Can the racial dimension of the shooting be discussed in a reasonable manner?

[HassleCat]

91. Pick a hate from column A, one from column B...

Hatred seems to be like on of those "build your own special" menus. When the shooters leave behind their rambling manifestos, as they often do, we see racism, sexism, xenophobia, and every other sort of resentment, all interwoven. From the little we know about Flanagan, it appears he thought the people at the TV station discriminated against him because of his race, when it's far more likely they wanted to get rid of him because he was nutty. (I assume he was fired.) There's nothing unusual in his explanation about the Charleston shootings. They vaguely correspond to the ravings of white supremacists who go on shooting sprees. In the unstable mind, there is a logical connection between the Charleston shootings and losing a job at a TV station.

It is reasonable to ask where to draw the line between racial hatred and insanity, or if such a line can be drawn at all. It is interesting to note these shooting sprees don't bear much resemblance to cross burnings and lynchings of the past. The violence we saw in the civil rights struggle was pretty straightforward racial hatred, and we can probably agree the people who perpetrated those acts were not crazy, even though they allowed their emotions to drive them to violence, including murder. They were no more crazy than the man who kills his wife in a violent rage, for example.

But some recent incidents appear to involve shooters who are generally paranoid, with persecution complexes, delusions of grandeur, messiah things going on, and who knows what else. What we need to know is not so much how much racial hatred played a part in their decision to go on a rampage, but the way in which racial hatred is promoted, advertised, made available for public consumption, and offered up for crazy people to seize on. I see some similarity between an incident like this and the fear that inspires police officers to shoot at young black men. By pretending we live in a post-racial society, we ignore the monster under the bed.