Dylann Roof committed a vicious act of violence last week killing nine black congregants at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church of Charleston, South Carolina.
This overtly racially motivated attack is yet another instance of the lingering remnants of white supremacy that still plague our nation.
President Obama believes the issue at play is a lack of gun control.
“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…Once again, innocent people were killed in part because someone who wanted to inflict harm had no trouble getting their hands on a gun,” Obama said in a speech on June 18.
While the president is correct in stating that this type of violence is unique in both frequency and intensity to our nation, the deeper seeded issue is an intense racism coupled with a societal issue of white male entitlement and privilege that causes mentally unstable individuals like Roof to act with violence when endangered.
“We [the city of Charleston] have no skinheads, no real KKK, no one doing anything but talking on the Internet. Well someone has to have the bravery to take it to the real world, and I guess that has to be me,” Roof wrote on his website before the massacre.
Roof also said in response to a victim’s plea for him to stop during the shooting, “No, you’ve raped our women, and you are taking over the country. I have to do what I have to do,” according to Sylvia Johnson, a relative of the church’s slain pastor who spoke to an undisclosed survivor after the shooting.
In a recent psychological profile of Roof by Joe Navarro, a former FBI criminal profiler, Dylann Roof fits two profiles of killers: “the paranoid and the narcissistic.”
Apart from Roof’s mental instability, what is frightening about this incident is this ideology is not unique, only the act is. Roof fits into a category of ignorant, intolerant, hate-driven and ultra-conservative whites who believe it is their responsibility to uphold the societal privileges they have known since birth by subjugating minorities they perceive to be a threat to their underserved sense of privilege.
This belief is so heavily engrained in our society those malleable and vulnerable minds, such as Roof, internalize this narrative and, when they perceive minorities are infringing upon their privilege, they seek to eradicate, not merely suppress.
The point is this: Roof typifies a lingering systemic issue of white supremacist counter-culture in American society that seeks to impose systems of oppression.
While the UW student body population is predominantly white, in light of our campus’s growing racial diversity, we must conduct ourselves with appreciation and respect for one another, as we ourselves would hope to receive from others.
Co-written by:
Christian Weed
cweed1@uwyo.edu
Alec Schaffer
aschaff@uwyo.edu
