Racist legacy refuses to die in US, says Henry Giroux

The tragic killing of worshipers at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston South Carolina, an apparent hate crime, is raising new and troubling questions about race relations and violence in the US.

Henry Giroux, McMaster University Professor for Scholarship in the Public Interest, is an internationally recognized author, cultural critic and thinker on topics that include violence, media, racism, youth, politics and education.

He recently earned an honorary doctorate from Chapman University in the US (a video recording of the event is here and the text is here), and a Distinguished Alumni Award from Appalachian State University.

Earlier this week, Inside Higher Ed interviewed Giroux about the Rachel Dolezal case.

Here, Giroux offers his reflections on the events in Charleston, as excerpted from a longer piece he wrote for the political newsletter Counterpunch:

The darkest side of the authoritarian state feeds and legitimizes not only state violence, the violation of civil liberties, a punishing state, and a culture of cruelty, but also a culture for which violence becomes the only mediating force available to address major social problems.

Under such circumstances, a culture of violence erupts and punishes the innocent, the marginalized, and those everyday people who become victims of both hate crimes and state terrorism. The killings in South Carolina of nine innocent black people once again registers the lethal combination of racist violence, a culture of lawlessness, and political irresponsibility.

In this case, politics becomes corrupt and supports both the ideological conditions that sanction racist violence and the militarized institutional gun culture that it celebrates rather than scorns it. Should anyone be surprised by these killings in a state where the Confederate flag waves over the state capital, where the roads are named after Confederate generals, and where hate crimes are not reported?

South Carolina is only the most obvious example of a racist legacy that refuses to die throughout the United States. Violence runs through American society like an overcharged and out of control electric current. And it will continue until a broken and corrupt political, cultural, and market-driven system, now controlled largely by ideological, educational, economic, and religious fundamentalists, can be broken. Until then the bloodshed will continue, the spectacle of violence will fill America’s screen culture, and the militarization of American society will continue.

Neither Orwell nor Huxley could have imagined such a violent dystopian society.