Conservative Citizens. There were pages upon pages of these brutal black on White murders. I was in disbelief. At this moment I realized that something was very wrong. How could the news be blowing up the Trayvon Martin case while hundreds of these black on White murders got ignored? [emphasis added]

Repugnant as it may be to accept the reasoning of a mass murder, something is wrong—at least in the minds of many whites. Unless we recognize this, it is impossible even to begin to think about how to forestall violent acts by others who think as Roof did.

The Martin/Zimmerman case certainly was “a big deal,” to use Roof’s words. It was a big deal because it was widely treated as a searing example of white racism. NBC famously doctored the recording of George Zimmerman’s 911 call to make it sound as though the only reason Zimmerman thought Martin might be a burglar was because Martin was black. Early reports were of a racist “white Hispanic” who had profiled and shot an unarmed black man in cold blood, and of an equally racist police force that refused to charge him with murder.

The case is still evoked as a powerful symbol of white racism. Therefore, it is no wonder Dylann Roof was surprised to learn that Martin profiled Zimmerman as a “creepy-ass cracker,” knocked him to the ground, broke his nose, and continued to beat him until Zimmerman fired a single shot from his licensed handgun. This case would have attracted little attention if Martin had been white, and it should not be treated as a telling example of white racism.

Nor should the Michael Brown case in Ferguson, Missouri. Again, initial reports were wrong: The shooting was said to be unprovoked; Brown was shot in the back; if he wasn’t shot in the back, he was on his knees begging for mercy. Like the Trayvon Martin incident, this was subsequently found to be a case of justified use of lethal force, in which race probably played little or no part. Anyone, white or black, who attacks a policeman and tries to wrestle away his gun has a good chance of being shot. Again, if Michael Brown had been white, this shooting, too, would have attracted little attention.

And yet, because the media gave such prominence to early, inaccurate accounts of the incident, it provoked rioting and arson, gave rise to the “black lives matter” movement that continues to this day, and put a cloud over every encounter between white police and black citizens.

Roof would certainly have followed this case, as well as that of Freddie Gray, the Baltimore man whose death at the hands of the police also provoked riots, arson, and outrage over alleged police racism. But again, subsequent investigation found that the evidence for police misconduct was thin, and—what is even stranger in a case of alleged police racism—the officers charged with the most serious offenses are black.

This is not to say that police should not be investigated for misconduct. In April, a white officer in North Charleston was caught on video shooting a black man in the back after what the officer claimed was a struggle over his Taser. The officer has been charged with murder. But here, likewise, despite much talk of racism, there is no compelling evidence that race was a motive in the shooting. Police get angry at people who fight them.

As so often happens when race is involved, these cases have a Rashomon-like quality: People can hear the same evidence—even watch the same video—and interpret it very differently. In the Michael Brown case, sixty-four percent of whites but only 10 percent of blacks thought the grand jury was right not to indict the white officer. Social opinion surveys rarely produce differences this stark. Later, an 86-page report from the Department of Justice found that the grand jury had acted correctly, but by then most people’s minds were made up, and the “black lives matter” campaign lost none of its energy.

Well publicized incidents such as these would have reinforced Dylann Roof’s view that the media are so determined to hunt down white racism that they find it where it may not exist. This is an increasingly common view, and not just among the disaffected whites I know. One need only glance through the comments sections of any on-line newspaper to sense a rising frustration with media that appear overhasty in accusing whites of racism.

Roof wrote that the Martin/Zimmerman case was the spark but that the real tipping point was the website of the Council of Conservative Citizens, where he found many reports of black-on-white murders. How could this have so affected him that he has “never been the same since that day”? The answer requires an examination of the nature and extent of interracial crime, and how society views it.

The website of the C of CC, as the council calls itself, is a lurid chronicle of black-on-white (and sometimes Hispanic-on-white) crime. Its typical posting includes a photo of an attractive young white woman alongside a photo of the black boyfriend or mugger who killed and/or raped her.

The website does not pretend to be balanced. It covers other subjects, but its main mission seems to be to find and memorialize every white victim of interracial violence. It never mentions white perpetrators. In that sense, it is pure propaganda, and most people would call it hateful propaganda. However, the C of CC does not make these stories up. It finds crimes that are reported locally, lists them, and argues that if the races were reversed, at least some of them would be headline news.

Roof “was in disbelief” that the press, which made a national racial scandal over George Zimmerman’s self-defense killing, completely ignored so many black-on-white murders, some of them barbaric, some of them racially motivated. The C of CC’s propaganda may be shocking and deplorable, but it contains more than a grain of truth. Disaffected whites take it as a truism that the press underreports black-on-white violence, and there is reason to think they are right.

Every year, in what is called the National Crime Victimization Survey, the Justice Department gathers detailed victim reports—including race of attacker—from a sample of more than 100,000 Americans. Survey data offer a clearer picture of interracial crime than counting arrest records because it eliminates any possibility of police bias. The latest figures for 2012 and 2013 show that of the nearly 600,000 crimes of interracial violence involving blacks and whites committed each year, blacks were the attackers 84.5 percent of the time. The proportions have been about the same for decades.

This is a huge, black-on-white imbalance. Some would argue that this is because there are five times as many whites as blacks, so black criminals are simply more likely to encounter white victims. However, in the case of interracial crime involving blacks and Hispanics, the proportions are similar: Blacks were attackers 82.5 percent of the time, despite the fact that there are only about 30 percent more Hispanics than blacks.

There may therefore be some justification for the view among disaffected whites that blacks deliberately target people of other races. Violent “flash mobs” are almost always made up of young blacks who mainly rob and beat whites. The “knock out game,” in which someone tries to knock out a victim with a single punch, has also been called “polar bear hunting” because the perpetrators are almost always black and the victims are almost always white.

The victimization survey bears this out. When whites commit violence they chose blacks as victims only 3.6 percent of the time, whereas violent blacks chose whites as victims almost as often as they chose blacks (38.6 percent vs. 40.9 percent, while 14.5 percent of their victims were Hispanic). To express the figures differently, although the individual likelihood was extremely low, a black person was 27 times more likely to attack a white than vice versa.

Figures of this kind circulate among disaffected whites, but they are little known outside such circles. They are buried within the justice department data and must be calculated. Disaffected whites generally assume that the larger media are not interested in the overwhelmingly black-on-white nature of interracial crime, and would not write about even if they were aware of it. They may not be mistaken.

To be sure, whites are more likely to be victimized by other whites than by people of other races. Fifty-six percent of the people who attacked whites were white, and only 13.7 percent were black (11.9 percent were Hispanic, 12.1 percent wee “other,” and 7.8 percent were “unknown), but it is interracial violence that damages race relations.

If a black man had entered Emanuel AME Church and killed the same nine people it would have been a horrible crime, but President Obama would not have spoken at their funerals and there would be no national self-examination. Over Memorial Day weekend, 12 people were shot to death in Chicago and nine in Baltimore. Since the shooters were black, it was routine news; if Dylann Roof had shot them, it would have been a national tragedy.

There have been black-on-white crimes of such brutality and drama that disaffected whites may be justified in thinking that if whites had done equally horrible things to blacks there would have been widespread outrage.

In 2000, two black brothers, Reginald and Jonathan Carr, broke into a Wichita home in which three white men and two white women, all in their 20s, were spending the night. The Carrs stripped and bound all five, and over the course of several hours beat the men and repeatedly raped the women. They forced both the men and the women at gun point to commit sex acts on each other. They took each individually to ATM machines and forced them to withdraw money. They then drove the victims—three stuffed into the trunk of a car, the men naked and the women naked from the waist down—to a remote soccer field, where they forced them to kneel in the snow, shot them all execution style, and ran them over with a truck. One woman miraculously survived, and walked nearly a mile in sub-freezing weather to report the crimes.

In 2007 in Knoxville, three blacks hijacked Christopher Newsom and his girlfriend, Channon Christian. They bound and gagged Newsome, raped him anally with an object, walked him barefoot to train tracks, where they shot and killed him. His attackers then set fire to his body. Christian was repeatedly raped orally and vaginally over a period of several hours, and her vaginal area was beaten to a pulp. Her attackers sprayed bleach down her throat. They then tied her up, wrapped her in garbage bags, and stuffed into a garbage can where she suffocated to death. Neither of these incidents gained much national attention, and in neither case did authorities make any attempt to determine if the criminals had a racial motive.

It is hard to find crimes of such brutality by whites against blacks, but when they occur they become well known. Many people have heard of James Byrd. In 1998, three white men beat him savagely, urinated on him, chained him to the back of a pickup and dragged him to death. The two men most responsible for the crime, Lawrence Brewer and John King were described as white supremacists. During previous jail sentences they had joined a white prison gang in order to seek protection; King said he had been gang-raped in prison by blacks. Byrd’s name is now on both Texas state and federal hate crime laws, and the crime has been made into a feature-length documentary.

This case gained notoriety in part because it was seen as a racially motivated murder. Racially motivated murder of whites by blacks does not get the same attention. John Mohammad and Lee Malvo terrorized the entire Washington DC area during a 2002 shooting spree. Their crimes were world news—yet how many people heard that John Mohammad carried out the crimes because he believed that “the white man is the devil,” and that he planned to kill six white people a day for 30 days?

Other explicitly racial killings attract little attention. In Wilkinsburg, near Philadelphia, 39-year-old Ronald Taylor killed three men and wounded two others in a 2000 rampage, in which he targeted whites. At one point, he pushed a black woman out of his way, saying “Not you, sister. . . . I’m just out to kill all white people.”

Also in 2000, Obie Weathers of San Antonio, Texas, attacked but did not manage to kill two elderly white men. Later that day, he found 82-year-old Norma Petrash in her home and beat her to death. “I hate all white people,” he explained to a detective.

In 2005, Philip Grant stabbed Concetta Russo-Carriero to death in a parking lot in White Plains, New York. In a video-taped confession, he explained, “I was thinking that the first person I see this morning that looks white, I’m killing them. I have no remorse whatsoever because she was white.”

In 2007, Steven Johnson was sentenced to 240 years in prison for shooting and wounding three white people and spraying kerosene on several others while he shouted that “white people are going to burn tonight.” He told police he was seeking revenge for the mistreatment of blacks.

In 2008, a white woman wept on the witness stand as she described her rape at the hands of a black man who broke into her apartment in Raleigh, North Carolina. He told her he was punishing her for the historic crimes of whites.

In 2009, Los Angeles police arrested a black man, John Floyd Thomas, Jr., thought to have been the most prolific serial killer in the city’s history. Over a period of more than a decade he raped and killed an estimated 30 older women. All were white.

In 2010, a black man, Omar Thornton, was caught on video stealing beer from the Connecticut distributor where he worked. Offered a choice between resigning and being fired, he shot eight white co-workers to death and wounded two more. Before shooting himself, Thornton phoned his mother and claimed the killings were retaliation for workplace racism. Other minority employees said his claims of racism were unfounded.

None of these crimes—and there are more with a clear racial motive—got national attention the way the Byrd killing and the Charleston shootings did.

In a way, the legal system recognizes the seriousness of all interracial crimes—not just white-on-black crimes—by designating some as hate crimes. The latest FBI hate crimes report includes 2,919 crimes motivated “on whole or in part” by race. Whites committed 52.4 percent of all bias crimes and blacks committed 24.3 percent (strangely, Hispanics are a victim category but not a perpetrator category and are grouped with whites). This means blacks were 2.89 times more likely than whites (including Hispanics) to commit hate crimes. The greater likelihood of blacks to commit bias crimes is well known by disaffected whites but rarely reported otherwise.

Hate criminals are eligible for enhanced penalties because bias is thought to be particularly damaging to society. However, which did more harm to race relations: the 2,919 crimes officially designated as racial hate crimes in 2013 or the nearly 600,000 black/white violent crimes (and the 950,000 crimes involving other racial combinations) that were not so designated? Interracial violence can leave deep scars; it is little comfort to the victim that the rapist or mugger did not happen say “ni**er” or “spic” or “white motherfu**er.” In an era of what may be increasing racial tension it would make sense to consider adding enhanced penalties to all violence that crosses racial lines.

It should now be clear that there really is a lot of black-on-white violence, some of it motivated by racial animus, but neither the media nor politicians pay much attention to it. The contrast with even ambiguous violence that goes the other way could not be more striking. President Obama spoke out in the Martin/Zimmerman case, famously saying, “If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon.” He took a similar position on the Ferguson shooting, saying it cast light on an unfair justice system that “stains the heart of black children” and judges people like Michael Brown “guilty of walking while black.”

This kind of sympathy and even identification with blacks who attacked people is deeply embittering to disaffected whites, and nudges other whites towards disaffection. Needless to say, the president expressed no sympathy for the families of the estimated 30 white women raped and killed by John Floyd Thomas, who was arrested during Mr. Obama’s first term. In his defense, he probably never heard of Thomas, since the case got scant coverage.

To my knowledge, President Obama has never said a word about black-on-white violence. I can think of no elected official who has. It would do a great deal of good if they did. High elected officials should condemn horrible crimes like those that have become known—among the disaffected—as the Wichita Massacre and the Knoxville Horror. Black-on-black violence is a subject of official concern and worry, and rightly so. But black-on-white (and Hispanic) violence is not only more frequent, it damages race relations every time it occurs.

If our country acknowledged the true dimensions of interracial crime, denounced it in all its forms, and forcefully condemned all who engage in it, Dylann Roof would not have had to go to a sensational, propaganda website to learn about it and might not have been unhinged by what he found. And there would be other benefits. If we strongly denounced blacks who prey on whites, shamed communities in which it occurred, and increased penalties for interracial crime there would surely be less of it.

Such changes are unlikely. The American media are afraid to “blame the victim”—even if the “victim” is a murderer. They are squeamish about mentioning race even when describing criminal suspects. The University of Minnesota campus police just announced it would remove race from most suspect descriptions so as not to “reinforce stereotypes of black men as threats and create a hostile campus climate.” Any politician who denounced black-on-white (or Hispanic) crime would be attacked for “racial stereotyping,” yet virtually no one calls it “racial stereotyping” when the media assume that any given white policeman is likely to be racist.

The reality of interracial crime will probably remain a taboo subject, which means future Dylann Roofs could be shocked into violence when they discover it.

Making Things Worse

In the rush to take action after the Charleston killings we are already doing things that will make similar attacks more likely, not less. There have been strong calls to emphasize the racial sins of the past and to make doubly sure that every new generation learns about them. The Atlantic, for example, published a syllabus of readings to help “understand the Charleston shootings.” It is all about slavery, Jim Crow, and the civil rights movement.

This will not help. As far back as 1992, more American 17-year-olds could identify Harriet Tubman than Churchill or Stalin. In 2008, researchers asked 2,000 high school juniors and seniors to write down the names of “the most famous Americans in history,” excluding presidents and first ladies. All the top three were black: 1. Martin Luther King, Jr., 2. Rosa Parks, 3. Harriet Tubman.

It is important for Americans to study history. But disaffected young men like Dylann Roof started learning about slavery and segregation in grade school. Constantly rubbing their noses in a past for which they are not responsible may make some feel guilty but it makes others angry. The latest innovation in this line—telling young people that they benefit from unearned “white privilege”—makes them even angrier. Silence about black-on-white crime today is far more relevant and compelling to them than lectures on slavery, which ended 150 years ago.

At the same time, what effect does all this have on blacks? What better way to teach blacks to hate whites than to remind them constantly of lynching and Jim Crow, to blame their misfortunes and failures on “institutional racism,” and to make racial martyrs out of doubtful figures such as Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown? Surely, this emphasis on white racism, past and present, contributes to black overrepresentation not just in interracial crime but in hate crimes.

The current wave of condemnation of the Confederate flag could also make things worse. Does anyone really believe that Dylann Roof killed nine blacks in cold blood because the flag flies at the statehouse or because he could have bought a Confederate flag iPhone cover at Walmart? Roof seems to have adopted the flag as his banner in the race war he was trying to start, but the flag did not cause his disaffection.

Difficult as it may be for some Northerners to believe, for most Southerners the battle flag really does symbolize pride in their heritage. Even after the Charleston shooting, even in the face of a tidal wave of condemnation, 75 percent of white Southerners said the flag was a symbol of pride, and only 18 percent said it stood for racism. A 57 percent majority of all Americans—black and white, North and South—see the flag as a symbol of Southern pride rather than racism (though 75 percent of Southern blacks see it as a symbol of racism).

It is presumptuous for people who never lived in the South to tell Southerners what their flag means. In former British colonies the Union Jack may be a symbol of imperialism, but that does not give Kenyans or Jamaicans the right to lecture the British on what the flag should mean in Britain.

Every racial group in this country is encouraged to take pride in its heritage, its culture, its symbols, and its ancestors. The only exception is whites and especially Southern whites. They are supposed to be ashamed of a heritage in which slavery now plays so bloated a role that hardly anything else is thought to remain.

Does anyone really believe that banning the flag will deter future Dylann Roofs? Can flag opponents not see what an insult it is to Southerners when their cherished flag is treated with scorn, removed from monuments and Civil War battlefields, and even banned from war reenactment video games at the Apple Store? This contempt for their feelings could drive yet more Southern whites into alienation and disaffection. It is true that many blacks do not like the flag, but future Dylann Roofs will ask why the feelings of blacks are more important than the feelings of whites.

There were other reasons for Dylann Roof’s disaffection, and his rambling manifesto hints at some of them: Blacks are encouraged to be preoccupied with race and to advance their interests while whites are told they have no legitimate interests; immigration and demographic trends are reducing whites to a minority; the national enthusiasm for diversity means valuing every other group over white men; whites are treated as the villains of history and rarely credited for their contributions; there is strong evidence that races are different and unequal but scientists who study race risk their careers.

Many disaffected whites would agree with Roof. The truth or significance of each of these points can be debated, and each can be evaluated in terms of whether it is a genuine grievance. But part of the grievance is that these points are not debated. Away from the seamy corners of the Internet, there is no public forum in which the views of disaffected whites can be seriously considered, refined, debated, or corrected.

In 2009, Eric Holder called America a “nation of cowards,” because it refuses to talk about race. Five years later he repeated the charge. I suspect that Eric Holder would not consider anything in Dylann Roof’s manifesto a legitimate subject of conversation. I suspect he would be indignant at the idea that whites could have legitimate grievances. I’m sure many whites would agree. But if white grievance is ever laid to rest, it will be only through honest debate of the kind we do not have.

Rightly or wrongly, those grievances are spreading. Dismissing them as ignorance and silencing those who express them only drives them underground, where they feed bitterness and disaffection. It is my fervent desire that white grievance—real or imagined—never again erupt into murderous violence. But I fear that, though they may have good intentions, many of our political and media leaders are following a course that makes it more likely.

References

Todd Spangler, “Pa. Cops Cite Anti-White Writings,” Associated Press, March 2, 2000. Tim Molloy, “Cops: Suspect’s Anger Was Simmering,” Associated Press, March 4, 2000.

“Black Man May Face Hate Crime Charge,” United Press International, Feb. 15, 2000.

Jennifer Fermino and Andy Geller, “Mall Killer ‘fessed Up Quick: Cop,” New York Post, June 15, 2006. “Jury Convicts Man Who Killed Woman Because She Was White,” Associated Press, July 12, 2006.

Samuel Maull, “240-Year Prison Sentence For a Black Man Who Vowed to Burn Whites,” Associated Press, March 22, 2007.

Sarah Ovaska, “Woman Tells of Attack,” News & Observer (Raleigh, NC), Feb. 7, 2008.

Thomas Watkins, “Police Call Man LA’s ‘Largest Ever’ Serial Killer,” Associated Press, April 30, 2009.