A Sociologist Explains The Charleston Church Shooting And Racism In The U.S.

A shooting at a historic black church in Charleston, South Carolina, on Wednesday has shaken the country, leaving many reflecting on the state of race relations in the United States.

Nine people, including Rev. Clementa Pinckney, the church's pastor and a South Carolina state senator, were shot to death by accused gunman Dylann Storm Roof at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church. Authorities have called the shooting a hate crime.

But how does one explain such a crime from a scientific perspective? What could lead someone to commit a racially motivated hate crime? What is racism -- and how can we as a society overcome it?

HuffPost Science posed those questions and others on Thursday to Dr. R. L'Heureux Lewis-McCoy, an associate professor of sociology at The City College of New York and author of the book Inequality in the Promised Land.

I would define racism as a system of social advantages and disadvantages doled out based upon group membership, particularly what we have socially defined as races. Among sociologists, we also talk about a newer form of racism known as "colorblind racism" (Eduardo Bonilla-Silva pioneered this work) that emerged after the 1960s, where the outward expression of racial animus and explicit discriminatory laws have been silenced or removed, but unfair racial advantages or disadvantages are still doled out, despite few people admitting to being devout racists....

Everything they see, they see in racist terms.

After reading your post I began to think that maybe they are merely engaging in psychological projection of their own perceptions onto society at large.

I wonder how they bridge the infinite logical gap from the individual to societal racism.

They have that membership card.

Maybe that is their 'logical' bridge.

His definition of racism certainly fits your apt description of it:

"I would define racism as a system of social advantages and disadvantages doled out based upon group membership..."

Cordially,

they let a lot slide don’t they in their reporting......99.999% of people don’t even know about the Knoxville murders....

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Channon Christian and Christopher Newsom Channon Gail Christian, 21, and Hugh Christopher Newsom, Jr., 23, were a couple from Knoxville, Tennessee. They were raped, tortured, and murdered after being kidnapped the evening of January 6, 2007 when Christian's vehicle was carjacked.[1][2] Five people were arrested and charged in the case. The grand jury indicted four of the suspects on counts of capital murder, robbery, kidnapping, rape, and theft, while a fifth was indicted at the federal level.

Of the four charged at the state level, three (Letalvis D. Cobbins, Lemaricus Davidson, and George Thomas) had multiple prior felony convictions. After a jury trial, Lemaricus Davidson was sentenced to death by lethal injection and Letalvis Cobbins and George Thomas were sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. Vanessa Coleman was sentenced to 53 years in prison for facilitating the crimes and Eric Dewayne Boyd was sentenced to 18 years in federal prison for being an accessory after the fact to carjacking.

The state convictions were all initially set aside because of misconduct by the presiding judge, since disbarred. Retrials were originally slated for the summer and fall of 2012, but the orders for retrials of Davidson and Cobbins were subsequently overturned, and their convictions and sentences stand. The Coleman and Thomas retrials resulted in convictions, but with reduced sentences. Coleman's sentence was reduced to 35 years, and Thomas' sentence was reduced to life in prison with the possibility of parole.

Much of the publicity surrounding the case concerned whether or not the US media underreported the original story, and whether there was a racial motivation, as all of the attackers were African American.

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