Dylann Roof Quotes

The glorification of hatred is predicated on a foundation of fear-induced ignorance venomous to haters and those they believe they hate.

How many skinny, short, blond men were rounded up when Dylann Roof massacred people

Later, when I hear others dismissing our voices, our protest for equity, by saying All Lives Matter or Blue Lives Matter, I will wonder how many white Americans are dragged out of their beds in the middle of the night because they might fit a vague description offered up by God knows who. How many skinny, short, blond men were rounded up when Dylann Roof massacred people in prayer? How many brown-haired white men were snatched out of bed when Bundy was killing women for sport?

Not even a full month after Dylann Roof gunned down nine African Americans at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump fired up his “silent majority” audience of thousands in July 2015 with a macabre promise: “Don’t worry, we’ll take our country back.”1

Although it received little press and was rarely incorporated into explanations of his motivations, Dylann Roof's identity as a white Christian was central to his worldview.

Anger and hate keep us energetically connected to another just as powerfully as love does. Stuck anger stops us from experiencing the peace that comes from settling into our true heart as we are constantly doing battle with the other, keeping the memory and the energy of the trauma alive. After the tragic murder of nine people during a Bible study session at Emanuel African Methodist church in Charleston, South Carolina, the parishioners were able to offer heartfelt forgiveness to Dylann Roof. In doing this, they were able to grieve in a state of peace rather than from a rage that would haunt them.

The infamous 2015 Charleston, South Carolina church shooting was originally going to be a college shooting. But Dylann Roof changed plans after realizing that the College of Charleston had armed guards.

The murder-suicide combination of school and other mass shootings is largely young white boys’ way of driving off the cliff at the end of mental health’s tortuous road. Consider three of the most notorious white male shooters: Adam Lanza (Sandy Hook), Elliott Rodgers (UC Santa Barbara), and Dylann Roof (Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston).

If the uprising in Baltimore was evidence of disillusionment with mainstream politics on the left, then Dylann Roof’s vicious murder of nine Black parishioners was proof of the same phenomenon on the right.

In July 2015, not even a full month after Dylann Roof gunned down nine black people at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, Republican front-runner Donald Trump fired up his “silent majority” audience of thousands with a macabre promise: “Don’t worry, we’ll take our country back.” It is time instead that we the people take our country forward. More than a century and a half of anger and fear have undermined American democracy, trampled the constitution, and treated some citizens as chattel and others as collateral damage.

Jones and Allen nonetheless granted broad absolution for white mistreatment, modeling the grace that came to define the Black church and that still found expression two centuries later at Dylann Roof’s bond hearing. “Let no rancour or ill-will lodge in your breasts for any bad treatment you may have received,” they counseled their formerly enslaved readers. “If you do, you transgress against God, who will not hold you guiltless.” They cited both Testaments in urging African Americans to turn the other cheek. Christ, they wrote, “hath commanded to love our enemies, to do good to them that hate and despitefully use us.” Forgiveness should be offered as one wishes to receive it, they said, less for the benefit of the forgiven than for the serenity of the forgiver.

Isabel Wilkerson wrote in Caste. “Black forgiveness of dominant-caste sin has become a spiritual form of having to be twice as good, in trauma, as in other aspects of life, to be seen as half as worthy.” In an op-ed for The New York Times, Roxane Gay explained why she could not forgive Dylann Roof: “White people embrace narratives about forgiveness so they can pretend the world is a fairer place than it actually is and that racism is merely a vestige of a painful past instead of this indelible part of our present…We forgive and forgive and forgive and those who trespass against us continue to trespass against us.

There was, in fact, a choice to be made in Charleston after the shootings at Mother Emanuel, a choice between conflagration and peace, between hatred and forgiveness. Once again, the Black community took the high road, the Way of Sorrows, and the streets did not erupt. This left more than a few conflicted, particularly those who already viewed Christianity as a tool of the oppressor class. No one wanted the elegant old city to burn. But neither did they want white Charleston (or white America, for that matter) to be exculpated. In their view, the expressions of forgiveness, the hand-holding across the bridge, the financial support for Mother Emanuel, all served the subversive purpose of making white people feel undeservedly better about themselves. They understood that their white neighbors bore no individual responsibility, and that many had responded with their hearts. But the narrative in Charleston nonetheless risked allowing them to presume absolution for the legacy of white supremacy that produced Dylann Roof and that still prevented Black Carolinians from achieving equity in most every sphere of life.