Sea change does happen. Always slowly, and never conclusively.

It is terrible, and not simply terribly tragic that 9 people were murdered because one run-of-the-mill local boy who was probably not actually significantly consciously inculcated in racist propaganda none-the-less committed this awful slaughter, that was made possible only because of the subtle and mostly unacknowledged racism that still permeates our society.   

These nine people who were murdered are clearly and purely martyrs. There is no ambiguity about that. It is hard to say at this point from what is reported how overtly racist Roof is. That is what makes the longstanding embedded racism of our society (and any other society) so apparent that even the governer of SC is calling for the Confederate flag to be removed from the SC capitol grounds to be removed. When the people lead, the leaders will follow. That is what is making at least some Republican presidential candidates publicly acknowledge Roof's murder of these nine souls is an act of terrorism.

Combined with recent coverage of the long-standing indication of institutional racism inherent in the statistical evidence regarding our justice system, this clear act of murder by a young man who was not, at least until recently, rabidly overtly racist, makes clear the strong undercurrent of the effects of both conscious and unconscious racism in our society unambiguously.

Just as with the bombing of that church in Alabama those many years ago, there is no ambiguity possible for a majority of USA citizens, even those with unconscious racial bias. (I submit that it is human nature to have racial, ethnic, tribal bias, and the best each of us can do is to be aware of that within ourselves and continually examine it, but this parenthetical is definitely an aside to this conversation.)

Aggregate statistics definitely point to racial bias with respect to interactions between police and possible offenders, but the individual circumstances of each encounter are often complex enough that it can rarely be said with absolute certainty, that racism was the dominant factor. In this instance, as with assaults on Mosques and Jewish Centers, there is no ambiguity.

Let us not focus on single issues or remedies. Time and information may or may not reveal whether these nine martyrs died because of longstanding overt racism on the part of Roof, or if he was a low functioning, lost kid, unconsciously steeped, as so many of us are, in the racism of our society, who latched onto overt racism as an excuse, in his own inability or lack of skills to think through and own his own "stuff."

There is no real comfort when one loses people we love. No one whose lives are intimately or even very remotely touched by the lives and subsequent taking of those precious lives will likely ever read any of our posts here.

None-the-less, I offer my heartfelt condolences to the families and friends of these nine people who died, and whose deaths are clearly related to the racism that continues to exist in all of us in our society.