Don’t Call it White Supremacy

A friend of mine commented on Facebook today that “white supremacy kills.”  I agree.  It does.  But I don’t think we should call what happened in South Carolina at the AME Church an act of White Supremacy.

Here’s why…

We can’t call it that because it lets too many White people off the hook.  The average White person (AWP) in America will look at the headlines, recoil at the sickening
 pictures and deplorable details circulating about Dylann Roof and then declare, “Wow, is he crazy or what?”

Here’s what happens next for the AWP:

1. We acknowledge that he is obviously a White Supremacist.
2. We denounce his actions.
3. We put him in the category that is reserved for the rare few who would actually bomb a church or shoot people in cold blood.
4. Then we distance ourselves.   We wash our hands of it and declare, “Can’t judge the rest of us based on this one delusional nutcase.  I would never!” and then walk away with our consciences clear.   Once again we chalk it up to one bad apple in an otherwise healthy bushel.

This will get us nowhere.

Until we are able to acknowledge the system that allows these acts to flourish, we will get nowhere.  Dylann Roof is not just one bad apple.  He was reared in a country that systematically depletes Black lives at every conceivable turn.  He was reared in a country that puts people who look like him at the front of the pack and then bolsters them at every possible turn.  He was reared in a state that still flies the confederate flag.

This isn’t a case of White Supremacy because the AWP reserves that term for the one-in-200-million who would actually shoot up a Church of people praying.   It’s not White Supremacy that enabled Dylann Roof to kill 9 people yesterday.

It’s just Whiteness.

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“They have treated the wound of my people carelessly,
saying, ‘Peace, peace,’ when there is no peace”

Jeremiah 6:14

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