Less than 24 hours after an apparent white supremacist murdered nine black churchgoers in cold blood during a prayer meeting in a historic black church in Charleston, South Carolina, one prominent MRA is trying to put the blame on feminism, because of a remark the killer reportedly made about rape.
One of the survivors of the church killings reported that, before he began shooting, the killer told those in the prayer group that “you rape our women and you’re taking over our country. And you have to go.”
Dylann Storm Roof, the accused killer, wore his racism on his sleeve, almost literally: a former classmate tells the press that Roof “made a lot of racist jokes”; his license plate featured the Confederate flag; his Facebook profile picture shows him in a jacket with patches representing the flags of Rhodesia and apartheid-era South Africa.
But Dean Esmay, the second-in-command at A Voice for Men, probably the most influential Men’s Rights site, thinks that Roof’s killing spree may be the result of too much feminism. Earlier today, he posted a link to an article on the shooting to the Men’s Rights subreddit with this headline:
To their credit, the Men’s Rights subreddit regulars voted his comment down; one told him “[n]ot everything is about us, man. This is distasteful.”
Two hours later, apparently undaunted by the criticism and oblivious to irony, Esmay returned to the Men’s Rights subreddit to make another accusation:
No one has declared the shooter to be an MRA. The little we know about Roof right now suggests that he was a garden-variety old-school racist. The paranoid notion of black men raping “our” white women is one of the oldest racist tropes out there; as Jessica Valenti noted on Twitter, Roof’s language is “the language of white supremacist patriarchy.”
The alleged threat to “our women” was used for generations as an excuse to lynch black men and terrorize the black community as a whole. In the case of Roof’s shootings, it’s an even more transparent ruse. As Rebecca Carroll notes in The Guardian, it’s hard to argue that these killings had anything to do with real fears or even paranoid fantasies about the rape of white women when most of the victims were not black men — the symbolic “rapists” in the equation — but black women:
There is something inconsistent with the Charleston shooter’s alleged evocation of the historical myth of black man as beast and rapist of white women, and the fact that he killed mostly black women. Did he only shoot black women because there were no more black men to kill? Because black women birth, care for and love black men? Or because he didn’t see black women as women at all …
The idea that white women’s bodies represent that which is inviolable while black women’s are disposable hasn’t changed enough since it was first articulated by white men; but again, aimed at black men on Wednesday night, it was predominately black women who suffered by their invocation.
We will find out more about Root’s twisted beliefs in days to come. But it is clear already that they had nothing whatsoever to do with feminism.
H/T — r/againstmensrights
EDIT: I’m making this a NO TROLL, no-derailing-with-idiotic-MRA-or-incel-talking-points thread.
Fucking racist sum.
They’re goddamned everywhere.
This has to stop.
After the Gabby Giffords shooting, of course they know, and they love it.
Reason #3043 why we should let the South secede and make popcorn while it slowly collapses into itself.
lea lol that is what I meant.
Btw Im really sick of mras using mental health and mental illness abuse as a men’s issue when, again, women also suffer from this and it is not at all exclusive to or even really predominantly men!
be wary of sources its still early. IE there could be multiple Dylan Roofs on FB, there could be misinformation in these early reports, as has happened before.
This Council of Conservative Citizens has blood on its hands. I know under the first amendment they acted within the law publishing that list. But morally, they played a part. It’s well documented that most crime is intraracial. These racist pieces of shit made it sound like there’s some sort of epidemic of black on white crime. They intentionally inflamed angry racists. Fucking assholes. They need to be publicly shamed. Hard.
Pandapool,
I’m sick of hearing that. Some of us live here and cannot afford to leave. Some of that “us” are black. It isn’t like loads of black and progressive southerners would be welcomed with open arms if there were a mass exodus north and black southerners should not have to leave their homes and communities for the entertainment of white yankees. Stop and frisk isn’t happening on the streets of Kentucky. It’s happening in cosmopolitan New York. Oregon was a state that did not allow black citizens once upon a time. They fly the starts and bars in Canada. How far north are we supposed to go?
When I wrote “everywhere”, that’s what I meant. This whole country needs to wake up and start changing. A cultural and economic revolution needs to take place all over the US.
KL,
I know. I got that.
When he says “We’ve only got talking on the internet” I want to know exactly who the “we” he’s been talking to and listening to is. Those people are terrorists.
For the record, I’d love to get the hell out of dodge, but then who stays here to make things better? I mean, I’d run. I’d shirk. But is that helping oppressed people or is it helping the oppressor? I’d be relieved to not have to be confronted with racism on this scale anymore, but me being more comfortable wouldn’t make it go away and maybe there are enough comfortable white women in the world.
I’d still run if I could, selfish hypocrite that I am.
*Dodge*
There is some discussion that the manifesto is written by another, possibly a mentor. This man quit school at 15. Also most of the pictures appear to be taken by another person. Who is that person? He acted and will pay; it is no defense if there is someone else involved in the site but that person or persons need to be known because they clearly were an accessory. The manifesto was posted the night before the murders.
@Lea
I’m sorry. I know the there’s a lot of good people in the South, it just doesn’t feel that way sometimes, and it feels like it’s never going to change. If it makes you feel any better, I wasn’t talking seriously.
I mean, if we didn’t have the South we wouldn’t have Jackie Robinson or Stephen Colbert or the first three/four books of the Vampire Chronicles, or the Sookie Stackhouse Mysteries, or Cajun and Creole food – the food is probably one of the best things to come out of the South, IMO.
So, I mean, at least there’s gumbo and jambalaya. And Tabasco. I could drink Tabasco sauce.
I read the article about Roof’s father, what an abusive asshole, and exactly the kind of asshole worshiped upon RoK. He sounds similar to the man who fathered and abandoned Marc Lepine.
I’m also inclined to ask who took those photos of Roof? Someone knew what he was about, someone was encouraging him.
Chicago is maybe the most segregated place in the country, or at least bad enough, and white cops torture and kill black people there. Racism is not a southern problem.
… Okay, two thoughts on the possibility of him having an accomplice:
1. That’s fucking scary. As much as I think the terrorism colour system is meaningless bullshit designed entirely to keep Islamophobic sentiment high, this would actually be a legitimate time to use it.
2. If true, that shuts down the last excuse used to handwave away aggrieved white male spree killers (aka 95% of spree killers) after the other standbys fail: “Oh well, he’s just a lone wolf.”
@SFHC
Well, he’s a racist white supremacist. They aren’t really lone wolves.
I know Grumpy mentioned that someone must have taught him what those flags on his jacket mean. Someone must have given those flag patches to him. Like, where the hell do you find apartheid patches like that in the first place?
One of the aspects I find interesting is that he sat with a bible study group for a minimum of 45 minutes. Now I’m an atheist, a secular Jewish one because Tradition (play the opening of Fiddler on the roof to get why I say Tradition). Now my wife is religious, I go to schul with her cos she likes my company and I respect her feeling regarding faith.
I’ve sat in Haftor’h and Torah study and I have to admit it’s quite a pleasant time for reflection, cogitation and dozing. Now I don’t quite know what would have been going on in bible study but you must have had a lot of anger and rage to keep it going for all that time.
@Panda
Oh, I know, but try telling the handwavers that without direct proof. =P
@SFHC
Neonazis and the KKK aren’t proof? What planet do these “handwavers” live on?
@autosoma,
true. This guy did not ‘snap’, he went there with a clear objective. That said, his waiting almost an hour suggests he was having doubts. I do wonder if someone else was urging him to do this?
I always feel that someone like this is a person who is easily encouraged and manipulated by others, and you need to shine a bright light on his “friends” and see who goes scurrying away back into the dark corners. Of course, nowadays it’s easy enough to get into one of the hate-filled echo chambers where people compete to see who can be the nastiest, and sooner or later one of the most susceptible members will turn evil thoughts into action.
You can look at someone like Roof, with what little we know about his family and his social milieu, and feel that he was probably fairly severely psychologically damaged in his early years — that his vision of the world was too badly warped. Yet many people have the same sort of upbringing and turn out to be decent, relatively unprejudiced people. I generally tend to see things like this as in large part a manifestation of toxic masculinity, in that he seems to have come to the delusional belief that for him being a Real Man imposed a duty to protect “our” women and “our” country against black people — just as the MRAs see themselves locked in a fight to preserve their manhood against marauding feminists. Life in an echo chamber can really screw up your head.
I guess it’s human nature to try to understand how another human could reach the point of doing something so monstrous. We would all like to know what might be done to keep (mostly young men) from ending up in this place. I know I’m just groping for answers. We know some of them — obviously we need to eliminate the endemic racism in society. But how do you prevent racist people from passing their racism along to their children? We seem to know what we need to do, but not how to do it. There is progress but it’s painfully slow.
@sn0rkmaiden,
Yeh I think there was a lot of premeditation on his part and regardless of all the things that got him to the point of pulling the trigger he murdered nine innocents irrespective of what extreme elements drove him to it and I think the right should stop trying to excuse him or say what in there opinion pushed him to do it. He’s a mass murderer plain and simple.
@sn0rkmaiden – apparently he told the police he had some doubts while he was there because everyone had been so nice to him. I’m not at all surprised. I’m white, I’ve been to AME regular Sunday services at a couple of different churches and everyone was incredibly nice to me – like super nice, incredibly warm. (I like AME especially as I attended Methodist church for years and so I can kinda go on auto-pilot for the order of service, it’s really similar.)
Some other person encouraging him? – yeah, maybe a chat room full of racist assholes and maybe some particular virulent ones in private chat. Have a look at the “philosophy of rape’ subreddit recently highlighted here (well, don’t, it’s awful) – which advocates rape as a systematic tool of terror – and there’s all kind of people encouraging each other to rape. I bet some of them would be like “It’s a joke, I didn’t mean it.” if some rapist was linked back to the site – but I bet there’s all kinda PMs of people really egging each other on. There doesn’t even have to be a mastermind of organisation, just some nasty fucks revelling in the potential of someone else’s pain and a few to make it a reality.
If you look at al Qaeda, something that had made them incredibly successful was both the use of a tight network approach, actually training and resourcing people, and a loose network approach – providing inspiration and anger and encouragement for ‘lone wolves’ to take matters into their own hands. Or at least with very little support other than training materials. So maybe it’s something like that…
What is really interesting is that this guy doesn’t ever seem to have taken much initiative at anything…
What the fuck. South Rhodesia changed its name in 1980, but there are still plenty of white people living in Zimbabwe who identify as “Rhodesian”, and even more who’ve left and live in South Africa, the UK or other places who use that term for themselves. Sure, many of them are hateful racists, but they’re still Rhodesians.
Calling yourself “the last Rhodesian” is despicable racism. But it’s something else too. This piece of shit asshole is fucking appropriating the culture of white people.
At long last, sir, have you no shame?
Reblogged this on My Blog News.