Murders in Charleston

Worshippers embrace following a group prayer across the street from the scene of a shooting at the Emanuel African...
Worshippers embrace following a group prayer across the street from the scene of a shooting at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church on Wednesday night.Photograph by David Goldman/AP

A week that began with public grappling with race as absurdity has concluded with shock, yet again, with race as the catalyst for tragedy. The existential question of who is black has been answered in the most concussive way possible: the nine men and women slain as they prayed last night at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, in Charleston, South Carolina, were black. The people for whom this new tableau of horror is most rooted in American history are black as well. The people whose grief and outrage over this will inevitably be diminished with irrelevant references to intra-racial homicide are black people. There are other, more pertinent questions, not all of them answerable. The most immediate: Who did this? Was it the act of an individual or was it an organized effort? What motivates someone to commit such monstrous acts and how do they rationalize such evil? How much longer can we live like this?

There is a great deal that is still unknown about what transpired last night, but the immediate details—a single white male shooting; a horrific act of desecration; nine people, including the church’s pastor, the Reverend Clementa Pinckney, murdered during worship—are enough to inspire something beyond despair. Two months ago, the country saw (http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/walter-scott-shooting-south-carolina), an unarmed African-American man, as he was fatally shot by police officer Michael Slager in nearby North Charleston. The two incidents seem like gruesome boomerangs of history until we consider the even more terrible idea that they are simple reflections of the present. The daisy chain of racial outrages that have been a constant feature of American life since Trayvon Martin’s death, three years ago, are not a copycat phenomenon soon to fade from our attention.

At the same time, what happened at Emanuel A.M.E. belongs in another terrible lineage—the modern mass shooting. We have, quite likely, found at 110 Calhoun Street, in Charleston, South Carolina, the place where Columbine, Aurora, and Newtown cross with Baltimore, Ferguson, and Sanford. We periodically mourn the deaths of a group of Americans who die at the hands of another armed American. We periodically witness racial injustices that inspire anger in the streets. And sometimes we witness both. This is, quite simply, how we now live.

For those who know the institution and its history, what happened on Wednesday evening conjures a particularly bitter irony. The African Methodist Episcopal Church, founded in 1793, is the oldest denomination established by black people in the United States. It owes its origins to white discrimination against black Christians in the eighteenth century, and an incident in which black churchgoers were interrupted while worshipping and directed to the segregated section of an Episcopal church in Philadelphia. For black Christians, the word “sanctuary” had a second set of implications. The spiritual aims of worship were paired with the distinctly secular necessity of a place in which not just common faith but common humanity could be taken for granted. No matter the coming details about the shooting in Charleston, it seems almost inescapable that the assault on a single black church is an inadvertent affirmation of the need for an entire denomination of them.