Dylan Roof: Symbol Of Racism

Ashlynn Hinson
Mr. Hasty
Honors English III
2 November 2015
On June 17th of 2015, a man named Dylan Roof committed one of the most infamous atrocities of our time. Roof, a white man, had entered the Emanuel African Episcopal Church with the intent to kill as many as possible. He succeeded. In just under an hour, Roof had killed nine black church members with a firearm. The uproar that followed the event quickly became radical. Roof’s had been an unprovoked and racially motivated attack, and many believed someone had to pay the price-- but not Roof himself. In the name of preventing further attacks, the source of the problem had to be eliminated, and the source of the man´s hatred, according to most, was something well-loved by the racist Roof:

Many maintain that the flag was cemented as a symbol of racism during the Civil Rights era, during which “Political displays of the battle flag of Dixie (the historical nickname for the states that seceded from the Union) only really resurfaced when that racial order was challenged by northern liberals.” But the flag of the Confederacy could not become a symbol of anything by that time-- the Confederacy was dead, and anything it came to mean afterwards was the result of its original meanings and uses being distorted by individual racists whose acts it could not, and certainly would not, endorse. Even today the flags of many modern nations are adopted for the use of racist groups: the Pan-African flag was adopted by the New Black Panthers, the British flag adopted by the National Front, and the ghgjgjh flag adopted by the dfghfhgf. These modern nations have the ability to disavow any and all extremist groups associated with their flag. Dead nations have no such privileges. Similarly, when Roof flaunted the Confederate flag prior to his attack on the Emanuel church, and stated

No banner can be stainless, and when companies ban the Confederate flag in favor of the sale of other flags, this implies that the Confederate flag alone has any semblance of some past wrong attached to it. While Amazon, Walmart, Google Shopping and Ebay refuse to sell the Confederate flag because it can be considered racist, they do not refuse to sell the English flag, despite the fact slavery was a practice in England long before and for a much longer time than it ever was in the Confederacy, and despite the fact it too is used by a great many extremist groups, such as the hjkhkjhk, ajkljkljlk, and hkhlkjkl. In fact, in much of Europe this is so-- nearly every flag, among them that of the French, the German, the Dutch, the Swedish, and the Danish, has some long-lived wrong connected to it. Some of these endorsed slavery for just as long as the English, all of these once less-than-ideal modes of execution for less-than-guilty people, and every last one of them possesses a much, much longer history of hatred and condemnation than the Confederacy ever did. Even the flag of the United States can be construed as overwhelmingly offensive-- after all, during the Post-war Civil Rights era, the only officially sanctioned emblem used in the repression of blacks was the American