Rhetoric Race and Religion
On last night at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church of Charleston, South Carolina, the faithful remnant gathered to share in fellowship, prayer, and community. This Wednesday evening was unlike any other Wednesday evening where church people come together and nothing out of the ordinary was to be expected. But an unfathomable atrocity took place in the sanctuary of this historic church. A 21 year old white man named Dylann S. Roof opened fire upon a group that was unarmed and welcoming to him in their church, killing 6 women and 3 men. Among those who tragically loss their lives was the pastor of Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, the Rev. Clementa Pinckney, also a State Senator. The perversion in this wicked deed is that he sat with them in this setting for over an hour before commencing upon his real intention for being present. In a space where the Divine is sought, where safety us automatically assumed, where humanity is affirmed, hate based on the sociological distinction of race manifested in the most brutal fashion imaginable. Charleston Mayor Joe Riley rather convincingly and accurately observed, “The only reason someone would walk into a church and shoot people that were praying is hate.” This awakened the dormant truth that Black people in religious spaces in America have a history of losing their lives in egregious acts of racial hate and terrorism. We are left with the falsity, the mythos of post-racial America and the reality that Black life is still under siege in this country. The irony is that this tragedy happened in the same town where unarmed Walter Scott was murdered and in the very church that Denmark Vesey was a founding member.
Denmark Vesey was a radical revolutionary who resisted the peculiar institution of chattel slavery. Vesey led a slave rebellion in 1822 that would result in the church being set on fire by whites which forced it’s members to hold their services underground for decades. The shooting Wednesday night took place a day after the anniversary of the June 16, 1822 slave rebellion where Vesey and other’s plotted against their enslavers for their own liberation at the cost of their own lives. In the aftermath of the Vesey rebellion, the African Church was burned down and laws were enacted further place Blacks under the umbrella of white control. 193 years later “Mother Emmanuel” faced yet another tragedy that reeks with the stench of the racial violence that Denmark Vesey and others fought against. Dylann S. Roof embodies the credo of White supremacy that says that Black life is subhuman and disposable.
Ever since the inception of the American project Black life has been propertied, tortured, commodified, dehumanized, and “othered.” The fundamental premise of the ideology of White supremacy is domination and subjugation at all cost. This is just not the history of American but it is America. Angela Davis contended, “We know the road to freedom has always been stalked by death.” The death of our lives, hopes, dreams, aspirations, and yes even our humanity while we are still alive. Armed with an assault weapon and the privilege of his on whiteness, Dylan S. Roof had complete justification and authority in his own mind to carry out this heinous crime. One of the unnamed survivors observed Roof while reloading 5 times insisting, “I have to do it. You rape our women and you’ve take over our country. You have to go.”
There is no language, lexicon, or dialect that can properly articulate or explain this kind of evil. No philosophy or theology exist that can adequately articulate how a white man enters into a Black church, sits for an hour, fires upon innocent people, leaves a witness to convey what happen, have a getaway car ready, and a 5 year old girl has to play dead in order to survive this traumatizing horrific experience. In these moments piety informs us to pray as coping mechanism and as solution. Prayer is the same spiritual exercise this congregation was deploying while 9 of them loss their lives. James Baldwin contended, “If the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more loving. If God cannot do this, then it is time we got rid of Him.”The God that informs us suffer in silence, to accept our place in a White supremacist society, to just “get over” being constantly victimized, has run its course. Our idea of this kind of God has reached it limit. Now in mourning, in shock, in confusion we all should ask God, “What are you saying to us now?”
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