Dylann Roof fatally shot nine people at a historic African American church in Charleston, South Carolina last year. His trial is set to begin in early 2017.
Dylann Roof facing trial in church killings
00:45 - Source: CNN

Editor’s Note: Issac Bailey has been a journalist in South Carolina for two decades and was most recently the primary columnist for The Sun News in Myrtle Beach. He was a 2014 Harvard University Nieman fellow. Follow him on Twitter: @ijbailey. The views expressed are his own.

Story highlights

The Dylann Roof trial assumes new importance at a time "white nationalism" is given undue attention, writes Issac Bailey

President-elect's top White House adviser Steve Bannon, as head of Breitbart, provided a platform for the "alt-right"

CNN  — 

It’s only fitting that shortly after being found competent to stand trial, Dylann Roof became his own attorney, setting up the possibility that he could cross examine the survivors of the carnage he is accused of causing or the loved ones of the nine people he allegedly killed, or even turn the proceedings into a spectacle and promote the warped views discovered in his writings. What began as a tragedy and turned into a triumph of (temporary) unity is becoming an unfunny joke.

It’s more than that, though.

Issac Bailey

The Roof trial comes soon after President-elect Donald Trump appointed as a top White House adviser Steve Bannon, who in his role as head of Breitbart provided a platform for the self-described “alt-right,” which includes the kinds of sentiments long and rightly described as white nationalistic and white supremacist. And the President-elect, likely along with most, if not all, Republican US senators, wants to make a man attorney general who couldn’t get confirmed for a federal post during the Reagan era because of past ugly racial views.

Until the election of Donald Trump, it seemed that Roof’s white supremacist views made him an outlier in the 21st century. Young white supremacists are rare and hang out mostly along the fringes of society. That one took up arms and killed nine black people in a historically significant black church in the city where the Civil War began was an anomaly, little more.

By contrast, the Michael Slager trial, being held in the same city at the same time as Roof’s, seemed the more important one. Slager is the North Charleston police officer seen shooting a fleeing man in the back multiple times. Slager was equipped with public dollars, armed and trained with the public’s blessing, given the authority to detain, arrest and even kill with the public’s authority. When such a man violates the trust placed in him, it can undermine a democracy like little else. A police officer who abuses his power and goes unpunished seeds the ground for cycles of violence, because it undermines the entire system. In that environment, it becomes every man for himself. Taking the law into one’s own hands, like gangbangers blindly firing off bullets during retaliatory drive-by shootings, becomes routine.

That’s why it should concern us that Slager’s actions might go unpunished. He was charged and is standing trial. There’s no guarantee he will be convicted, despite the clear video evidence available. Just ask Rodney King. An unexpected outcome in that case in this charged post-2016 election environment couldn’t come at a worse time. That’s still true. But the Roof trial, which is in its jury selection phase, is taking on even more importance.

We needed to be outraged by Roof’s alleged act, needed to cling to each other in a search for comfort in the immediate aftermath of that slaughter, and need the criminal justice system to do what it failed to do so many times in the 20th century when such things occurred, and that is deliver justice to the perpetrator and bring a sense of peace to the victims’ families.

But 2016 has revealed that Roof is no longer an outlier, no longer on the fringe. The views that led him to pick up a gun – feeling aggrieved and supposedly left behind as a young white man – no doubt contributed to Donald Trump garnering enough support to make him our next president. That’s why white nationalists are giddy and doing Nazi salutes in the name of Trump on video, why they see an affinity with him in a way they haven’t seen from any other President-elect in modern times, Democrat or Republican.

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    I was hoping the Roof trial would take a backseat to Slager, that his name would soon be forgotten because the rest of us would have been so shocked, outraged, by what led him to that dastardly night during a Bible study, that we would declare with one voice: Never again.

    Instead, America has elevated his grievances and ushered them into the most powerful office in the land. That should grieve us all.