[On September 10th,
1897, striking coal miners at the Lattimer mine near Hazleton, PA, were attacked
by a sheriff’s posse, killing at least 19 and wounding many more. So this
week I’ve AmericanStudied historical massacres, leading up to this special
weekend post on contemporary hate crimes.]
On the
contemporary crime that most echoes historical massacres, and its connection to
an even more troubling broader trend.
If I had to
identify one 21st century act of violence that most clearly extends
the legacy of the kinds of massacres about which I’ve written this week, it
would be Dylann
Roof’s June 17th, 2015 killing of nine African American
parishioners (including Senior
Pastor Clementa Pinckney) and wounding of another at Charleston (SC)’s
historic Emanuel African Methodist
Episocal Church. Roof overtly targeted members of a particular racial and
ethnic culture, and for just as overt
white supremacist reasons (he said
to the victims “I have to do this because you are raping our women and
taking over the world” before opening fire), and did so at a site of crucial cultural
and historical significance for that community. While he was a single
shooter, compared to a rampaging mob or a military force or the other
large-scale perpetrators of the week’s historic massacres, Roof was part
of extremist online communities that to my mind represent 21st
century equivalents of those historic mobs, and in his ugly
manifesto entirely defined his violent actions and their purposes as part
of those broader, communal efforts. So for all those and other reasons I would
call Roof’s shooting a 21st century massacre (not just a mass
shooting, which of course it certainly was but tragically only one of so many
in recent years), and as a result an extension of these dark and horrific
historical legacies into our own moment.
At the same
time, Roof’s shooting could just as easily and with just as much accuracy be
described as an early example of one of the last few years’ most horrific
trends: white supremacist hate crimes against Americans of color. Of course
such racial/ethnic hate crimes have never been absent from American history and
culture, and African Americans in particular have been subject to them in
increasing numbers for many years now (even if we leave police shootings aside,
killings such as George
Zimmerman’s February 2012 shooting of Trayvon Martin or Michael
David Dunn’s November 2012 shooting of Jordan Davis embody such 21st
century anti-African American hate crimes). But even those anti-African
American hate crimes have become more blatantly white supremacist in the last
couple years (I write this not long after the horrific
stabbing murder of teenager Nia Wilson in Oakland by a racist killer), and
have been paralleled by other racist hate crimes committed against members of
so many different American cultures (Sikh
Americans, Indian
Americans, Muslim
Americans, Mexican
and other Latinx Americans, and many
many more). Indeed, I’m not sure any single awful trend has been more
consistent in the age of Trump than these hate crimes against Americans of
color—perhaps ridiculous Trump Tweets, but those have overtly been linked
to said crimes so I’ll go ahead and lump them in as part of the same trend.
Obviously (I
hope) I would never in any way downplay the horrors of large-scale massacres,
but to my mind there’s something uniquely and perhaps especially horrible about
these seemingly constant 21st century hate crimes: their everyday,
almost ordinary nature. Almost by definition a massacre is such a striking
event that it stops communities, and even the nation, in their tracks; President Obama traveled to
Charleston to deliver the eulogy at the funeral of the Emanuel AME victims,
for example. Whereas in 2018, racial and ethnic hate crimes, big or small,
barely register as news at all; it’s on the small end of the spectrum to be
sure, but when “Fuck n[-words]” was written on the walls of two bathrooms at my
sons’ elementary
school in Needham, MA this past academic year, the event was noted as terrible
but wasn’t the subject of extensive school meetings or even multiple emails or
the like. I’m not suggesting that we are at a point where a hate crime on the
level of Dylann Roof’s would barely make a ripple in our news cycle—but I think
it would be possible for us to get there, and there’s no doubt that the general
ubiquity of racist hate and violence is at the very least a troubling trend.
Next series
starts Monday,
Ben
PS. What do you
think?
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