It is rare that an American president appears to distance himself from his own countrymen and women. But that is what Barack Obama came perilously close to doing last week as he reacted to the fatal shooting of nine black churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina by a lone, white gunman. Obama appeared frustrated, sad, weary, but, most of all, angry. Angry over yet another senseless, random act of mass killing. Angry at the crass unwillingness of a Republican-controlled Congress to support even the most modest gun control legislation. And angry at the ongoing reluctance of American society to take collective action to purge an obvious social evil.
“At some point, we as a country will have to reckon with the fact that this type of mass violence does not happen in other advanced countries,” Obama said, sounding like a disappointed teacher addressing a class of under-achieving 14-year-olds. “It doesn’t happen in other places with this kind of frequency. And it is in our power to do something about it. I say that recognising the politics in this town [Washington DC] foreclose a lot of those avenues right now. But it would be wrong for us not to acknowledge it. And at some point it’s going to be important for the American people to come to grips with it.”
Obama’s subsequent comments were less defeatist. He refused to “act as if this is the new normal”. He went on: “More than 11,000 Americans were killed by gun violence in 2013 alone. If Congress had passed some commonsense legislation after Newtown [when 20 children and six teachers were killed by a gunman at Sandy Hook elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut]… we might still have more Americans with us.” Obama, who failed to pass limited gun control legislation in 2013, insisted he had not given up. “I am not resigned. I have faith that we will eventually do the right thing.”
All the same, it seemed dispiritingly clear by week’s end that those demanding tough action on gun ownership and licensing could not expect much immediate help from their president. More disturbing still was Obama’s reluctance to dwell on the obvious racial element to the Charleston outrage – what he called the “dark part of our history” – which for many Americans was more central to the killings than the issue of guns. His diffidence was not shared by enraged and frightened African American communities. Cornell William Brooks, president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, spoke for many. “This was not merely a mass shooting. Not merely an incident of gun violence. This was a racial hate crime.”
This wholly accurate characterisation of what happened in Charleston is what makes the latest incident stand out from other mass shootings. Unlike a dozen or more superficially similar events since 2009, the gunman, a young, white racial bigot identified in court as Dylann Storm Roof, specifically targeted black people. He reportedly shouted racist abuse as he opened fire. He is alleged to have told a friend that “black people are taking over and that somebody needs to do something about it”. He was previously photographed with a Confederate flag sticker on his car. He owned emblems of defunct white supremacist regimes in South Africa and Rhodesia. The other mass killings were mostly perpetrated by mentally disturbed people. In five cases, the killer’s gun was turned on Muslims, on people thought to be Muslims, or on home-based military personnel engaged in the “war on terror”. Roof is different. Mentally ill or not, he specifically chose to kill African Americans. His fervent hope, he told police, was to spark a civil war.
Perhaps that should read “second civil war”. For what Obama and many American politicians struggle to recognise or even talk about is that for too many people in South Carolina, home to Fort Sumter and the lost dream of Dixie, and in other corners of the “New South”, the old Confederate cause lives on. The Confederate flag, ultimate symbol of racial injustice and political division, still flies high over Columbia, South Carolina’s state capital, undisturbed by the Republican governor, Nikki Haley. When other flags on the capitol building were lowered to half-mast after the shootings, the appropriately named “blood-stained banner” was not.
It is only 20 years or so since South Carolina endured a spate of Ku Klux Klan church burnings. In 2010, it held a “secession ball” to celebrate its break with the Union 150 years previously. Yet these are but crude, public manifestations of a deeper, often obscured dysfunction. In much of American society, and not just South Carolina, the racist mindset, one that ultimately feeds and produces racial hate crime, remains deeply entrenched. And in recent times the most striking reminders of this continuing malaise have been found not in one-off mass shootings but in numerous instances of official violence, usually carried out by police, against black people.
In Ferguson, Missouri, where mass protests followed last year’s police killing of Michael Brown, a young black man, campaigners established that a black person is killed by someone employed or protected by the US government every 28 hours. Repeated failures by the justice system to treat black people equally, the misuse of prisons to disproportionately incarcerate young blacks, the “militarisation” of police forces, a culture of impunity among law enforcers emboldened by an oppressive, post-9/11 security-obsessed outlook, and the failure of a polarised Congress to address minority concerns comprise the unbalanced national backdrop to the Charleston atrocity. Dylann Roof is described as a loner. But he is not alone.
Race and guns is a toxic mix and one that Obama, though forever famous as America’s first African American president, looks powerless to tackle. But passion is not lacking beyond the White House. Jon Stewart, the TV chatshow host, did not pull his punches. He condemned the “racial wallpaper” that surrounds black people in states such as South Carolina. Roof’s crime was a “black-and-white issue”. And he suggested that a nation that invades other countries, flies drones on assassination missions, tortures, illegally incarcerates and dehumanises its Islamist or Muslim or Arab foes in the name of counter-terrorism should be just as vigilant in ensuring that its own citizens, especially vulnerable minorities, are protected from acts of terrorism at home.
Terror begets terror. And what Roof did was a terrorist act. So when Obama regrets the heedless violence that periodically disfigures American society and the bigotry that regards some people as less than others, he should also look at his own government’s responsibilities.
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