Unendurable, Enduring Racism

"They were in a Bible study. They had to be talking about love and caring, and how we should treat people. Those kinds of things had to be present, you know?"
"For someone to sit through that and then carry out an act like that, I can't understand it."
"I believe in God and I believe in His wisdom and I believe in His mercy and I know in time I'm going to heal. But right now I'm asking, 'Why?' What I have done all day is I repeated the shepherd's psalm: 'The Lord is my shepherd I shall not want'. I said that over and over again because it's medicine for my heart right now -- a heart that aches, a heart that is bleeding and a heart that is scarred and a heart that is broken. But through it all, I believe in the grace of God."
Doris Coaxum Sanders, 81, Emanuel Church, Charleston, S.C. parishioner

A group of church members greet each other before entering the Emanuel AME Church for a worship service, Sunday, June 21, 2015, in Charleston, S.C. Members of the church are returning to their sanctuary today to worship, marking the reopening to the public following a deadly shooting during a Bible study session. (AP Photo/Stephen B. Morton)

A seemingly normal young man. And the emphasis here is on the word and the fact of his youth, a mere 21 years of age. A young white American who is reputed to have had black friends in high school and who appears to have drifted dangerously toward the disharmony of a poisonous belief in racial superiority and hatred that seems never to want to fade into the jaded and disgraceful obscurity it deserves.

On the other hand, this young man has grown up in a culture and a society in South Carolina where resistance to removing the Confederate flag from public view remains endemic.

The flag is a symbol of division and racist dysfunctional separation and hatred. Those who defend it think of themselves as defiant of the loss of an ideology that fuelled the early wealth of the country based on slave production. The dreadful civil war that rent the country asunder and saw families split in their support of the southern states' confederacy against those of their families who fought for the northern states' union forces.

That the horrible animus that propelled the country into opposing forces to save the Southern cotton-based economy so dependent on black slavery, culminating in the deaths of over 600,000 young Americans remains resistant to dying a deserved death itself, speaks volumes about the inability of human beings to see one another as deserving of equality and respect.

Even after Dylann Storm Roof killed nine black worshippers in a place of sanctuary where they should have been safe and secure, the Confederate flag still flies.

It is conceivable that viewing that flag in its enduring place of respect could be seen as validation by people like Dylann Roof for their hateful ideology of racist bigotry. It seems clear enough that he became a follower of white supremacy, that it fulfilled something deep within his psyche to believe that the white plurality was threatened by the presence of a growing black presence to whom has been imputed dire and dark aspirations to "take over" the rights and privileges of the white population.

A woman covers the fence of the Emanuel AME Church with white ribbons and flowers on Thursday, June 18, 2015, in Charleston, S.C. (Curtis Compton/Atlanta Journal-Constitution via AP)

He saw himself as the instrument to deliver a message that whites would never accept the concept of black equality with whites, and nor would he and his kind permit blacks to believe they could achieve parity in any dimension of life's approaches and possibilities with that of their one-time taskmasters. "Quit looking at the symbols. Get out and get a job. Quit shooting each other. Quite having illegitimate babies", growled a Republican legislator in 1997. All but the first 'quit' has legitimacy.

And it would help considerably if blacks were playing the game from an equal playing field, with the same opportunities they could aspire to as the greater white population. "Racism isn't dead. It has gone undercover and it's too bad it's coming out in our young people. And we just have to keep working to try to eradicate it", urged 81-year-old Doris Coaxum-Sanders, prepared to deal with this new grief, and expressing hope irrespective of what appears a hopeless situation.

A capacity crowd fills the pews during a prayer service for Wednesday's shooting victims held at the Morris Brown AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina June 18, 2015. A white man suspected of killing nine people in a Bible-study group at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, a historic African-American church in Charleston, South Carolina was arrested on Thursday and U.S. officials are investigating the attack as a hate crime. REUTERS/Randall Hill

"In South Carolina, the governor does not have legal authority to alter the flag. Only the General Assembly can do that", said a spokesman for South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley. Perhaps it's time for convention and the law to finally put an end to the silent reproach against a United States of America that asserted itself through a civil war to end slavery, only to see it resurgent through the domination of resurgent hate and vilification intent on murder to prove its point by sending a bloody message.