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Sorry, grown-ups. Young people can’t solve America’s race challenges alone

When it comes to moving past America’s troubling history—written in words and blood—and its struggle to achieve goals of racial equality, young people have the answers, adults have rationalized. The next generations will be better, more accepting of a diverse society because they are already living it, right? Well, no.

Dylann Roof, the young man who has confessed to conflicting carnage and trauma in a Charleston, S.C., church, was just 21. The barely legal man, who joined a prayer meeting for nearly an hour before methodically executing the young and the old, is a skinny kid with a goofy bowl haircut whose body looked lost in baggy prison clothes. Being part of a generation that attended integrated schools— including the high school he attended—and Facebook-friending a rainbow nation did not make him desire a multiracial utopia. Just the opposite, in fact.

As America now knows, if it did not before, the lessons Roof absorbed made him come to a different conclusion. He has shattered the lives of the nine he killed, their families, loved ones, and all those they helped with their community service and personal acts of kindness and love, even, apparently, directed toward their killer before he opened fire. Though Roof did not start the “race war” he is said to have wanted, he has harmed a large circle who will feel loss even if they never met or knew the Rev. Clementa Pinckney, Cynthia Hurd, DePayne Middleton Doctor, Susie Jackson, Ethel Lance, Tywanza Sanders, the Rev. Dr. Daniel Simmons Sr., Sharonda Coleman-Singleton, and Myra Thompson.

There is the Confederate flag that, though a compromise removed it from the top of the dome, stills flies prominently on the South Carolina state house grounds. When it was placed on the dome in the 1960s at the height of the movement that was fighting for voting and civil rights for all South Carolinians, the flag was seen as a symbol of the old order. Its continued presence at the Capitol is seen as official endorsement of white supremacy still. And there are the flags he wore from apartheid-era South Africa and from white-ruled Rhodesia, symbols of white supremacy governments that Roof could not have remembered from his own lifetime.

Roof knew enough to stage his act of domestic terrorism on African Americans, in the Southern region we both call home, in historic Emanuel AME Church, “Mother Emanuel,” a center of civil rights history through centuries of attacks and rebirth, tragedy and triumph.

But his education was obviously twisted, as he somehow missed the lesson that the country was built on the backs of the people he thought did not belong. With his reported remarks of protecting white womanhood from being defiled by black rapists, he was buying into a crumbling myth that won’t die. It has been justification for a legacy of violence, guarded by some “Southern gentleman,” by generations of white men, some of whom were themselves the perpetrators of rape and abuse, victimizing black women the system was never designed to protect.

Though studies have shown that millennials are just about as racist as their parents, maybe the sight of this baby-faced murderer will reach people in the way statistics never seem to.

Doing nothing is always easier than taking responsibility and working for change. But Charleston, S.C., is proof, as though anyone needed it, that our children won’t necessarily save America from itself.

In some important ways, the country has come a long way from 1963, when cowards bombed the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala., and loved ones buried the broken bodies of four little girls. This time, in 2015 South Carolina, law enforcement and government officials worked together to find the person responsible and stood together in condemnation of Roof’s devastating crime.

But the state of South Carolina still does not have a hate crime statute. And now the country—with a spotlight on North Charleston, where unarmed African-American Walter Scott was shot by a police officer, who is facing murder charges—is as ever embroiled in discussions of race, justice and hate.

When it comes to facing racial truths and working to reconciliation, no generation, no matter how tired, gets to take a pass. It may be a difficult journey for a country accustomed to looking forward, not back, and the powerful beneficiaries of systems of privilege have little incentive to question the ways things are. But even the comfortable have reason to pause and let the events of Charleston sink in: A 21-year-old has committed one of the most heinous acts of racial hatred America has seen in years.

The consequences of silence are unthinkable.



More articles by Category: Race/Ethnicity
More articles by Tag: African American, Racism, Black Lives Matter
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