TV

Jon Stewart Has Given An Emotional And Passionate Response To The Racist Charleston Massacre

"The Confederate flag flies over South Carolina, and the white guy's the one who feels his country's being taken away from him."

by Alex McKinnon  19 June 2015

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About 24 hours ago, news came through that a young white man entered the historic Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, and opened fire on the black parishioners inside. He killed nine people, ranging from a 26-year-old college graduate, to a 45-year-old mother of three, to a 74-year-old retired pastor. All of them were black.

It has since become apparent that the massacre was an explicit and premeditated act of terror by a man, Dylann Roof, who held deeply racist and white supremacist beliefs, and had previously expressed intent to act on those beliefs violently. Roof sat with his victims for an hour before opening fire. A photo of Roof picked up by the media shows him wearing a jacket adorned with the flags of apartheid-era South Africa and the former apartheid regime of Rhodesia, modern-day Zimbabwe. In interviews with his roommates, Roof is quoted as saying that “the races should be segregated, that whites should be with whites,” and that he was “planning to do something crazy”.

“He was big into segregation and other stuff,” Roof’s friend Dalton Tyler said. “He said he wanted to start a civil war. He said he was going to do something like that and then kill himself.”

Beyond the horror of the act itself, what has further ignited people’s grief and fury is the response of the media, who have characterised Roof and his atrocities in the careful and nuanced language reserved for white men who shoot people but routinely denied black people who are shot. Media outlets have almost entirely avoided using terms like “terrorist” to describe the perpetrator of this clear act of terrorism and downplayed the issue of race in a clearly racially-motivated attack. As they have many times before, responses to the Charleston massacre instead described him as a “troubled teen” with a difficult childhood, speculated that he is suffering from a mental illness and framed the massacre as a “crime against faith.”

The church in question, as many other black churches across the United States do, has a long history of being attacked by white supremacists; it is the oldest black church south of Baltimore, and was burnt to the ground in 1822 after a failed slave uprising.

Many have also noted that the Confederate flag continues to fly over the South Carolina statehouse.

In his latest Daily Show opening monologue, Jon Stewart dealt, once again, with the wilful ignorance of large sections of American society to acknowledge the vast and hideous effects racism still has on people of colour, and the certainty of something like this happening again.

“I honestly have nothing, other than just sadness that we have to peer into the abyss of the depraved violence that we do to each other, and the nexus of, just, gaping racial wound that will not heal, that we pretend doesn’t exist.

“I’m confident, though, that by acknowledging it, by staring into that and seeing it for what it is, we still won’t do jack shit.

“The Confederate flag flies over South Carolina and the roads are named for Confederate generals, and the white guy’s the one who feels his country’s being taken away from him.”