Charleston, Family History, & White Responsibility

In response to concerns expressed by some members of my family, I have removed this blog post. This marks the first time that I’ve removed or changed something for reasons other than finding an error or a typo.

This post will not reappear here. Â But nor will it completely disappear. Â I plan to revise and expand it, with the aim of publishing it somewhere else in the future. If I can initiate a dialogue with family members, I want also to incorporate their critique into a new and better essay. Â As I said in the original piece, I refuse to deny the truths about racism’s legacy. Â But I also want to do a better job at expressing thoseÂ truths.

As James Baldwin writes in The Fire Next Time (1963), white people “are, in effect, still trapped in a history which they do not understand; and until they understand it, they cannot be released from it” (8).

[The links that accompanied the original post remain.]

Activism

To help survivors of the 2015 Charleston Massacre
- Mother Emanuel Hope Fund (City of Charleston)
- Reverend Pinckney Fund (Lowcountry Ministries, Palmetto Project): Pinckney is the minister and state senatorÂ who was assassinated.
- Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church: donate directly to the church
In general
- NAACP
- Southern Poverty Law Center

Essays on the 2015 Charleston Massacre

Britt Bennett, “White Terrorism Is as Old as America,”Â New York Times, 19 June 2015
Robin Bernstein, “Racial Innocence Suffuses a White Confessed Killer,”Â Racial Innocence, 21 June 2015
Ta-Nehisi Coates, “Take Down the Confederate Flag – Now,”Â The Atlantic, 18 June 2015
Ta-Nehisi Coates, “When This Cruel War Was Over,”Â The Atlantic, 22 June 2015
Julius Lester, “Reflections on the Murders in Charleston, South Carolina,” Facebook post, 19 June 2015
Jeb Lund, “The Charleston Shooter: Racist, Violent, and, Yes – Political,”Â Rolling Stone, 19 June 2015
Nell Irvin Painter, “What Is Whiteness?”,Â New York Times, 20 June 2015
Stacey Patton, “Black America should stop forgivingÂ white racists,” Washington Post, 22 June 2015
Alison Piepmeier, “My fellow white people, now is the time to truly examine white privilege,” Charleston City Paper, 22 June 2015
Claudia Rankine, “The Condition of Black Life is One of Mourning,” New York Times Magazine, 22 June 2015
Rebecca Traister, “Our Racist History Isn’t Back to Haunt Us. It Never Left Us,” New Republic, 18 June 2015

Resources

Charleston SyllabusÂ (African American Intellectual History Society): An outstanding collection of resources.
Daniel Costa-Roberts, “8 things you didn’t know about the Confederate flag,” PBS NewsHour, 21 June 2015.

Charleston, Family History, & White Responsibility