Apparently race is back in the spotlight again. Today a 20 yr old white male stormed the historic Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal church in Charlston, SC and opened fire, killing multiple people. The cause of the shooting is unknown and the suspect is still at large, so all I can do is speculate. The easiest thing to do is to call it racially motivated. That says a lot about where my mind has moved towards over the past decade or two. I spent a long stretch avoiding making race the default cause of negative actions. I even boned up on my social-psychology as a way to better understand the role of race in individual and group thinking. It led me to understand strain theory as an explanation for a good deal of inner-city ideology and resultant behaviors, and inside and viewer expectations. Still, little of this can explain why a dude would walk into a church and light the place up.
Maybe I’m sensitive to this because my boys recently became churchgoers. Maybe its something else entirely–empathy perhaps. This story will develop over time, should the news find a salacious angle to sell it. What info I have comes from CNN. Fox news had something, but I had to dig past their assertion that Iraq is the new U.S. quagmire caused by Obama (Really, Fox? Really?).
This could be a lone wolf incident–an isolated shooting caused by any number of factors. Then again, it could be something else entirely.