After spending the day reading about reactions to last night’s terrorist attack at the Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, I keep coming back to the same detail:
For an hour, a group of black parishioners sat and studied the Bible with a 21 year old white man who was unknown to them. Then he stood up and started shooting them.
I think about those kind and generous people, who invited this man into their house of worship and who sat with him as they talked about their faith. They didn’t think about him as someone to fear, someone who was there specifically to harm them. Instead, they treated him as they would anyone else, as one of their own, even as he was preparing to murder them for whatever imagined crime a white supremacist assigns to people of color.
Because he was a fanatic, he sat with them for an hour but he never heard what they were saying and he never saw the example they set.
Ari Kohen’s Blog (via ndnickerson)
