Charleston Church Shooting Sparks Debate on Race in South Africa

• by Lisa Vives (new york)
• Friday, June 26, 2015
• Inter Press Service

The right-wing Front National party was quoted to say that the photo of shooting suspect Roof, wearing a jacket bearing apartheid-era South African and Rhodesian flags, was photoshopped.

"...The liberal media in South Africa and a host of liberal social media platforms have been spitting acid about the young man who shot and killed a number of African Americans in a church in Charleston in the south of America", they wrote in a Facebook post.

"Front National South Africa started questioning the picture … and suddenly, in the blink of an eye, the Facebook profile 'disappeared', but not before we got hold of the original "un-photoshopped" picture. The REAL badge is rather reminiscent of the logo of the American Democratic Party of Barack Obama!"

Another view was expressed by South African writer Eusebius McKaiser who pleaded for understanding of a wayward young man.

"Dylann Roof isn't a terrorist," insisted McKaiser. "He isn't a racist. He isn't a monster. He isn't a murderer. And he certainly isn't singularly responsible for having allegedly killed nine people.

‘Roof is the product of a world that created him… We created the racist society into which poor Roof was born. It is our collective racism and hatred that are the building blocks of the Roof tragedy.

"Perhaps the saddest part of the whole tragedy is that Roof's empathy for other people shone so brightly for an hour in that church," the black South African lamented. "For a whole hour, he was in communion with people different from him. He reportedly tells us that he almost didn't shoot any of them because they were so nice to him. I confess, I was moved to tears.

"What that shows is that it would be cruel for us to lock up Roof and scapegoat him for society's ills."

An opposing view appeared in the Mail & Guardian by Terri Barnes, history professor now at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, who compared the controversy over the statue of Cecil Rhodes, founder of the policy of enforced racial segregation, at the University of Cape Town with the Confederate flag.

Barnes wrote: "After a great deal of pressure from many quarters and a lot of good, hard debate, the statue has since come down. (Still), the odious Confederate flag and versions thereof officially fly in seven US states: South Carolina, Mississippi, Arkansas, North Carolina, Tennessee, Georgia and Florida.

"Cape Town University had the wisdom to remove a symbol of racist oppression, elitism, and callous barbarism from its campus. Will Americans have the wisdom to tackle their own outdated symbols of a horrible past?"

"It is heartbreaking," the long-time resident of South Africa continued, "even in the midst of a killing season the likes of which America has perhaps never before witnessed — that the stench of the old South Africa and of racist Rhodesia still have the power to inspire someone like Roof."

Edited by Kitty Stapp

© Inter Press Service (2015) — All Rights ReservedOriginal source: Inter Press Service

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