On June 17th, 2015 Dylann Roof, a young white man from Columbia, South Carolina, fled shortly after opening fire on the congregation of the oldest black church in the south. After sitting through an hour-long Bible study, Roof allegedly announced to the church members he's come "to shoot people," then began to shoot and kill nine members of the Emmanuel AME Church.
Why is it that even after this young white man targeted an extremely historical, prominent African-American church and killed nine of their members, people are still hesitant to call this what it really is? Why are news outlets like CNN and Fox News discussing and debating whether or not this act is a hate crime? On national television, news anchor are "suspecting" and "wondering" if this is a hate crime. And it's not. It's much more than that.
This is terrorism. This is nothing more or less than an intentional, planned, motivated, targeted act of terrorism. According to the FBI, domestic terrorism is defined as "acts dangerous to human life that violate federal or state law; intended to intimidate or coerce a civilian population." This was an act of domestic terrorism, purposefully planned to strike fear in a large population of people by means of a long-standing tradition of attacking prominent black churches. This attack was dangerous to human life, it violated federal and state law, and was intended to intimidate a civilian population.
As journalist and Senior Editor at Mic.com notes, attacks on black churches are nothing new. He states: "On Sept. 15, 1963, for example, four black girls — Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Robertson and Cynthia Wesley — were killed when four white male members of a Ku Klux Klan splinter group bombed the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, before churchgoers began prayer. And in the 1990s, a spate of racially motivated arson attacks destroyed numerous churches in the rural South, like the historic Macedonia Missionary Baptist in Memphis and Johnson Grove Missionary Baptist Church in South Fulton, Tennessee."
These kinds of attacks are used to insight fear and despair throughout communities.
Consider members of African-American churches, and how on-guard and fearful they will be for the upcoming weeks. Imagine the African-American pastors having to drive to their churches on Sunday morning and wonder if they will be the next victims. Imagine the families full of children that attend church every single Wednesday and Sunday; how do they explain to their young ones that they should not be afraid? Imagine the consequences that fear carries with it, and how these consequences will manifest within the community.
Don't let Dylann Roof be called "mentally ill." Don't let the media label him as a madman, an emotionally upset teen, or troublemaker. Roof is a terrorist and a racist, who targeted his victims. This is a tragedy that reveals a much deeper problem within America. If we refuse to call Roof a terrorist, are we refusing that terrorists can be white? Can whiteness and terrorism not co-exist within the same American body?
This is domestic terrorism. "Hate crime" is not strong enough language for this act of violence, and we must label it as it is.
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