On the evening of June 17th, 2015, Dylann Roof joined a Bible study at Mother Emanuel Church in Charleston South Carolina. It is known as Mother Emanuel because it is the church from which all subsequent African Methodist Episcopal (AME) congregations sprang. The AME church was the first independent black denomination in the United States, and it was founded by slaves and freed slaves in Charleston, the port through which more than one third of all enslaved Africans entered the United States. Roof was welcomed into their Bible study. He participated for an hour before standing up, pulling a Glock 45, and shouting, “I have to do it. You rape our women and you’re taking over our country. And you have to go” (Borden, Horwitz, Markon 2015). Nine people were killed. Three others survived their wounds. The next day, after his arrest, Dylann Roof, wearing a jacket with the flags of Rhodesia and apartheid South Africa, told police he had gone to Mother Emanuel in the hopes of starting a race war.

While it would be wrong to claim that Dylann Roof is typical, his act and his discourse are hardly a fluke. Racial violence has been a persistent part of the American imaginary from the founding of the country to the present: from slavery to the oftrepeated necessity to conquer, suppress, or annihilate the Native American population; to Donald Trump's campaign announcement that declared Mexican rapists were swarming across the border (“Leo Frank” 2018; Davis 2001: 280; Rushdy 2012: 123). Dylann Roof in Charleston, Robert Gregory Bowers at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, the Charlottesville march, and David Duke are symptoms of a deep and persistent racism that has haunted American culture. In December 1890, a few days before the bloody massacre of 300 unarmed men, women, and children at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, and shortly after the murder of the Lakota holy man, Sitting Bull, L. Frank Baum, the beloved author of such children's classics as the Wizard of Oz opined in the Aberdeen, South Dakota newspaper he edited, the Saturday Pioneer: