calmly, while their eyes were closed in prayer,
Details that show (instead of tell) the deck's description of Roof as "one of the coldest killers of our time."
12 Matching Annotations
- Apr 2019
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I carved into it all nine of their names
Kicker = Ghansah taking symbolic/written action (both in the sand and in this article) against Roof's symbolic/written action (the racist murders and neo-nazi symbols). She counters Roof's racist annihilation with the resilience, dignity and necessity of black identities.
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Mother Emanuel
The article begins with Roof but ends with Mother Emanuel AME Church and its members. Ghansah lets their lives provide the weight and resilience for her conclusion.
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Roof is what happens when we prefer vast historical erasures to real education about race.
Societal big-picture critique
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I am a black woman, the descendant of enslaved people, so I went anyway and walked along the same path that Roof did, where the quarters are set on something cheerfully marked as “Slave Street.”
Gansah talks about her race when it inevitably comes up in South Carolina. The irony of all this is dark... she shows how racism denied her access to a site of historic racism during her investigations in South Carolina of a racist crime... It's deeply relevant to understanding the place Roof comes from.
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Dylann Roof, then, was a child both of the white-supremacist Zeitgeist of the Internet and of his larger environment.
I agree with this - it's both Roof's real-life racist family/community (look at his sister) and the radical violence of the internet that bred his racist murders.
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If it was atypical two years ago, it is no longer. To imagine that Roof needed a handler is to underestimate the role that the Internet has played in re-energizing and indoctrinating a young community of white supremacists.
Gansah's larger takeaway from Roof's online radicalization = young white supremacists now are likely to be radicalized without a face-to-face community (more like ISIS internet followers).
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Roof was perhaps suffering from undiagnosed mental disorders. He was definitely raised in a hotbed of racism. And maybe he was activated by the rumor of the rape. But it is inarguable that he found the answer to his problems online.
Gansah's answer to her thesis question - what happened to Roof? THE INTERNET.
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As if he were aware of some stain or some filth that others did not see.
Eerily reminds me of the line "Out, damn spot!" in Shakespeare's play Macbeth. Lady Macbeth compulsively scrubs her hands clean again and again after she and her husband murder the king.
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I
First time Ghansah includes herself in the narrative. Subtle introduction of herself paves the way for a later paragraph when Ghansah describes helping Roof's mother. The section ends with Ghansah stating her personal goal to understand Roof's backstory (more frequent use of "I").
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Glock handgun
Important to note what he used for gun law advocacy but specifying also paints a clearer picture for the reader.
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And so, after weeks in the courtroom, and shortly before Dylann Roof was asked to stand and listen to his sentence, I decided that if he would not tell us his story, then I would. Which is why I left Charleston, the site of his crime, and headed inland to Richland County, to Columbia, South Carolina—to find the people who knew him, to see where Roof was born and raised. To try to understand the place where he wasted 21 years of a life until he committed an act so heinous that he became the first person sentenced to die for a federal hate crime in the entire history of the United States of America.
Nut graf paragraph - comes at the very end of the first section ("The Crucible") following the lead.
Last sentence = thesis. Her goal is to understand his backstory. The sentence also states the newsworthiness of that context - Roof is first person ever put on death row for a federal hate crime :O
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