An Appeal for Grace

Dylann Roof was from Richland County, like Representative Neal. I am, too. In fact, I knew Dylann Roof’s older sister. We attended Dreher High School together, a public school in downtown Columbia that has a demography evenly split between Black and white. Roof’s sister was a grade ahead of me, and we participated in theater productions together. She was little and blonde, with large blue eyes. Years later, I saw those eyes transposed onto the face of her younger brother, Dylann, staring out unfamiliarly hooded and dull from the pages of newspapers. Dylann went to Hand Middle School, which I attended, and there he overlapped with my little sister for a year. She didn’t know him, but she knows people who did. One of them recalled that Roof often spent afternoons smoking weed by the dumpsters behind the Target five minutes from my parents’ house.

My father met Rep. Neal a few times. Though my dad is the head of the statistics department at the University of South Carolina, he is also a dedicated environmentalist who has spent the past couple decades fighting to ensure protections of Congaree National Park, the largest remaining fragment of old-growth floodplain forest in the country. Congaree, the only national park in South Carolina, is located in lower Richland County, Rep. Neal’s home and his district. One of Rep. Neal’s dearest causes was improving lower Richland County residents’ access to clean drinking water. My father, for whom that issue meshed well with safeguarding the health of the Congaree River and its watershed, got to know him at public hearings on the subject. Roof also spent time in lower Richland County, living for a while within a stone’s throw of Mr. Bunky’s, an area landmark. It’s a catch-all country store, the sort of establishment where bags of chicken feed slump next to coolers of Coca-Cola, and from which, when I was young, my dad and I bought bales of hay for our dog Lizzie’s backyard enclosure. Roof practiced shooting guns, including the Glock, on a lot nearby, maybe framed with tall pines and scrubby oaks growing in sandy soil, like so many of the spread-out lots that checkerboard the agrarian landscape.

This must sound almost folksy — a town in the South where everyone knows each other, or each other’s family, or some piece of gossip — and it might be, if it weren’t for the patina of blood. Proximity does not guarantee compassion. In the South, it’s often been the reverse: the closer whites and African Americans are, the more whites push themselves away. We’ve made racial hierarchy more rigid, using racism to reassure ourselves that we are indeed better than our Black neighbors. It’s an ingenious but ultimately vicious, self-defeating strategy. James Baldwin wrote extensively about what this racism has done to the white soul. In a clip from the powerful new documentary I Am Not Your Negro (2017), he calls it “the death of the heart.” He argued that racism has created a division in the private and public lives of white Americans, rendering them unable to practice public empathy — grace, as Rep. Neal might have called it. Baldwin, in his book The Fire Next Time (1963), described it as an “inability to renew themselves at the fountain of their own lives,” a profound distrust of the self that makes any incisive, revelatory discussion of the racial reality of America nigh impossible. Until white people open themselves to public empathy — to grace — and interrogate why, as Baldwin puts it, we have constructed the concept of and need the “n—–,” that conversation cannot happen. Roof needed to believe in that myth, and, like so many whites before him, he killed Black Americans to maintain it.