Mother Emanuel AME Church, famous for being the Church of Denmark Vesey, and one of the oldest churches in South Carolina, is now infamous for the Peculiar Institution of racially motivated hate crimes. Nine souls murdered for the eternal crime of being Black.
When someone enters a church, a synagogue, a temple, a mosque and shoots down people, it goes beyond the heinous act of killing the innocent. It shatters the sinews of a society.
Evil.
For Black Americans, evil does not lurk, it lunges. It lynches. It lunches on our entrails with bloody fangs and reads the signs of past and future terror. It is celebrated as Americana. Baseball, apple pie, and racism.
America's Original Sin, 500 years in the making.
Jim Crow is back with a brand new outfit. It has molted its feathers and looks like another bird. It is now a mutant with two right wings: one wing is voter ID suppression and the other wing is the school-to-prison pipeline for our children. And voter suppression is not just for African Americans. It is for students, and Latinos and anyone who isn't "just so."
Chorus: Wheel about, and turn about, and do just so;
Every time I wheel about, I jump Jim Crow.
The melody lingers on.
The people who died in Mother Emanuel AME Church will be buried in a state that still flies the Confederate Battle flag at the State Court House. It is a truncated swastika. Still saluted. Still revered by those who believe in the Cult of Euro-Narcissism, aka, White supremacy.
So there will be no season of jubilee for us. No funeral for racism. No respite from its spiritual and physical violence. No parades for the final coffin of racial hatred. No victory parties, but the continuation of public outcry and private pain.
The despair of our diaspora continues. We can say, "It Gets Better." But right now it is bitter. Racism has infused liability into the bone marrow of our viability.
Now we must draw on our prayers and the strength of our ancestors who faced worse than today and survived. We will soldier on. We will face fear and loathing with the same rich, deep-veined reserves as those who went before us. We will soldier on. We will challenge the daily domestic terrorism that haunts our movements and existence and we will survive.
We soldier on.