Today is the 10th anniversary of the killing of nine members of a Charleston church.
A Chronicle Editorial. Unfortunately, hate has a home everywhere. We as a society have given it way too warm a welcome.
Ten years ago today, a young white man named Dylann Roof joined a Bible study taking place at Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina. He was welcomed warmly by the African-American parishioners taking part, including the church’s lead pastor, the Rev. Clementa Pinckney, who was also a South Carolina state senator.
Towards the end of the study, Roof pulled out a handgun and began shooting. He killed nine parishioners, including Pinckney. An investigation of the crimes clearly revealed that Roof was motivated by racism. Yet the church members were so kind to him that he almost changed his mind about carrying out the killings, he told authorities. The Washington Post reported:
Yet Roof also acknowledged to authorities that he had briefly reconsidered his plan during the time he spent watching the Bible study group after entering the church, two people briefed on the investigation said.
Roof said he “almost didn’t go through with it because they were so nice to him,” one of the people said, before he concluded that “I had to complete my mission.”
As he methodically fired and reloaded several times, the person said, Roof called out: “You all are taking over our country. Y’all want something to pray about? I’ll give you something to pray about.”
Roof was charged under both state and federal law, and eventually sentenced to death on the federal charges—”over the objections of survivors of the shootings and many relatives of the victims,” as the New York Times has reported.
Last December, shortly before leaving office, President Joe Biden commuted the death sentences of 37 inmates on federal death row. He declined to commute the sentences of three men: Dylann Roof; Robert Bowers, convicted of killing 11 worshippers at a Pittsburgh synagogue in 2018; and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who was involved in the bombings at the 2013 Boston Marathon, which killed three people and wounded hundreds of others.
What does this have to do with Croton? Many of us display “Hate Has No Home Here” signs posted on our properties in the village, and the sentiment is certainly laudable. We think it would be accurate to say that most residents who do so are politically liberal or “progressive." On the other hand, many conservatives (including many Trump supporters) accuse those on the left of hypocrisy and “virtue signaling,” because of the perceived low tolerance they display for conservative or even right-wing views.
Indeed, journalists and other analysts who have given a lot of thought to why Trump beat Kamala Harris in the 2024 election have cited liberal disdain for conservative voters as an important factor in the outcome. They give a lot of credence to the criticism that the Democratic Party has become largely the home of middle to upper class elitism and that the party has allowed Trump and the Republican Party to pose as the champions of the working class.
We see signs of this dynamic here in Croton, where Democrats are a strong majority and liberals/progressives hold almost monopolistic power in all of our local institutions, from the village to the school district.
(We discussed these questions at some length in an article we published the day before Trump took office, entitled “Croton-on-Hudson in the Age of Trump.”)
At the same time, we find it very disturbing that many local conservatives seem willing to turn a blind eye to the clearly authoritarian inclinations of President Trump and members of his administration, which the federal courts—based on constitutional law, not “judicial activism”—have been trying, with only limited success, to rein in. For example, some here were quick to grasp at one or two initial straws they thought suggested that the alleged perpetrator of the killings in Minnesota was a Democrat, when in fact it is now clearly established that he was a Trump supporter and had a list of Democrats and abortion service providers on his alleged hit list.
A close look at the history of hate crimes in the United States and around the world would demonstrate that the great majority of them have been carried out by right-wing bigots of various stripes.
Bias Motivation Categories for Victims of Single-bias Incidents in 2023 (U.S. Department of Justice)
But we also find it disturbing that many liberals and progressives in Croton have turned a blind eye to the huge death toll in Gaza, which almost all human rights organizations and experts have concluded are the results of war crimes committed by Israel. We don’t think that denial, acceptance, or active support of this modern day mass collective punishment of Palestinians is consistent with the principles of “Hate Has No Home Here.” Only a very few voices have been raised locally about what more and more Americans are concluding is morally unacceptable, even as, this June, the village is celebrating Pride Month and Juneteenth.
(We highly recommend the cover story in the current issue of New York Magazine, “Crimes of the Century,” which details the factual basis for war crimes in Gaza in journalistically rigorous fashion. We see it as a possible breakthrough in the national conversation.)
In conclusion, we can’t pick and choose the victims we prefer to champion and to mourn over. Not if we want to claim to be moral beings. We think that, in reality, hate still has a home everywhere, and that is the challenge we all face. It is far from certain whether we will be able to meet it.
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“we can’t pick and choose the victims we prefer to champion and to mourn over. Not if we want to claim to be moral beings.” In fact we can. There is a lot of discussion today of “whataboutism” — a way of defending one immoral action by pointing out the general acceptance of another immoral action. Most debaters would agree that whataboutism is an invalid form of argument. In other words, we *can* pick and choose which immoral actions we wish to focus on and ignore others.