Countless people were heartbroken by the news of Wednesday's massacre at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, but conservative writer Mona Charen seems to have been doubly upset. Writing in National Review, she complained that the prospect that the tragedy could be politically exploited by Democrats was “even more depressing” than the actions of the killer. “The heinousness of a person who can sit for an hour studying the Bible and then open fire is unfathomable,” Charen wrote. “Even more depressing, if that’s possible, is my suspicion—and I truly hope I’m wrong—that this event will play a role in the 2016 presidential campaign.”

Later, when the crassness of the phrase “even more depressing” in this context was pointed out to her, Charen amended the sentence. But her article's flaws run much deeper. Charen takes a curiously blinkered view of how atrocities are politically exploited, citing examples of political haymaking that pale in comparison to those who respond to racist murders by downplaying the role of bigotry.

As it happens, National Review offers a prime historical gem of this sort of denial of racism. On September 15, 1963, an explosion at the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, killed four black girls, and left many more children injured. The bomb was set by white supremacists hoping to intimidate the Civil Rights movement. National Review Bulletin, a biweekly offshoot of the magazine, editorialized about the event two weeks later:

The fiend who set off the bomb does not have the sympathy of the white population in the South; in fact, he set back the cause of the white people there so dramatically as to raise the question whether in fact the explosion was the act of a provocateur—of a Communist, or of a crazed Negro. Some circumstantial evidence lends a hint of plausibility to that notion, especially the ten-minute fuse (surely a white man walking away from the church basement ten minutes earlier would have been noticed?).

The language used in this editorial is antique. Few today would talk about “a crazed Negro.” Yet many of the underlying assumptions of National Review in 1963 are echoed by conservative discourse today. On Twitter, the conservative pundit A.J. Delgado wrote of the suspect—later identified as Dylann Storm Roof, who reportedly confessed to the crime—“Sorry, am I the only one who isn’t seeing a ‘white’ male? I know the media wants to run a racial angle here but this guy doesn’t look white?” Others on Twitter agreed with her and speculated that Roof was of “mixed” race and not white. (Delgado's Twitter account is no longer publicly accessible.)

Both National Review’s 1963 theory that about a “crazed Negro” and Delgado’s notion that Roof doesn’t “look white” spring from a profound commitment to the myth of white innocence. The underlying idea is that white people have only good intentions, so horrific crimes like Birmingham in 1963 or Charleston in 2015 must somehow spring from another source, most likely a dark-skinned person.