Nikki Haley, South Carolina’s Republican governor, made a curiously obtuse statement on Facebook in the aftermath of Wednesday's massacre at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston. "While we do not yet know all of the details, we do know that we'll never understand what motivates anyone to enter one of our places of worship and take the life of another,” the governor said.

A charitable reading of the remarks is that Haley was trying to express the idea that so horrific a crime defies fathoming. Yet her choice of the word “motivates” conveys the false idea that this type of mass murder cannot have an explicable intent. But in point of fact, attacks on houses of worship often have all too clear agendas: When Al Qaeda attacks churches in Iraq, no one would say that their motives were unclear. For that matter, the 1963 church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama, and the 2012 shooting at the Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, were two blatantly obvious cases of a place of worship being targeted for violence by racists.

It’s hard to escape the suspicion that Haley’s remarks were a pre-emptive attempt to deflect listeners from an uncomfortable possibility: that, like the killings in Birmingham and Oak Creek, the Charleston slaughter was a racist hate crime. In an America where conservative pundits and a Supreme Court judge assure us that racism is a thing of the past, news of so horrific a hate crime goes against politically convenient narratives.

In the immediate wake of the Charleston attack, it was known that those killed were black, that the church played a historically significant role in African-American history, and that the suspected shooter was white. Thursday, the suspect has been named and arrested. As facts emerge about the alleged killer Dylann Storm Roof, the likelihood of a racist motive have increased.

A friend of Roof’s told the Daily Beast that the alleged shooter “had that kind of Southern pride, I guess some would say. Strong conservative beliefs. He made a lot of racist jokes, but you don’t really take them seriously like that.” A Facebook photo shows Roof wearing a jacket with patches displaying the flags of apartheid South Africa and Rhodesia. “He apparently told people that he was involved in groups, racist groups,” a family member told the Wall Street Journal. Roof reportedly told one of the survivors of the shooting, "I have to do it. You rape our women and you’re taking over our country."