Visitors pray together at the Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, S.C. (Joe Readle/Getty)

The young man who, on Wednesday evening of this week, shot nine black parishioners of Charleston’s Emmanuel AME Church, was motivated by pronounced racial animus. Explaining to the murdered why he was taking their lives, he told them stupidly, “I have to do it. You rape our women, and you are taking over our country. And you have to go.” He was, his former roommate informed the press with a disgraceful understatement of tone, “big into segregation and stuff” — intent, even, upon starting “a civil war.” A much-circulated photograph, taken appropriately next to a filthy swamp, depicts him wearing a jacket that boasts two unmistakable signs of white supremacy: an apartheid-era flag from South Africa, and the segregationist colors that once flew ignominiously over Rhodesia. There, as now, he resembles a silly and angry child — a fool and an ignoramus who has managed to adopt as his own some of the worst instincts within our culture.


Since the news broke, it has become fashionable to play up just how prominent those instincts supposedly are. This is a mistake. What happened in Charleston was a tragedy — no, an abomination — and it understandably served to reopen some of America’s deepest historical fault lines. But it was not part of a contemporary pattern, and for this we should be grateful, not frustrated. Whatever one believes is the modern value of the Confederate battle flag — and for my part I see little at all to admire — the interpretation that the killer appears to have indulged puts him out on a limb. Symbols do indeed matter, and Ta-Nehisi Coates is correct when he concludes that there is no means by which the stars and bars can be washed of their heritage. But I cannot endorse the implication that others have submitted in concert — namely, that we can infer any good answer to the question “why” from the relative ubiquity of a piece of cloth. It is not 1861 in Charleston, and the killer does not speak for the city. Rather, he is a throwback; an anomaly; an isolated and reviled recrudescence. In 2015, the Declaration of Independence has been restored to its rightful place at the heart of American life, and the dissenters have been pushed righteously to the margins. That the shooter saw fit to stage such a painful attack on history and on progress is alarming to us precisely because it is so rare. Happily, the man who would have started a “race war” found no compatriots to help him in his quest. We should avoid granting him an ill-deserved victory by electing to indulge his premise.


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Alas, across media new and old, a dangerous — and related — meme has reared its head. “When Muslims attack Jewish synagogues, anti-Semitism is definitely to blame,” runs an indicative line from CNN’s Sally Kohn, “but white guy shoots up black church and nah, not racism?!” This interpretation is an utterly perplexing one. Before the killer had even been captured, the federal Department of Justice had declared in no uncertain terms that it would be investigating the murders as a “hate crime.” And, once the painful details became clear, the whole country joined it in condemnation. At the Daily Beast today, Anna Marie Cox pretends that, in the early hours at least, both “the GOP” and “leading conservatives” denied that the murders had been the product of racism. Predictably, she provides no evidence of denial anywhere in her piece. Likewise, today’s criticisms of Jeb Bush appear to be wholly unfounded. What can be attributed to initial confusion or to reflexive uncertainty — or even to crass omission – should not be attributed to malice. Why, one wonders, would anyone wish to crack our united front with insinuations?

What can be attributable to initial confusion or to reflexive uncertainty should not be attributable to malice. Why, one wonders, would anyone wish to crack our united front?

On The Nightly Show yesterday, Larry Wilmore made the same mistake, explaining to his audience of clapping seals that Fox News “makes my f*cking head explode.” “With all of [the] evidence” available, Wilmore contended, still conservatives would not accept “that racial stuff” had gone down. This was a cheap shot at the time that it was fired. But, had he waited a few more hours, he would have seen just how cheap it was. Running through his “talking points memo,” favored boogeyman Bill O’Reilly cast the attack as “terrorism” and concluded bluntly that “skin color seems to be the motivator.” The assault, O’Reilly proposed, is “no different than what ISIS and al-Qaeda does targeting civilians because of who they are.” “This is not a tragedy,” he added, “this is an execution designed to terrorize people just like the Boston Marathon bombing and the mass murder at Fort Hood, Texas.” Unlike with much of the reaction to the shooting at Charlie Hebdo, there was no impending “but.”


#related#Here at National Review, all our commentary has reflected the same attitude. In our first post noting the shooting, Patrick Brennan reported that “the suspect appears to be a white nationalist,” suggested that “it’s hard to imagine a reason not to call it an act of terrorism,” and wrote extensively about the “symbolic significance” of the church itself. While making it clear that details were thin on the ground, Mona Charen recorded that the killer had apparently been heard uttering “vile, racist sentiments as he (allegedly) murdered innocent, defenseless people.” Responding to the early reactions, meanwhile, David French submitted that we were dealing with “a terrorist act in a church, one apparently motivated by racial hatred.” Such attitudes were reflective of the whole. On Twitter, on Facebook, and on the many other tools of expression that beep and buzz through our national trials, I have seen only a handful of separatists, all of whom have been immediately shamed for their abnegation.


The brutal divisions within American political life are a fact that is much lamented by the champions of unity, even to the extent that legitimate civic disagreement is often held to be a vice. Yesterday we saw a rare moment of unanimity and accord, replete with a linguistic solidarity that is peculiar in the modern era. Apparently, some people just can’t take “yes” for an answer.