Killing Dylann Roof

May 26, 2016

On Tuesday, Attorney General Loretta Lynch announced she would seek the
death penalty for Dylann Roof. It has not been a year since Roof walked into
Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church and murdered nine black people as
they worshipped. Roof justified this act of terrorism in chillingly familiar language
You rape our women and youre taking over our country. The public display of
forgiveness offered to Roof by the families of the victims elicited bipartisan praise
from across the country. The president saluted the families for an expression of
faith that is unimaginable but that reflects the goodness of the American people.
How strange it is to see that same administration, and these good people, who once
saluted the forgiveness of Roof, presently endorse his killing.
Dylann Roofs act stood in a long and lethal tradition of homegrown American
terrorism stretching back to the Civil War. The response to this terrorism that the
powers-that-be tend to endorse is nonviolencelove, forgiveness, and turning the
other cheek. The symbol of this approach is, of course, Martin Luther King Jr. One
problem with using King in this way is that the actual King had an annoying habit of
preaching nonviolence, whether it was convenient or not. Whereas American power
generally regards nonviolence as a means of cynically enforcing order, King
believed protesters should be exemplars of nonviolence, but not its unique
employers.
There are defensible reasons why the American stateor any statewould find
Kings ethic hard to live up to. States are violent. The very establishment of
government, the attempt to safeguard a group of people deemed citizens or
subjects, is always violent. In America, a president is the commander in chief.
Anyone who voted for Obama necessarily voted for violence. Furthermore, there is
indisputable evidence that violence sometimes works. The greatest affirmation of
civil rights in American historyemancipationwas accomplished at gun-point.

But one has to be careful here not to fall into the trap of lionizing killing, of pride in
the act of destroying people even for just ends. Moreover, even if nonviolence isnt
always the answer, King reminds us to work for a world where it is. Part of that work
is recognizing when our government can credibly endorse Kings example. Sparing
the life of Dylann Roof would be such an instanceone more credible than the usual
sanctimonious homilies delivered in his name. If the families of Roof's victims can
find the grace of forgiveness within themselves; if the president can praise them for
it; if the public can be awed by itthen why can't the Department of Justice act in
the spirit of that grace and resist the impulse to kill?
Perhaps because some part of us believes in nonviolence not as an ideal worth
striving for, but as a fairy tale passed on to the politically weak. The past two years
have seen countless invocations of nonviolence to shame unruly protestors into
order. Such invocations are rarely made to shame police officers who choke men to
death over cigarettes and are sent back out onto the beat. And the same political
officials will stand up next January and praise King even as they act contrary to his
words. Capital punishment is against the best judgment of modern criminology,
wrote King, and, above all, against the highest expression of love in the nature of
God.

Moreover, killing Roof does absolutely nothing to ameliorate the conditions that
brought him into being in the first place. The hammer of criminal justice is the
preferred tool of a society that has run out of ideas. In this sense, Roof is little more
than a human sacrifice to The Gods of Doing Nothing. Leave aside actual
substantive policy. In a country where unapologetic slaveholders and regressive
white supremacists still, at this late date, adorn our state capitals and our highest
institutions of learning, it is bizarre to kill a man who acted in their spirit. And killing
Roof, like the business of the capital punishment itself, ensures that innocent people
will be executed. The need to extract vengeance cannot always be exact. It is all but
certain that a disproportionate number of those who pay for this lack of precision
will not look like Dylann Roof.