When a white person claims that they are not racist today, what they are saying, for the most part, is that they are not "white trash." In other words, they are not so poor, so miserable as to be obliged to declare their racism openly, nakedly: Since the rhetorical triumph of the civil rights movement, outright bigotry has been banished, more and more, from the field of tolerable public discourse. But there's an interesting parallel, or at least inversion, from the side of the "white trash" racists. The "white trash" racist slogan "white power" is, above all, an attempt to claim that they are not "white trash," but white as such. They believe it is possible to become wealthy, beautiful, powerful, clean, and graceful by treating colored people atrociously: This is true. But the truth of their belief is embodied in the very white people who look down on them with such contempt: It is true, but not for them. Possessing a pale skin without any of the purported pale virtues, they are trapped by whiteness, compelled by it, enslaved by it. White power is always vicious, always violent, and it is always most vicious and violent where most precarious.

To be a dumb, "white trash" killer from “South Carolina,” then, is to fit the contemporary description of a “racist,” whether from the right or the left, perfectly. Should actual details of the killer's life fall outside the stereotype, they will have to be forced into it for any societal closure to occur. It will likely mean nothing that Dylann Roof comes from a middle-class household, or that he is not stupid: At the very least, he was sharp enough to know that attacking a black church—Denmark Vesey's church, no less, and on the anniversary of Vesey's attempted liberation—and killing nine black people, including a black churchman and elected official, was the most incendiary act he could possibly perpetrate. He was sufficiently far-seeing to transpose the images of apartheid South Africa and Rhodesia—former British colonies like South Carolina whose especially virulent racism, much like South Carolina's, originated in the fear of a black majority visiting upon their overlords the same unkind favors delivered unto them—onto his vision of a United States on the verge of being overtaken by black insurrection. Certainly, he was a strong reader of the message delivered to him daily, in real American life through radio and through television, and last but not least online: That the assertion of black humanity, whether expressed in churches, marches, or riots, constitutes a mortal danger to white lives and livelihoods.

None of this can count in the eyes of the national media because it steps beyond the given cultural narrative, that anti-black racism is purely the province of accented simpletons in greasy overalls as opposed to what it is really—a web of suppositions and insinuations whose cruelty animates the minds and words and acts of Americans of all classes and all political ideologies. The guilt for Roof's killings falls primarily and overwhelmingly on Roof himself, but its shadow touches all non-black Americans, with an especial emphasis on the white Americans who profit most from anti-black racism. But since these white Americans happen to be—at once, and not coincidentally—America's wealthiest demographic, the primary audience for the national media, and the people most confident of their innocence, the media coverage of the killings so far has a muffled feel to it. The chase for Roof is over, but the quest to get away from what his act implies about his various social milieux (white, South Carolinian, Southern, American) goes on.

Today, the alibi is everything; since the violent death of that great black church leader Martin Luther King Jr., white Americans have lived in a country where the celerity with which they mask their racism matters as much as the color of their skin. One might look forward, unhappily, to white conservatives disassociating themselves from this massacre by claiming, in effect, that they're not "white trash"—meaning, in effect, that they've profited enough from their racism that they can afford to dress it up better; or look forward to white liberals disassociating themselves by claiming, in effect, that they're not "white conservative" hypocrites—meaning, in effect, that they've profited enough from their racism that they can afford to dress it up better still; or to white leftists disassociating themselves by claiming, in effect, that they're not "white liberal" hypocrites.