BECAUSE MANNERS MATTER TO SOUTHERNERS: Jason Riley: What Charleston tells us about race relations.

The reaction to the carnage in Charleston represents racial progress of the type today’s liberals have no interest in acknowledging. The post-1960s left derives political power, in the form of voter fealty, from encouraging blacks to view themselves primarily as helpless victims of white racism. The struggles of blacks are the fault of whites, in other words, and until the Dylann Roofs are no more, nothing has really changed.

But the shooting victims deserve to be remembered as individuals, not politicized symbols of black struggle.

Mr. Roof may have his sympathizers, but they are largely relegated to the anonymous fever swamps of the Internet. Racism still exists, alas, and no one reading this is likely to see the day when it doesn’t. But antiblack animus doesn’t explain racial gaps in employment, crime, income, learning and single-parent homes. Furthermore, attitudes and behaviors in the U.S. have evolved to a point where a twice-elected black president has asked the second black attorney general to investigate a shooting in a Deep South state with a black senator and Indian-American governor.

The black left guards its victim status fiercely. Witness the “Black Lives Matter” brigades that reject replacing the slogan’s adjective with “All.”

Riley’s right. The individuals who were murdered in Charleston are being mourned by a tight knit, Southern community, where a lot of racial progress has taken place since the civil rights movement. While those who have never lived in the South love to demean Southerners in various ways and assume they are all redneck racists, the truth is that Southerners–of all colors–are some of the best mannered, polite people in the world. They value community, family and God. When tragedy strikes, the first instinct is to help, and to unify, not to hate, or riot. Yes, there is still racism (flowing in both directions) in the South, but having lived all over the country (except the west coast), I believe Southerners are no more racist that the rest of the country, and perhaps in some ways, less so.

As someone who grew up in the South, I have a hard time imagining the Baltimore riots happening in Charlotte, Charleston, or Savannah. And before someone starts lecturing about how Baltimore is a “Southern” city that had a lot of confederate sympathizers (it did), I know few Southerners–those from the deep South, rather than border states– who would ever characterize Baltimore as a “Southern” city. When I was in high school, a family moved into our neighborhood from Maryland, and we all referred to them as the “Yankee family” for awhile. It was just good-natured joking around, of course (the girl in that family became a good friend), but the family definitely wasn’t “Southern” in its mannerisms and culture.  Nice, to be sure, but not Southern, bless their little hearts.

So when I see what’s happening in Charleston, I am not surprised. I see a bunch of nice, well-mannered, God-fearing Southerners coming together to mourn the loss of good people and condemn an evil act.