A few months ago Americans started to toss around a catch phrase called “a conversation about race.” Well, this week a deranged, racist young man with strong delusions of restoring American democracy to its white supremacist glory did everything he could to provoke a conversation about race in this country, by slaughtering nine people who gathered in a church for prayer and Bible study. And despite the jolt that Dylann Roof’s massacre delivered to our collective mind frame as a country, some Americans are being abject simpletons, and are actually using their platforms to say that the attack was not, in fact, racially motivated.

Of course, a lot of this denial of a blatant racial attack comes from FOX News. But anyone with basic powers of logic will acknowledge that Roof hated Blacks, has a long track record of revering white supremacist regimes, and that he deliberately targeted Blacks for murder when he planned the shooting and sat next to the congregants for an hour prior to the shooting. I’ve read up on the history of Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, S.C., and if you do the same, you’ll realize that it was a hub for Black activism and advocacy in the South, and it has been targeted multiple times over its history for hate-driven violence and intimidation.

Black churches in general stand as places where Christians can not only get spiritual rejuvenation, but activists can find supporters to their cause. Unfortunately, racists also know that they can find Blacks in these houses of worship, and target them for violence. It’s been said that Dylann Roof wanted to trigger a “race war” with the killings. Well, to him and any other nut job out there, I say we’ve already fought a race war. It was called the American Civil War, and the racist South got its ass handed to it. If the nut jobs that Dylann Roof represents want to provoke a second “race war,” and we are forced to give them another humiliating ass whuppin, will they then shut up and stop waving their defeated Confederate flag already? The pride of the South is America’s shame. Face it.

The incredible irony is that the environment that created this monster, this avowed white supremacist, is in complete denial about his clearly articulated motive for the slaughter. So when you have people going on FOX News saying that we have to take a close look at whether these attacks were actually attacks on Christianity, it just indicates to me how unprepared Americans are to start making progress on the racial tensions in this country. They can’t even acknowledge that a problem exists. They’ll come up with a number of lame theories to explain the actions of Dylann Roof and others.

So we want to know if we need to have a national “conversation about race,” or if we’re overdoing all this “racial shit.” Well, let’s try to look at this a different way. Dylann Roof, the mass murder suspect, was apprehended by law enforcement without incident, clothed in a bullet-proof vest so that a vigilante wouldn’t take him out. He will now go through the legal process and hopefully be brought to justice. Was the same due process extended to Michael Brown, Eric Garner or Walter Scott? These men were not saints, but I don’t think petty theft and child support arrears are grounds for their killings! Since when is an on-the-spot death penalty an acceptable way to deal with petty theft and child support arrears?!

What about the two Black girls who were brutally thrown around by much bigger and stronger white male officers, in two separate incidents at neighborhood swimming pools, one in McKinney, Texas, and the other in Fairfield, Ohio. Both girls were wearing swimsuits, and I doubt they concealed deadly weapons in them. How can any rational person fail to see the differences in the police responses to these situations? Still not convinced? Well the late monster Timothy McVeigh blew up a federal building in Oklahoma City, then watched the destruction from nearby, feeding his already sick mind with images of people being blown apart. Then he had the nerve to say that the murders of the children were collateral!! He got a trial. No police officer shot him dead on the spot in the back.

It’s not my style to define myself based on others’ perceptions of me. But when hate groups flourish, and police officers respond to Blacks with brutality, I know there is a difference between me and Hubby, and the way our country sees us. And I laugh at people who say silly things like: “I don’t see color.” “There is no such thing as race.”

Maybe the reason some of these pundits cannot bring themselves to call out racism when the see it is because they would come to an awful realization. In order for them to see racism in someone else, they’d have to admit that it exists, and perhaps they’d have to admit that this country has a problem, and they are part of it, with their idiotic assessment thatb the is had nothing to do with race. Maybe the reason they come up with soft, lame explanations like “it’s mental illness,” is to distract us from the real problem in this country. Why they would want to do that, I don’t know, since depravity and destruction await if we diddle and do nothing. Well, maybe that’s OK with them, too.