Dylann Roof is standing trial for mass murder at the same time that we are witnessing a transition to the Trump administration, which has embraced white supremacist rhetoric and support. Black Americans cannot help but be horrified by this confluence of events.
Before he went on his killing spree, Roof posted racist remarks online. He opined that blacks are morally and intellectually inferior to white people. He urged other whites to join him in a race war. Now he is facing charges after admitting to killing nine innocent African-Americans at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, S.C., on June 17, 2015.
Donald Trump was elected president while Roof sat in jail, awaiting trial. He embraced bigots, delighted in shocking the public with crude, racist and misogynist remarks, and encouraged violence at his rallies.
Is it wrong of me to connect Roof's hate crime to the kind of rhetoric we've heard from Trump? Is it obnoxious to link this sick loner with a murderous hate-filled heart, and the mass movement which led millions of white, mostly male voters to propel Donald Trump into the White House?
I don't think so. Roof is a product of the same 21st-century white rage which helped elect Trump.
I am a black Southerner who has had too much experience with Southern white supremacist attitudes to dismiss Roof's actions as a freak event with no larger social meaning. I live among people who feel a need to justify slavery and the Confederacy.
I returned to Charleston for the funerals of the nine victims of the Charleston church massacre. Every fellow African-American I joined in mourning shared my sense that the massacre was the fruit of toxic and deceptive neo-Confederate lies.
Roof was raised in Lexington, S.C. It's an area I know well for its unwelcoming reputation toward blacks. Lexington is 83 percent white. Roof attended school in a highly segregated suburb. Like all of South Carolina, Lexington has suffered an economic pinch since the recession.
These facts are consistent with what we know about Trump voters, and the new white rage. Trump supporters have experienced a loss of status, but they often enjoy better incomes than the very poor. They tend to live in segregated communities, where they have little contact with minorities.
I cannot look at Dylann Roof's murders, and the surge in hate crimes which followed Trump's election, without seeing a connection. I have been in mourning, along with my entire community, since June 17, 2015. But mourning is insufficient without acknowledging my deepest fear _ that Dylann Roof is a sign of what America could become.
