The >gun attack that killed nine black churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina, is a violent reminder that racism courses through America’s veins even 50 years after an unarmed civil rights activist was killed by an Alabama state trooper, an incident that led to the historic Selma to Montgomery marches. The target this time was a storied African-American church and the victims included a state senator. The > arrested suspect, Dylann Storm Roof , 21, apparently wanted to ignite a “civil war”. The incident should be seen in the >backdrop of a >rising trend of crimes in the U.S. against African-Americans , involving both >persons in authority and members of the public. Charleston’s victims are simply the latest in a long list from recent years. They include >Walter Scott , who was shot from behind by a police officer on April 4 in North Charleston; >Michael Brown , shot by the police in Ferguson in August last year; Eric Garner, who died in New York in July 2014 after the police got him in a chokehold, and >Trayvon Martin , shot in Florida by a neighbourhood watch volunteer in 2012. The election of Barack Obama as the first black President of the country in 2008 had raised hopes about the dawn of a post-racial era. But African-Americans are still being frequently targeted.
>Racism is not history. Racialisation, making presumptions about people based on their identities from the perspective of White supremacy, is a continuing process that feeds people like the attacker in Charleston. The >American polity , which claims to cherish freedom and fairness, should have addressed this >societal flaw long ago. Instead, the political activism of the conservative right in the U.S. is deepening the flaw. It may not be a coincidence that what the shooter at Charleston told his victims — ‘you are taking over our country’— sounded much like the Tea Party slogan, ‘Take back our country’, which emerged as a rallying cry among the conservatives after Mr. Obama became President. To be sure, the U.S. is not the only country that has racism. What makes it more lethal here are >the country’s gun laws . The Obama administration’s attempts to bring in stricter gun laws have failed in Congress despite a number of mass shooting incidents in recent years. Unsurprisingly, Mr. Obama has now renewed his calls for stricter gun laws. It may be ironical that “the policeman of the world”, which invaded two nations after the September 11, 2001 attacks and sent drones to several others presumably to keep Americans “safe” from terrorists, is seen to be clueless on how to deal with home-grown terrorism. Racism and guns are the twin pathological failures of the American system. It has to tackle urgently these challenges, politically and legally. Else, no force would be able to halt the decay of moral fabric in the country.
Correction: This article was corrected post-publication for a minor error. The date September 11, 2011 has been changed to September 11, 2001.
