Society and Culture

Fellow White Folks: We Are All Dylan Roof

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Sharonda Coleman-Singleton.

Reverend Clementa Pinckney.

Cynthia Hurd.

Tywanza Sanders.

Myra Thompson.

Ethel Lee Lance.

Reverend Daniel L. Simmons.

Reverend Depayne Middleton-Doctor.

Susie Jackson.

So, fellow white folks. Know any of these names? Any of these lives?

No?

But we all know the name in the headline.

That’s why you clicked on this post, right? Outraged, right, because we would never pick up a gun and murder Black people, in a church for crying out loud, so how can we possibly all be this killer kid?

But we don’t need a gun and we don’t need a confederate flag to be the Charleston shooter.

Because the murderer in Charleston was, yes, an individual young person, but the murderer was also all of us white folk.

It’s all of us who tweeted #notallwhitepeople after the shooting but criticized Black people in Baltimore for rising against state violence.

 

It’s all of us who let him say that he slaughtered Black people to “protect” white women, and we still remained on the proverbial sidelines, letting him murder people in our name.

It’s all of us who prioritize our white tears over the lived experiences of people of color.

It’s all of us, even when we don’t remain passive in the face of state violence.

Because even when we don’t remain passive, we can travel down the street–or even run down the street–confident that we won’t get shot by cops.

Because even when we do protest against white supremacist state violence, we benefit from it.

We benefit from it, and we can do nothing to change that except, maybe, beginning to acknowledge it, and encouraging other white folk to acknowledge it, too.

Because the Charleston shooting is not an exception. This young man’s racism and racist violence are not exceptions.

He has been honest. He has been explicit about what every single structural foundation of this country is entrenched in.

The young man who took so many lives in Charleston is simply more honest than the rest of the country. He explicitly states what all of these foundational fixtures of U.S. society implicitly yet violently impose on people in this country and across the world every day–from our slavery-defending and genocide-based Constitution; to the racist “war on drugs” that is actually a war on communities of color; to the fact that Black History Month is the only time narratives by any kind of POC are highlighted in our schools; to the microaggressions that dominate the workplace, internet, media, and just about everything else; to the environmental racism that is killing even more people of color than police violence–white supremacy.

White people — all of us, no matter how radical our politics or how intersectional our identities (my dis/abilities and queerness do not make me any less white)–materially benefit from and participate in white supremacy.

So yes, we are all Dylan Roof.

And if we don’t want to be?

Well, acknowledging our positions in a white supremacist country and turning off our white tears in favor of genuinely prioritizing those that white supremacy kills is a fine place to start.

Jennifer Polish
Jennifer Polish
Jennifer Polish is an English PhD student at the CUNY Graduate Center in NYC, where she studies non/human animals and the racialization of dis/ability in young adult literature. When she’s not yelling at the computer because Netflix is loading too slowly, she is editing her novel, doing activist-y things, running, or giving the computer a break and yelling at books instead. Contact Jennifer at staff@LawStreetMedia.com.
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