“White nationalism infuses our political ideology”: Dylann Roof is just the beginning

http://www.salon.com/2015/07/20/white_nationalism_infuses_our_political_ideology_dylann_roof_is_just_the_beginning/
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When Dylann Roof pulled a gun at a Bible study in Charleston, South Carolina, his shots rang through history to the roots of the ideology of white supremacy, which justified genocide of indigenous peoples and the enslavement of black people from Africa. We deny this at our own risk.

Roof attacked the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, which by the early 1800s was at the center of black resistance to slavery in Charleston, according to African-American history scholar Gerald Horne. Black people, Roof feared, threaten the existence of the white race. Events in the church’s history play a role in Roof’s fear. Inspired by a slave rebellion that began in 1791 in what is now Haiti, Emanuel parishioner Denmark Vesey of Charleston began organizing an insurrection against slavery, using the Charleston AME church as a base.

Roof might have been unaware of the specific history of “Mother Emmanuel,” but he had immersed himself in a narrative that is deeply rooted in our nation’s history, a narrative that takes into account the history of Charleston’s historic congregation.

Roof told a participant in the Bible study, “I have to do it. You rape our women and you’re taking over our country. And you have to go.” Horne and other social scientists believe Roof inherited the fear of murderous blacks raping white women from a common historic narrative of white supremacy.

Horne says that after the bloody slave revolt, American newspapers were full of stories salaciously describing “marauding blacks with sugar cane machetes hacking the white slave-owners to death.” Regardless of their veracity, these stories informed a historic narrative that was seized upon by the founders and early members of the Ku Klux Klan.
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How ironic that the narrative is an inversion of reality - it was the other way around.