Turn Instead to the Victims

Wednesday night in Charleston, South Carolina a depraved act of violence was committed against a group of Black Americans. Condolences and well-wishes wrap around the community, sending support in this time of loss. We too send our deepest heartfelt sympathy and support. It is not enough. This is more than a tragic loss, this was a terrorist act motivated by racism. It was designed to strike out at a center of community life and rob its target, fellow human beings, of a sense of safety.

As I stagger through the dark hole left in the wake of this deadly hate crime, I ask that we collectively turn away from the pervasive images of the suspect. Not only do I believe that it is dangerous to grant notoriety to killers in a society obsessed with fame, but our lack of personal identification with the perpetrator, our instinctual effort to place violence at the doorstep of an unrecognizable other, undermines our sense of shared responsibility for a culture of racism and violence.

I see our collective energy manipulated by the status quo, the media, and by our own discomfort as we circle around a theory of mental illness and a narrative about a misguided individual who snapped.

Turn instead to the victims, speak their names, and consider their individual lives.

Sharonda Coleman-Singleton

Reverend Clementa Pinckney

Cynthia Hurd

Tywanza Sanders

Myra Thompson

Ethel Lee Lance

Rev. Daniel L. Simmons

Rev. Depayne Middleton-Doctor

Susie Jackson

They, each of them, were members of their church, their families, and their communities. Sharonda Coleman-Singleton coached the girls track team at a local high school. Cynthia Hurd was the manager of St. Andrews Regional Library. Tywanza Sanders, who recently graduated from Allen University in Columbia, South Carolina, died trying to shield his 87-year-old aunt, Susie Jackson, from gunfire.  Ethel Lee Lance had worked at historic Emanuel AME for 30 years. The list goes on, the loss is enormous. And we can see ourselves in them.

Sharonda Coleman-Singleton
Image via Facebook

It is a powerful act, and a political one, to look deeply into the lives of the victims, to write their names on our hearts, and to draw them towards ourselves rather than focusing on the suspect. By feeling the loss of these lives, we bear witness to the destruction wrought by a racist and violent culture.

When we look at the perpetrator, we do not see ourselves. This enables us to write him off, to create the ‘other’ and to dismiss, minimize and turn away our collective energy and deny our individual responsibility. By focusing on him, a person we reject, we also cordon off and neutralize this act of terrorism by denying its roots in a racist legacy that we all share. We are also absolved of further responsibility for action once he is behind bars. After all, if the focus is all on one lone, crazed killer, we have solved the problem he poses once he has been captured.

By focusing on the perpetrator as a lone wolf, we also fail to make the connection between this massacre and the broad spectrum of violence, from murder to gun violence to racist micro aggressions. Instead of reflecting on what we can do to shift a culture of violence, we are left shaking our heads and wagging our tongues about one young man gone wrong.

In the same way that domestic violence is not a private issue, we cannot simply obfuscate our responsibility by dismissing this as terribly tragic isolated incident that happened somewhere in ‘the South.’ In the same way that a domestic violence murder-suicide does not represent a single tragic moment in which an otherwise nice, kindly person “just snapped” we must not minimize this by failing to see the interconnectivity and the cycle of violence.

We have to take responsibility and take action. When we consider the victims, when we hold up their lives, their stories, we know that it can’t wait.

Links to articles about the Charleston Church Massacre:

These Are the Victims of the Charleston Church Shooting

The Victims of the Charleston, SC, Church Massacre

Let’s Call Charleston Shooting What it Was: A Terrorist Attack

We Were Never Meant To Survive: A Response to the Attack in Charleston