This post discusses Charleston, even briefly. Below the fold. I just want this little detail recorded somewhere, somewhere that it sticks in my head. The real stuff’s all being penned to stone elsewhere – and a lot of it is very wrong. I imagine that there will be a lot of writing about Charleston. Hopefully, the historical record will not obscure the racism of the killings, will erode the narrative that it was somehow mental illness that did this, will dissolve the notion that gun crime and racial hate crime and toxic masculine crime are unrelated to this instance of a white man using a gun to kill black people over the threat they presented to white women. I hope that history will respect the racism and sexism that formed part of this man’s bedrock assumptions about the world, about what was appropriate and reasonable to do.
Still.
In the story of this event and these sad, dreadful killings, I hope someone keeps the footnote that this man, so intent on ‘protecting’ white women from black men, was apprehended after being pursued by a white woman who was a middle aged florist, named Debbie Dill.
I hope it doesn’t go forgotten.
Because I bet it would upset him dreadfully.