I talked about this last week, and while I’m glad to see that the rash of “mysterious” fires at black churches across the South is getting noticed by the media finally, it’s reprehensible that the burnings are somehow continuing.
South Carolina Law Enforcement Division Chief Mark Keel told the Post and Courier that local officials, as well as the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives responded to the fire in Greeleyville on Tuesday night. Keel said on Tuesday night that they had not completed their investigation into the fire.
By Wednesday morning, the fire had destroyed the church’s roof and interior, according to CNN.
Keel noted that the fire may have been ignited by lightning, as storms passed through the region on Tuesday, according to the Post and Courier. But he said that he was concerned about the possibility that the fire is somehow linked to the other fires in the region.
About half the incidents, including last night’s Greeleyville fire, are not being treated as arson investigations yet. It’s possible that some of these fires are plain old lightning damage or electrical accidents that happen.
But there’s too much history in America to be treating these lightly, and there are some cases that are being investigated as arson. You will excuse me if I think that there might be a reason to consider that these churches are being targeted deliberately as a distinct possibility.
Of course, that would require admission that post-racial America still has big problems, and that’s not going to happen anytime soon, not as long as we have things like presidential candidates meeting with violent right-wing domestic terrorist racists.
Hoocoodanode, right?
Botsplainer
But American Exceptionalism!
Saying that there was a problem with hundreds of years of multigenerational stolen labor and legal exclusion of people of African descent from the delivery of society’s benefits would be tantamount to shitting on the graves of lazy, entitled white planters
Patricia Kayden
Nice minority outreach those Republicans have going for them, huh? Between the silence of GOP candidates on Trump’s xenophobia and Paul visiting with his “let me tell you about them negroes” friend, Republicans are doing a great job of giving minorities their middle finger.
scav
So, are we to believe there is no problem is there is a spate of unlinked cases of arson or vandalism? So long as it’s apparently a community or culture of lone wolves, it’s all good?
Doug R
Maybe that’s why we put up with the Dixie swastika for so long. Kept them out of the closet as it were.
biff diggerence
Obama should stick one final blunt instrument up the ass of the Old White South. Send fucking troops.
Belafon
One faked rape case makes all rape cases suspect. One electrical fire in a church accused of being arson invalidates all church fires.
There’s a legitimate but obviously frustrating reason the government will have to take these investigations slowly.
Mike in NC
After all those children were murdered at a school in Connecticut a couple of years ago, the gun nuts kept quiet for a few weeks but then lost their shit. Same thing happening now with the Neo-Confederates and their goddamn rag.
Frankensteinbeck
I’m glad this got a front page. I was about to bring it up.
Derelict
If it had been, say, Joel Osteen’s church that had a fire, you can bet that the FBI, ATF, and the NSA would have been called in. Armies of analysts would comb through the wreckage, sifting and sampling and testing until they either had their suspect or conclusively ruled arson out.
But, since these are only churches that Black people attend, eh, no big deal if a couple dozen burn to the ground.
Derelict
@Mike in NC: I don’t recall the gun nuts being quiet for even a few days. They were front-and-center immediately, claiming that it was a false-flag operation to justify confiscating guns, and by the very next morning they were out calling for arming teachers and loosening restrictions on gun purchases.
dww44
@biff diggerence: It’s comments like this that distresses and angers this lifetime liberal Democratic Deep South citizen. Talk about painting with the broad brush to come to a desired characterization of Southerners. We are as diverse these days as most other regions of the country.
I live in one of those towns where a church burning happened last week and commented about it last night in another thread. One of the local TV stations covered (and not for the first time) the burnings this morning. The one here has been deemed arson but there is no reason, per the FBI, to consider it a “bias motivated burning”. Indeed the church is located in a depressed and blighted area of town and had earlier been victimized by thieves and robbed of its air conditioning system.
kc
Federal and local LE are investigating the Greeleyville fire. I don’t really understand what you want them to do differently.
Elizabelle
Believe they’ve initially concluded that last night’s fire was possibly sparked by lightning? No sign of an accelerant, so far. May have just been local law enforcement tamping down local fear.
Much talk of “churches are old, and places of worship of all kinds have fires just about every few days.”
But the fires before, so targeted, regional and close in time? Highly suspicious.
Snarki, child of Loki
Would it be irresponsible for someone to market a product line of white Klan robes, made from a mixed polyester/nitrocellulose fabric?
One spark, and it turns into flaming, melting wraparound plastic.
Available with custom logos also, too.
Elizabelle
Historian James W. Loewen in today’s WaPost:
Why do people believe myths about the Confederacy? Because our textbooks and monuments are wrong. False history marginalizes African Americans and makes us all dumber.
link: http://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2015/07/01/why-do-people-believe-myths-about-the-confederacy-because-our-textbooks-and-monuments-are-wrong/?hpid=z5
Loewen discusses how both Kentucky and Maryland have numerous Confederate monuments, even though neither state succeeded and its citizens, in fact, fought overwhelmingly for the Union: Kentucky, which had 90,000 Union soldiers and 35,000 Confederates, now has 72 monuments to the rebels and two to the Union.
In Maryland, you had 63,000 Union soldiers and sailors vs. 24,000 rebs.
Textbooks obfuscate the war’s causes, partially so as not to endanger sales to Southern schools. Loewen writes that Texas specifically railed against state’s rights, because its government was furious that northern states were not complying with the Fugitive Slave Act.
The U.S. citizenship test for immigrants is another case:
Elizabelle
I think that standing up and batting down the glory of the Lost Cause of the Confederacy might train us to take on the NRA and ammosexuals next. They’re actually outliers.
Time to destroy these myths: that the Confederacy was not based on white supremacy, and that guns, guns, guns — a society awash in them — will keep us safe and protect our liberty and freedom speech.
Bobby Thomson
@dww44: he used to be a liberal, but now that the traitors’ flag is being attacked he’s outraged by Chappaquiddick.
Villago Delenda Est
@Botsplainer:
Not to mention parasitical.
I suggest this is exactly what needs to be done.
All these particular churches being set on fire is not just a coincidence. We’re well into the “enemy action” stage of the game.
JasonF
Turns out there is a war on Christianity after all, but it’s got nothing to do with forcing Christian bakers not to discriminate in terms of who they sell their cakes to.
Ryan G
I’ll believe these burned from natural causes if 30 or 40 white churches also burned from natural causes this week.
gene108
@Elizabelle:
They had a willing and ready audience for their material.
People could have rejected the Lost Cause mythology and all that and been more honest, but they wanted to believe the myth making.
Villago Delenda Est
@Derelict: The NRA stayed quiet for a week while they purged their records of any references to Adam Lanza or his mother in their membership rolls.
This does not mean that individual gun nuts (and the Alex Jones yahoo types) were not jumping up and down as ammosexuals do, mind.
ruemara
What the fuck do they find so damned romantic about the Confederacy? What about being slave owning, treasonous bastard is noble? And, frankly, a pox on people who can’t call this suspicious. Shit. You’d think the entire 19th through 20th century of America never happened.
jayjaybear
I’ve long been of the opinion that Sherman didn’t go nearly far enough. We should really have had to repopulate the South after Appomatox.
LWA
@Elizabelle:
Exactly-
Waiting for legislative miracles or Green Lantern superheroes won’t win the ballet against guns.
Its going to take a lot of us constantly harping on it,constantly fighting the false narrative that guns keep u safe, fighting the myth that there exists a natural right to carry a deadly weapon, confronting those who trumpet the gun as a cure for male anxiety.
It won’t happen overnight, but it will happen, if we want it bad enough.
Botsplainer
I’m trying a new approach to talk of the Confederacy – it is about how lazy the planters were, along with how they stole labor and had an unearned sense of entitlement while displaying pretentiousness in a bid to achieve false aristocracy.
p.a.
I’d ease up on the gas. Church fires have been an issue before and it turned out 1) the incidents weren’t abnormally high historically (just the media issue du jour), and 2) most were insurance arsons, arson covering up theft, or old wiring.
As long as the Feds do a transparent investigation, let’s let them do their job.
skyweaver
I’m a news hound, and I’ve only become aware of these fires this morning.
Belafon
@skyweaver: That’s why twitter is useful. For all the stuff that people complain about, I’ve known about every church fire since the shootings.
boatboy_srq
@Doug R:
Succinct.
Punchy
That fire was started by lightning all right….white lightning. That, and matches, some racists, and a getaway pick-up truck.
B
@boatboy_srq:
But wrong.
Botsplainer
Query – viewing the world through the eyes of Jeremiah Wright, is his expression “God DAMN America” an appropriate sentiment?
Discuss and contextualize with the competing theory of American Exceptionalism.
Amir Khalid
@B:
This is actually me.
boatboy_srq
@B: @Amir Khalid: How so? It’s not like we can associate the bigotry and hatred with any other immediately-recognizable symbol.
scav
@Botsplainer: Exceptionally bad is about as agrandizing as exceptionally good. Mudding through among equals isn’t ego food enough.
Shakezula
According to the geniuses of Twitter this is the fault of black people for reminding white people to be racist by mentioning racism.
Cacti
Also too, since 09/11/01, the number of hate crimes per year against US muslims leaped from 20-30 per year to 100-150 per year and have remained there ever since.
US Jews and Muslims also account for 60 percent of anti-religious hate crime victims, despite being less than 5 percent of the total US population.
There might be a war on religion in this country, but it isn’t the one that Fox News talks about.
MomSense
Zander, thank you for putting this on the front page.
Kay
I don’t know what’s going on now, but I was reading about this last night and I came upon the fact that there were a huge group of fires in black churches between 1995 and 1996. It was a big enough issue that both Clinton and Al Gore responded- Clinton went to one of the sites and Gore did this:
Villago Delenda Est
@Botsplainer: The problem here is that there are a lot of people who have no problem with this “master race” crap, with having others do the work for them at next to no cost to themselves.
Villago Delenda Est
@Cacti: Judaism and Islam are not “real religions.” For a very long time, Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy didn’t quite count, either.
Peale
@Elizabelle: I think that’s about the saddest statement that I recall. The issue isn’t just that Southerners refuse to give up their cause. Northern Whites simply abandoned their cause, so their war dead go unremembered.
Chris
@Elizabelle:
This. I’ve read complaints that things like lowering the Confederate flag are just distracting us from the “real” problems (e.g. police violence, underfunding of services to the inner cities, employment discrimination, wev), and I really don’t get it. Did the denazification of Germany fix all of the country’s racial problems? Of course not. But does anyone think these problems wouldn’t be even worse if Germans had been allowed to continue proudly claiming the Nazi “heritage” in the same way Americans have with the Confederacy?
Betty Cracker
Why do y’all think the North acquiesced to the South’s post-war myth-making and largely treated subsequent displays of Confederate pride as an amusing regional eccentricity? Because most Northerners were white supremacists too.
ruemara
@Chris: my very liberal friends have been annoying the fuck out of me by describing marriage equality, back lives matter, the voting rights issue, birth control, fair wages etc all as “wedge issues distracting us from the real issues of wealth inequality” & TPP. Then Bill Nigh quotes on how race is a construct and we’re all human. Just, stop it. Please.
fidelio
@Elizabelle: Ah, yes, monuments in Kentucky, like this little historic site.
315 feet, complete with elevator.
shawn
@Betty Cracker: THIS – thank you. So tired of hearing how just the South is racist or stupid or whatever – humans are the worst kind of people no matter where they are from or what color they are or what language they speak – not saying the South hasn’t turned into that skid sometimes but seriously
Elizabelle
@Kay: Two interesting articles from the LA Times.
From June 22, 2015: Before Charleston attack, a long history of violence against black churches
From June 16, 1996: America’s Long History of Black Churches Burning
If you only have time for one, definitely choose the 1996 article. From it:
Also: do you think it was just a coincidence the 1995-96 church burnings happened during election season, with a Southern Democrat in the White House?
Matt McIrvin
@Belafon: Not to mention, professional arson investigators are themselves notorious for myth and fabulation, as came out in (as I recall) a high-profile death-penalty case a few years ago. It’d be very bad to get one of these wrong.
Elizabelle
@Betty Cracker:
@shawn:
Yup. If not as overt. Otherwise, we would not remember the individuals who stood out against the tide of the day.
I’ve always thought that Harry S Truman’s reputation suffered a bit in his time because he integrated the Armed Services. People did not want to tell pollsters that was why. But his reputation improved in later years. Truman got more respect in the 1970s and beyond. He died in 1972.
AnonPhenom
@Betty Cracker:
True ‘dat, but it was more of a tribal/ethnic thing up north (we’d work with any tribe, but only live with our own). Down Dixie way it was/is a way of life (y’all will live next to each other, but it ends there)
Joey Maloney
@Derelict: And who can forget Megan McArglebargle’s brilliant idea of teaching five-year-olds to bum-rush an active shooter?
Matt McIrvin
@AnonPhenom: Dick Gregory said “down South white folks don’t care how close I get as long as I don’t get too big. Up North white folks don’t care how big I get as long as I don’t get too close.”
It’s been a fairly accurate description of the difference between Northern and Southern white racism for a long time.
Matt McIrvin
@Botsplainer:
http://www.abrahamlincolnonline.org/lincoln/speeches/liberty.htm
“They are the two principles that have stood face to face from the beginning of time, and will ever continue to struggle. The one is the common right of humanity and the other the divine right of kings. It is the same principle in whatever shape it develops itself. It is the same spirit that says, ‘You work and toil and earn bread, and I’ll eat it.’ No matter in what shape it comes, whether from the mouth of a king who seeks to bestride the people of his own nation and live by the fruit of their labor, or from one race of men as an apology for enslaving another race, it is the same tyrannical principle.”
Matt McIrvin
You can just go ahead and imagine some Aaron Copland music over that last comment.
Brachiator
@AnonPhenom:
Bullpucky. American apartheid was exactly that, American. The South had outright slavery, the North had outright discrimination and were complicit in helping Southerners maintain the white supremacist regimes.
The racial codes and noxious stuff such as racist real estate covenants in various states did not write themselves. A commenter noted Oregon’s attempt to establish itself as a white only state.
http://gizmodo.com/oregon-was-founded-as-a-racist-utopia-1539567040
The idea that racism outside the South was somehow benign is one of those weird fantasies that some people try to tell themselves to sell the lie that the entire country was not complicit in maintaining legal and social racist practices.
Kay
@Elizabelle:
No, now that you mention it, but I never thought of Bill Clinton as “southern”. I accept he is, but that wasn’t how I thought of him except for what I think was a nasty kind of law enforcement knee-jerk thing he had that I felt came from his time as a really young AG. I think he felt he had to be “tough on crime” because he was so young in that job. It was really the part of him I found most repellent. That’s the only “southern” thing I got from him and that probably comes from TV shows, where the sheriff is a big asshole and has an accent. Maybe it isn’t southern at all. Maybe he’s just a jerk on that issue :)
Kay
@shawn:
I agree to a certain extent. there’s lot and lots of racisim here and we’re pretty far north, but the south was particularly bad (and I don’t assume you’re denying that).
It really came clear to me with this book, about the post-civil war prisoner/slave system they set up called “convict leasing”.
Too, when you read the accounts of the south to north migration in The Warmth of Other Suns they encountered plenty of horrible racism in Chicago and Milwaukee and Toledo and Los Angeles, but they themselves describe the difference, how really oppressive it was in the south. These are first-person accounts. They were fleeing a region. They were refugees. They really lay out the difference.
Gvg
I think we here were all primed to expect church burnings. I know I was, so that makes me cautious in certainty that each particular case is arson and a hate crime. I still expect it to turn out to be mostly racist arson but I can’t talk to certain till we here more specific evidence.
I recall a prior string of church burnings just when I moved to Gainesville around Clinton’s time. it turned out to be someone with um issues related to an abusive parent and step parent who were to harshly religious. I think at least one of them turned out to be unrelated. since then I have heard of a fair number of church burnings. it seems churches sort of attract hatred and are more than other entities prone to being burned.
I have also seen it mentioned on local front pages since they started happening. Not much info, but being mentioned almost every day.
I really think even the non political people expected something.