Before opening fire – and reportedly reloading five times – the man who killed nine black people at the historic Emmanuel AME church in Charleston, South Carolina, on Wednesday night reportedly said: “You rape our women. And you’re taking over our country. And you have to go.” (Dylann Roof has been arrested in North Carolina and is expected to be charged with the crime.) According to police, three of the people who died were male, including South Carolina state senator Clementa Pinkney, who served as the church pastor, and six were female.

Six black women were shot to death during a community prayer service by a young white man who allegedly declared: “You rape our women.”

These women and men welcomed a white man into their close-knit church, and likely encouraged others in their community to join and listen and pray and let God into their hearts. Black women, who are said to be the most religious demographic in America, have long been considered the backbone of black church – our backs are precious and sturdy, but have been weighted down for decades. You don’t attend Wednesday night services if you aren’t a devout churchgoer; you don’t go to Wednesday night services with a gun and the intention to murder if your true goal is to kill as many black men as possible.

There is something inconsistent with the Charleston shooter’s alleged evocation of the historical myth of black man as beast and rapist of white women, and the fact that he killed mostly black women. Did he only shoot black women because there were no more black men to kill? Because black women birth, care for and love black men? Or because he didn’t see black women as women at all, and, as something less than women (and certainly lesser than white women), felt us undeserving of the same valiance he conjured on behalf of the women he claim to be protecting?

The shooter allegedly used the salvation of white women’s bodies as a motivation for his acts, an old trope that was once used to justify the lynching of black men and the denial of rights to all black people. The idea that white women’s bodies represent that which is inviolable while black women’s are disposable hasn’t changed enough since it was first articulated by white men; but again, aimed at black men on Wednesday night, it was predominately black women who suffered by their invocation.

In recent months, activists have urged us to #SayHerName on the streets and on Twitter, to acknowledge the loss of black women’s lives to police violence and white supremacy: already, Rev Sharonda Singleton, Cynthia Hurd, Ethel Lance, Susie Jackson, Rev Depayne Middleton-Doctor and Myra Thompson have been named as victims of Wednesday’s massacre. That we have to urge people to say their names, to remember their names, as the shooter’s name is etched into our collective psyche, makes vividly clear what we value as unforgettable, and that which we deem disposable.

As it goes with the murder of black bodies by white America, we are left to mourn, to mask our fear and to piece together the all-to-readily available clues that, more often than not, point us to the steady reality that we are not safe to exist as free black people anywhere. Sometimes, when you get sick and tired of being sick and tired, you go to church to pray, or to weep. Black women go to church to find comfort, strength and solace, and to mend from the cultural maintenance of our communities. Not to get murdered – though that’s happened before, too.

In the opening scene from Ava DuVerney’s film Selma, she captured the innocence of four black girls detonated in the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963. Four black girls were just walking down the wooden steps to the basement for prayer meeting; DuVerney showed the light trickling through the stained glass window, let us listen to them talk about their hair and how they do it and how they like it, showed us their Sunday clothes pressed and colorful. And then, in the movie as in our history, they were just dead.

The girls killed in Birmingham in 1963 are the child forebearers of the grown women killed in Charleston in 2015, in a country where our ancestors keep getting younger and younger because violence too often prevents us from getting older, from growing fully into our lives. Somehow, protecting the world from black men has, far too often, meant killing, beating and raping black women and girls. So we have prayed in solidarity and what we have looked upon as safety. On Wednesday, a white man took that from us, too. What remains to be seen is whether the law and this country will recognize that there is now nothing left to take from us.