guardian | Race is a big issue in the US. Always was, and seems like it always will be. And this week has been no exception.
Overnight, a young white man, Dylann Roof, walked into an iconic
black church in Charleston, South Carolina, and allegedly opened fire,
killing nine people.
Fox News’s response
was to reject any suggestion the shooting was a “hate crime”, before
bringing on that time-honoured icon of white American dialogue – the
Uncle Tom.
Bishop E W Jackson, from Chesepeake in Virginia (a mere 500km
away), appeared on a morning Fox news program to explain, to nods of
approval from the three white Fox news anchors, that the violence wasn’t
about race. It was about Christianity.
Never mind the fact the shooter – pictured on his Facebook page
wearing a shirt bearing the flag of apartheid South Africa – told the
church gathering he had to kill the people who were “raping and killing”
children in his neighbourhood.
If it was about Christianity – and obviously it wasn’t – but if it
was, it begs the question why Fox News has refused to brand the attack
an act of terrorism?
Of course, this shooting is just the latest race debate to grip the US.
Amid growing attention at the number of black men killed by white
cops, the US media took a breather last week to focus its white-hot gaze
on Rachel Dolezal,
the president of the Spokane chapter for the National Association for
the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), who was recently outed as a
white woman.
