In which it is proven that Dylan Roof is Mad

"Madness is rare in individuals - but in groups, parties, nations, ages it is the rule." -Friedrich Nietzsche

Part 1: Dylann Roof is Crazy

I've been reading a lot about whether the Charleston shooter, Dylann Roof, ought to be considered "insane" or not. To me the question seems absurd: of course he is. This consuming obsession with and unquenchable rage against the racialized Other who is stealing "our" country, this reversal whereby the most oppressed and powerless groups in our society become the omnipotent, conspiratorial oppressors, the way this hatred twists history and mangles biology in order to project an imagined enemy and take bloody vengeance for a crime that never occurred--what is this if not insanity? If the white supremacist fantasy is quite common, very well: insanity is common in a mad world. If this fantasy serves certain functions--if certain politicians find it convenient to dog-whistle this hallucinatory marching-song in order to mobilize support--very well: no mental illness is without its political conditions, none is without its use.

Not that I don't understand the resistance to describing Roof as "crazy"--it's a matter of fairness. As Yasmin Nair recently wrote, "White guilt is psychoanalysed.  Black guilt is demonised." It's not fair that when black (and Muslim) people commit politically inflected violence, the media presents them as evil (and as representative of the evil that lurks in "their" "culture," whereas when white people do the same sort of thing they're treated as "mentally ill" (and as concomitantly unrepresentative, unpolitical, alone). But is the proper response to demonize white criminals? Demonization, precisely, appears to be the demand: my friends worry that if we admitted that Roof is mad we would lose sight of how he is evil. 

My friends apparently think that justice-in-representation here entails a reversal: because the mainstream media demonizes black crime and psychoanalyzes white guilt, we leftists will on the contrary psychoanalyze black guilt and demonize white guilt. I don't buy it. The trouble with calling Roof evil is not that it's wrong--it's right, I suppose, he is evil--but that it's useless. The role of the left here is not to morally condemn this crime; CNN will do that for us. Our role is to politicize it, to trace its historical and material conditions and make them targets for collective action. Psychoanalyzing is the first step toward such an explanation, since psychoanalysis searches out the reasons in unreason; moralizing is impotent for this purpose, because moral thought takes all "explanation" to be the evasion of guilt.

Part 2: Dylann Roof Reveals Virtually Nothing about Race Relations in America Today

But if you're still not convinced of Roof's madness, consider this: he is a white supremacist who railed against white flight. According to the New York Times, his manifesto "laments white flight, and suggested that the whites should instead stay behind in cities and fight." Now this, truly, is madness.

Here's the thing: intensified residential segregation, which has entered our collective memory under the name "white flight," is one of the two great pillars on which modern American racial oppression rests. (The other, of course, is the post-Drug War criminal justice system.) Residential segregation is a brilliant mechanism of racial control: once it is firmly in place, no one has to say a thing about race, and yet black people get screwed. Every city ordinance, every transit project, every school-funding bill and policing strategy intensifies the flow of resources from black people to white people, and yet no one need say a racist word, or even have a racist thought; the system is smooth and impersonal and it is crushing. And not just in the benighted Confederate-flag-waving South but in the suburb where you grew up, in the neighborhood where you read this. That's what "white flight" means, and that's how race functions in America today. A white supremacist railing against white flight is as insane as an environmentalist railing against the EPA.

Once upon a time, before the civil rights movement, an important part of the American system of racial oppression was Root-style vigilante violence. Think the KKK. That time is over; that battle was won; that system does not exist anymore. And more than that: the racial system we know and love uses precisely that victory as its legitimating ideology. If "racism" means KKK-style self-consciously political vigilante violence, then there is virtually no racism in today's America; the other thing, the thing where black neighborhoods are starved of resources and black children go uneducated and young black men are sentenced to decades in prison, all thanks to residential segregation and the carceral state, well that's not racism. The people who keep that system functioning smoothly, why, they have black friends!

That's how the adult, sane, powerful white supremacists speak and act in America today. From their perspective someone like Roof is an atavism, a liability: they'll condemn him as loudly as anyone precisely because it's only by not being anything like him that they can legitimate themselves.

The civil rights movement was not a failure. It destroyed the post-Reconstruction racial settlement in this country. In place of that settlement a new one has emerged, and today it is our enemy. To say "nothing has changed" in this country, a rhetorical tic in some parts of the left, is to commit both a failure of analysis and a significant strategic error.

Part 3: The Scandal Trap

I've seen so many people step up to declare that the Charleston shooting is "proof" that "racism is alive and well in America." Certainly, racism is alive and well in America, but the racism which is alive and well looks nothing like the Charleston shooting; the shooting proves nothing. To imagine that we have discovered in Roof's act the dark truth of contemporary American race relations is foolish; that dark truth emerges in the poverty statistics, in the prison system. It neither requires nor is susceptible to further proof.

Whence the temptation? Well, we know that our society remains deeply racist, and here we have an instance of racism that everyone agrees is horrible; let's shout from the rooftops: "see how bad it is? SEE?!"

The trouble is that the people who enforce systemic racism in this country will be only too delighted to agree with us, to say "yes, precisely, this lone shooter is the last remnant of American racism, how horrible!" They'll be happy to sic the FBI on the white supremacist organizations, to expand the surveillance state, to push toothless gun laws and pass new hate-crimes legislation and burn the Confederate flag. They'll do these things all the more gladly because differentiating themselves from the last remnants of KKK-style violence is precisely how they legitimate vastly more significant forms of racism; when someone comes along and says "your housing policy, your school funding, your three-strikes law is racist," they'll be able to answer "how can you say such a thing when I just passed a hate-crimes bill?"

It's easy to imagine that you can attack a system through its scandals--that you can prove the Republicans are racist because one of them says the N-word when the mike is still on, or prove the American criminal justice system is racist because one cop steps over the line on video. But these events are scandals precisely because they're not essential to how the system works. The real scandal, the real enemy, is what the cops do when they're following the rules, how the system works right out in the open. It's that that we have to attack. If we attack the scandals, we'll very often win--the N-word-user will get run out of the party, the cop will get fired; the system doesn't need them, doesn't even want them. When we take someone like Roof as "proof" of anything, we're accepting that that's what real racism looks like--but it's not. The real and powerful racist system looks nothing like that at all; it looks like housing segregation, it looks like drug laws, it looks like people who loudly condemn the KKK and proclaim tolerance while promoting housing segregation and drug laws. If we remain within an analysis of racism that the system has long since shed, we make it easy for the actually existing system to defend itself and to co-opt us, because we're fighting the last war.