The Making of a True Believer

The idea isBy Joe Elliott –

On June 17 a young white man named Dylann Storm Roof walked calmly into the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in downtown Charleston, SC and shot dead nine people, including the pastor, a state senator.

Before opening fire, Roof was heard to say he had to do it because “you (African Americans) are rap(ing) our women and… taking over the country … I have to do what I have to do.”

These lines about raping white women and taking over the country have run through my mind repeatedly since this tragic incident. I have struggled to understand them not from my perspective but the perspective of a deeply disturbed young man who, it is said, had few friends and no job, drank heavily, and spent most of his time holed up in his room, presumably on the Internet. I’ve attempted, as it were, to gaze into the dark recesses of such a turgid psyche, hoping to come away with better insight as to its troubled workings.

While I don’t lay claim to have made any startling discoveries, I do think I now have a somewhat better understanding of what may have motivated Roof. It can be summed up in one word: fear. From that fear, seeds of rage were born and took root in his fragile soul. Having never been successful at anything, Dylann Roof peered into his future and what he saw frightened him. A social nobody with little education and few skills, he could see himself disappearing a little more each day. Soon he would become all but invisible.

Desperate to find a way out of his predicament, he did what others of similar mindset (Lee Harvey Oswald and Timothy McVeigh, for example) did before him: he latched onto a cause. In Roof’s case, the cause was white supremacy. In its philosophy—if that’s what it can be called—he found a new identity, a new way of being in the world. He would now be a Hater, a hater of all things non-white, and his hate would be his new calling card to the world.

Eventually, however, it wasn’t enough to simply “talk” his hate: emotion must be translated into action to have meaning. Learning somewhere that America’s racial and ethnic minorities now make up half of the under-five population, and that white Americans are expected to become a minority over the next three decades, he felt he must do something concrete to stop the trend before it was too late. (Such racial comingling was, in his overheated imagination, a kind of societal rape of the white race.)

Suddenly, Root had a mission to fulfill, something to give his life focus. He was no longer invisible. That this mission involved murdering people seemed almost incidental to the larger purpose he believed he was serving. He would offer himself up to it body and soul, holding nothing back. He had now become what philosopher Eric Hoffer famously referred to as a “True Believer.”

It’s all so pathetic, and all too depressingly familiar. There are so many potential Dylann Roofs out there, just waiting to happen. Anyone who has ever taught public school, as I have, has encountered more than a few. What causes one of them to take that last fateful step of acting out their violent fantasies, we just don’t know.

As to the larger question of what to make of such senseless events like Charleston, I can only quote the words of Dr. Martin Luther King, who reminded us that “human progress is neither automatic nor inevitable. Every step toward the goal of justice requires sacrifice, suffering, and struggle; the tireless exertions and passionate concern of dedicated individuals.”

The nine parishioners of Emanuel Episcopal gave their all in that struggle. The question remains, what are we willing to give in the wake of their sacrifice?