Throughout the tortuous court proceedings, Roof battled and eventually fired David I. Bruck, the renowned capital defense attorney, for insisting that he undergo psychiatric evaluation. In two closed-door hearings, Roof told the presiding judge, “I don’t want anybody to think that I did it because I have some kind of mental problem. I wanted to increase racial tension.”
In fact, expert examination of Roof did not yield evidence of insanity but a high IQ and diagnosis of mild-to-moderate autism, “debilitating social anxiety, and precursor symptoms of psychosis.” The report concluded, “Dylann pursued his preoccupation with racism with an autistic intensity. It pervaded all aspects of his life.”
To Kevin Sack, the New York Times reporter who covered the murder trial (and has just written a magisterial book about Mother Emanuel), Roof wrote in the spring of 2020, “I’m not the bad guy. I’d like to think I’m not even a bad person,” before returning to his obsession: “I am a member of a group targeted for genocide. What complicates things is that many of the people doing the targeting are also part of this group.”
By that logic, white anti-racists are the naïve and willing collaborators in their own destruction. But through ingesting the noxious brew of his twin legacies, it is Dylann Roof who is slated to die.
On today’s 10th anniversary of what Black Charlestonians refer to as “the tragedy,” South Carolina’s neo-Confederate leaders will don their best pained faces and utter words of condolence before returning to their cravenly cultish work of heritage promotion—work that has proceeded intensely since 2015. Their actions underscore how deeply impervious they remain to the full spectrum of trauma and degradation endured by Black Carolinians for 355 years.
In January, Governor Henry McMaster, whose great-great-grandfather defended the murderous outrages of the Reconstruction Klan in federal court, issued this clarion call: “We must protect and preserve our history and heritage. It is why we are who we are and why we are here. It is why we stay here and why others come here. It informs our strengths, purpose and duty.”
The heritage obsession fosters derangement. Lodged today in the state House Judiciary Committee is a bill to construct a monument to the state’s “African American Confederate Veterans.” The brainchild of Greenville Republican Bill Chumley, the legislation conjures kepi-headed Black soldiers riding into battle whooping the Rebel yell. No such group ever existed. Even more absurdly, the legislation decries the excision of these fantasy characters from school curricula, lamenting it as “completely unacceptable” and a “manipulation of facts” that redound to a “distorted perspective of our State and national history.”