To begin his Charleston Massacre, the confessed murderer Dylann Storm Roof coldly told his victims the cause that animated his deadly violence. “You rape our women, and you’re taking over our country,” Roof exclaimed, “and you have to go.” Each of these frightful exclamations – the fear of miscegenation (interracial sex), the fear of Black empowerment, and the threat of racial genocide – are punctuated with an abiding sense of history that does not exist solely in our past but instead ruptures our present with a visceral lineage of White domestic terrorism. By drawing on the fear of miscegenation and concocted fears of dangerous Black male sexuality, the murderer reenacted the very...
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