Will the political leaders of the capitalist world react to last night’s racist massacre of nine Black parishioners at Charleston South Carolina’s historic Emmanuel AME Church, co-founded in the early 1820’s by anti-slavery resistance martyr Denmark Vesey, as they did to the massacre six months ago of eleven people at the Paris magazine Charlie Hebdo?
Will they all descend on Charleston in a massive march that clearly condemns white supremacy and white racist terrorism? Will the airwaves be filled with denunciations of white racist “extremism” that is so commonplace in the United States? Will they mass produce T-shirts that say, “We are all Emanuel Methodist Church?” Will U.S. authorities round up and arrest individuals and members of organizations who have been making racist and anti-Black comments on social media following the police murders of Walter Scott? Mr. Scott was the unarmed 50-year Black man who was gunned down two months ago by a racist cop in Charleston who had stopped his car for a minor infraction.
If this massacre had been committed by a Muslim person against a white Christian or white Jewish congregation we would not be simply hearing empty platitudes about the “tragedy” and the “need now for Black and white people to come together” or as South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley (R) said: “While we do not yet know all of the details, we do know that we’ll never understand what motivates anyone to enter one of our places of worship and take the life of another.” Really? The Governor can’t understand “what motivates anyone,” meaning white racists, to slaughter Black people in South Carolina? Racism is epidemic. Her state still flies the Confederate flag from the State House 193 years after it executed the legendary Denmark Vesey and scores of other Black people for having planned a “rising” to free enslaved people in the area.
