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| The first Memorial Day or Decoration Day was apparently held in Charleston by freed men and women of color, May 1865, when they went to "decorate" the mass graves of mostly white Union soldiers dead in the local POW camps in love and respect. Via Damario Solomon-Simmons. |
I never know what to say on occasions for despair like this white-terrorist massacre in Charleston. I'm good to go with Obama's statement, which I thought was very just though almost too sad to bear, and the things all my favorite people have been writing today, I don't have any special insights of my own.
No, wait, there's one thing, in the area we're all talking about, of the weird insistence of the right wing that we shouldn't call the killer a terrorist, or a racist, or refer to the crime as a "hate crime". Like, I can understand why they'd want to say he isn't a conservative, because that would suggest there's something wrong with conservatism. But for that very reason it's pretty weird when they avoid saying he's a racist, insisting instead that it's wholly unknowable, like Governor Nikki Haley:
"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.Or that if he hates something it couldn't be black people (in spite of the overwhelming evidence that he hates black people) but must be something else, like Christianity:
Steve Doocy: “Extraordinarily, they called it a hate crime. Because it was a white guy, apparently, and a black church, uh, but you made a great point a minute ago about hatred against Christians and it WAS a church, so maybe that’s what they’re talking about, they haven’t explained it to us.” (via Ashley Miller/FreeThought)
Which has taken off with old Sanctum Santorum:
You talk about the importance of prayer in this time and we’re now seeing assaults on our religious liberty we’ve never seen before. It’s a time for deeper reflection beyond this horrible situation.And Lindsey-Woolsy Graham:
But despite the fact that the Justice Department has labeled the attack a “hate crime,” Graham was not willing to go that far. “There are real people who are organized out there to kill people in religion and based on race, this guy’s just whacked out,” he said. “But it’s 2015. There are people out there looking for Christians to kill them.”(Incidentally, a little strategic Googling reveals that the Roofs of the Columbia/Lexington County region of of South Carolina are a long line of Lutheran pastors and church musicians, and you can bet that killer has had a conservative evangelical upbringing, though not of the snake-handler style.)
So you can't help thinking they don't want to call young Roof a racist or a hater because they don't want to give racism and hatred a bad name.
Or because, and with some excuse, they confuse "racist" with "white", as in panicked comments at Jim Hoft's Gateway Pundit displaying a fear of collective punishment, because that happens so often to white people, who get constantly harassed on the street by the authorities, herded into their white-people jails, lynched:
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