Moore: In Charleston church shooter’s arrest, racism’s history lingers

Police arrested Dylan Roof for murdering nine black churchgoers last week, and two powerful symbols of Southern history collided. The rare violence everyone condemns came into contact with the daily racism few white Americans notice. It is time many of us started noticing the quiet hatred parading as heritage and humor.

On the one hand stands Charleston’s Emanuel AME Church: birthed by mistreated black Christians, burned to the ground over slave rebellion, clinging to existence in secret meetings and brandishing a pulpit from which Martin Luther King Jr. preached. Emanuel stands in the beating heart of Charleston. It reminds passersby that the Old South included far more than gallant Confederates.

On the other hand sits a lonely stretch of U.S. 74 in North Carolina dubbed Dixon Boulevard. There, police arrested a young white supremacist on a road named in honor of America’s most celebrated white supremacist. In 1905 Thomas Dixon Jr. wrote The Clansman, which 10 years later became the first blockbuster movie, “The Birth of a Nation.” The book and film inspired dramatic spikes in lynching. On average, a white mob lynched a black American every week of each year before 1930.

Many people will refer to the alleged perpetrator as “crazy.” This is probably true. Yet another terrible truth remains. Acts like Roof’s were once more common than they are today — understandable rather than unhinged.

As the shooter’s gunfire robbed families of loved ones, he explained himself. “You rape our women, and you’re taking over our country. And you have to go,” he reportedly said. In The Clansman, Dixon made much the same point. The novel hinges on the fictional rape of two white women by four black men and the spread of black voting power. Then white men ride (literally) to the rescue in white robes, using violence to restore racial order.

What has changed? A great deal. In the 100 years since Dixon’s epic, public perception of white-on-black crime shifted from triumph to travesty. People of all races call it foul. The day after the massacre, the Southern Baptist Convention, a denomination born in defense of slavery, condemned the shooting in Charleston and called for national repentance from racism. We do not live in Dixon’s America anymore.

But some of us do drive on his highway, as Dylan Roof did before his arrest. There is a quiet and acceptable racism still loose in America today, tucked away in the jokes told at family gatherings and neighborhood cookouts. Being politically incorrect is its own act of freedom — telling it like it is in the real world, we often say — and is more common than anyone is willing to publicly admit. According to a friend of the alleged shooter, Roof was known to make racist slurs. “He would say it just as a joke,” the student told CNN. “I never took it seriously.”

Most white Southerners do not take racism very seriously. It is safely in the past. But after a year of racial chaos, it is time that white Southerners force other whites into some awkward conversations.

Only when we stop tolerating subtle forms of racism can we create better barriers to its most horrible outbreaks. Otherwise, we allow it to fester like bacteria searching for a host. Apparently, it found one in Lexington County, where I was raised just a few miles from Roof’s home. It turned deadly in Charleston, where I’ve walked past Emanuel A.M.E. Church for 12 years of vacations. And authorities finally contained it on Dixon Boulevard, on the same road I drive to work everyday.

The distance between Dylan Roof’s life and mine — two white boys from Lexington County — is minimal. Calling him crazy misses the point. White Southerners like me tolerate his twisted logic daily by paying it no attention, and that should cause us all to cringe.

Few white Southerners want to police others’ thoughts. Renaming roads, removing flags or criticizing someone’s jokes won’t accomplish everyone’s deepest desire to bring the victims back. It wouldn’t make a young mind less troubled. But it would deny that troubled mind one avenue to travel. Today we need to do something actually within our own power to do, and these things are doable. Such little steps could move society further down the road from our violent racial past toward something like that place where “God is with us” — Emanuel.

This story was originally published June 28, 2015 at 5:00 PM.