Is Honesty about American Racism Really the Best Policy? Some Thoughts on the Charleston Church Massacre and the Ambiguous Value of Candor

It is completely predictable in our polarized nation that there are two competing narratives about the Charleston Church massacre. One narrative is that the actions of Dylann Roof, the young murderer, reflects and is inspired by a toxic and pervasive brew of wistfully nostalgic white supremacy and racist paranoia that swills around the internet and spills out into the open in Freudian slips and occasional acts of terror. Such murders are not the random, inexplicable acts of lone lunatics. They are instead a disturbed individual’s taking literally the day-to-day racist fantasies and nostalgia of millions of white Americans, attitudes that foster websites like Stormfront.org and practices like the flying of the Confederate flag outside public buildings. This narrative is best captured by Jon Stewart’s passionate denunciation of the widespread tendency to treat Roof’s act of racial terrorism as a merely tragic outburst of individual lunacy rather than an all-too-predictable product of widespread American racism. Key to Stewart's eloquent appeal was his tying white Southern fondness for the Confederate flag and for naming streets after Confederate war heroes to racism generally and Roof's racist attack in particular.

The second narrative, mostly from conservative sources, is that pervasive contemporary racism had nothing to do with the Charleston massacre. In one version, that attack is said to be the product of anti-clerical bias requiring churches to arm their parishioners to protect the faithful. (Such a spin was nicely captured by Fox New’s interview of E.W. Jackson, a black pastor at a church in Virginia). The less implausible version of this narrative is that Dylann Roof was indeed a vicious racist but that his racism is an atavistic expression of a long-extinct ideology rather than a reflection of widespread contemporary attitudes and fears. (This version of the Roof-does-not-reflect-America response is well captured by the Wall Street Journal’s op-ed, which attributed Roof’s murders to some “problem that defies explanation beyond the reality that evil still stalks humanity”).

As a matter of common honesty, Stewart’s interpretation of the massacre strikes me as far more accurate than Fox’s or the Wall Street Journal’s spin. Roof’s rhetoric – fear of black rapists’ attacking white women, for instance -- is not only as American as apple pie but as contemporary as Stormfront.org or talk radio. The numbers of Americans who endorse Roof’s attitudes, if not his violence, can be numerically tracked at racist websites and measured through simple social science experiments. That alienated individuals (Dylann Roof, Anders Breivik, etc.) would take such widespread attitudes and rhetoric as inspiration for a mass killing is no more surprising than that (for instance) alienated young Muslim men would draw inspiration for murder from anti-semitic pamphlets in Middle Eastern bookstores and anti-semitic sermons at extremist mosques. Conservatives’ stance that they are shocked, shocked, by Roof’s “inexplicable” attack strikes me as just as implausible as the analogous claim by moderate Muslims that “extremist” Islamic violence bears no connection to Friday sermons at major mosques comparing to Jews to pigs and apes.

Nonetheless, if I were to judge these competing narratives by their utility rather than their honesty, I confess that I prefer the Fox News spin. My reason, elaborated after the jump, is that Fox News’ approach has a prayer of creating a cross-racial rural coalition rooted in church and guns. By contrast, Stewart’s Naming & Shaming strategy seems not only futile but dangerous to me: Convince “mainstream” Southerners that their condemnation of racist violence is inconsistent with their embrace of Stonewall Jackson and the Confederate flag, and you might find that they dump the former rather than the latter.

As I noted five years ago on this blog, everyone is ethnocentric, meaning that they "tend to divide human society into in-groups and out-groups and use those divisions to reinforce their own sense of identity and self-worth." One should predict, therefore, that white, middle-class, suburban or rural, Southern, and evangelically Protestant Christian homeowners will develop a bias favoring similar people.

Stewart's Naming & Shaming strategy invites the scolded listener to consider whether this general bundle of cultural loyalties (for instance, an affinity for Confederate flags) is causally associated a tendency towards racist violence. It seems to me intuitively obvious that there is such a link. Such a Naming and Shaming strategy, however, poses the risk that, rather than jettison their general cultural commitments to Southerness, the target audience will instead circle the wagons. Maybe it is just my paranoia, but it is not obvious to me which horn of the dilemma white South Carolinians would choose if they were convinced that there was an inconsistency between their general celebration of "Southern-ness" and their condemnation of a racist church-shooting.

The Fox News strategy, for all of its intellectual dishonesty, has the single virtue of reenforcing the aversion to racist violence by tying that aversion to the target audience's other cultural commitments. "If you love the NRA and attend church regularly," the Fox News interview implies, "then you should rise up to demonstrate against the anti-Christian Dylann Roof and arm Black churchgoers against others of his ilk." Painting white supremacists as anti-Christian rather than pro-Confederate, in other words, seems like a smarter way to peel off Southern support for the frequenters of Stormfront.org and similar venues. Likewise, painting black churchgoers as potentially pro-gun seems to me to be a smarter way to ground a cross-racial rural coalition than insisting that white Southerners tear down their statues of Robert E. Lee, re-name their streets that now commemorate Confederate generals, and lower the Stars and Bars.

None of this is to condemn Stewart for his eloquent speech (which probably had few listeners sympathetic to the Confederacy who could be alienated by it). Instead, I offer merely a limited endorsement of the Fox News approach. The admittedly dishonest down-playing of the role of racism in white Southern culture seems better calculated to me for the forging of cultural and ultimately political ties between white and black Southerners than the jeremiad against the Confederate symbols that many whites hold near and dear. Sometimes, in short, honesty might not be the best policy.