There is terrible conflict in the heart of Rev. Sharon Risher. It is a contradiction between the word of God, and the tragedy of experience.
Risher’s mother, Ethel Lance, and her cousins Susie Jackson and Tywanza Sanders were among the nine black people murdered in 2015 by white supremacist Dylann Roof at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina.
“God tells us not to fear, and that’s in the deep of my soul. But, as a regular, everyday person just being true about her feelings, I do fear,” Risher said. “I even got to the point that I don’t even want to close my eyes in prayer.”
Long after high-profile hate crimes fade from the headlines, and victims’ names fall off the front page, their families continue to feel the pain and terror of their loss.
Whether it is a church in Charleston, a mosque in Quebec City, or a college in Montreal, hate killings leave a residue of anxiety and depression.
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“It’s devastating enough to lose someone violently, but when you have that added layer, it becomes even less comprehensible,” said Barbara Perry, an expert in hate crime and professor at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology. “It’s much more difficult for people to get their head around … how someone can take a life purely out of hatred.
“I don’t know that you ever heal from something like this.”
Risher was, for years, a clinical trauma chaplain at Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas. Every day she counseled families whose loved ones had just died. Often, the people she saw had lost a son or daughter to gun violence.
But in the wake of the Charleston shooting, Risher’s ability to guide others through grief simply abandoned her: “When this happened to me, all my chaplain training just kind of went out of my brain,” she said.
Toronto native Ralph Gerhardt was a vice-president at Cantor Fitzgerald investment firm, with an office in the North Tower of the World Trade Centre. He was killed on Sept. 11, 2001, when two planes struck the Twin Towers.
For his brother, Stephan Gerhardt, Ralph’s death is never out of mind. The event that took his life is a seminal event in world history; And it’s there twice a day, when the clock rolls over to 9:11.
“It’s such a rawness to it,” Stephan said, over 15 years later. “That just doesn’t go away.”
“The difference with a 9/11 or a mosque shooting or any of these big signature things, is the remembrance is so public and becomes so much bigger,” Stephan said. “The whole world talks about the fact that this was the day that Ralph died. It’s so constant.”
The knowledge that a loved one was killed for the colour of their skin, their religion, their gender or culture, can haunt a person.
“People will often feel … this sense of ‘It could have been me,’” Perry said. “The random nature of (hate crime) is really terrifying for people.”
Beset by fear and mistrust, many relatives of hate crime victims may withdraw from society, Perry said. Or, like Risher, they start looking over their shoulder, always wary of who might be around them.
Some may even change their own appearance to be less identifiable as a member of a persecuted minority. A Muslim man might shave his beard, or a Muslim woman may abandon her hijab. But these changes come at a cost, said Perry.
“They feel like they are traitors to their group, that they’re somehow eschewing that group membership, that community,” she said. “Some people say they really begin to not like themselves very much because they’re not real anymore.”
From 2011 to 2013, Cardiff University professor Matthew Williams co-produced one of the largest studies on hate crime in the U.K.
Interviewing survivors of hate crime, Williams and his fellow researchers found people were more resilient if surrounded by family or community members who had gone through a similar experience.
“The impacts of hate were not homogenous,” Williams said. “People express experiencing impacts at different levels yet there are good reasons for that, one of them being this notion of resilience and intra-family support for victims of hate, especially in relation to race and religion.”
Sharon Risher has found a community with a very particular form of shared experience. About a month after the Charleston church shooting, she joined Everytown, an anti-gun violence advocacy group.
Now she works alongside people who have lost family to mass shootings in Aurora, Colorado, and at Sandy Hook Elementary School. She calls it her lifeline.
“This bunch of people knows every feeling, every pain I’ve been through,” she said. “I am not by myself.”
Yet she remains hyper-vigilant.
“There is nothing sacred anymore,” she said. “That’s what Charleston made known in this century. That there is no place sacred on this earth.”
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