History and Culture go hand in hand, Culture is directly affected by the mark of history, both positive and negative effects. In modern society, the culture of the United States has been cursed with a gap between economic and social class. Within this class gap, a de facto segregation, segregation through fact of circumstance, has formed and has put the majority of the African-American population in poverty stricken neighborhoods and forced the African-American population to not have as many opportunities as the upper-class and wealthier neighborhoods. Racism still exists in America, it isn't as observed in America as it was in the days of the Civil Rights Movement, but it is visible in the ghetto neighborhoods of the South or the churches in Charleston that African-Americans are still oppressed by their fellow man.

Dylann Roof, a man who truly was demented and wanted nothing but a race war, walked into the Emanuel AME and shot nine African-American men and women because he thought they were ruining the country. This, unfortunately, is one of many racial incidents in the United States today, along with Ferguson, Missouri where an unarmed African-American man running away from the Police was shot and killed, and in New York City where an African-American man was put in a strangle hold and died from a lack of oxygen. Roof felt that Caucasian men are the superior race, that African-Americans are ruining America and his solution would have been a race war to end black lives, and unfortunately he is not the only man that feels this way. Much like Dylann Roof, there may be men in the Ku Klux Klan that feel that what Roof did was an act of aggression for the advancement of the superiority of Caucasian men, and this negative historical organization has unfortunately influenced a small minority of people to live with their lives in the past and not wanting to accept others. In Roxanne Gay's "On Why I Can't Forgive Dylann Roof", she explains how she cannot forgive Roof because he performs such a heinous act, because there is no reason for anyone in their right mind to want to kill innocent lives and the fact that the media tried to humanize him to figure out why he performed such a heinous act. She goes into detail saying how because he is white he was given more leverage in his bond hearing because his judge too was a racist who had "once been reprimanded for using the N-word from the bench." Gay doesn't forgive Roof not because he is white, but because he was a white man who hunted African-American lives in a time where racism should be done away with.

Roof had shot and killed nine African-American men and women so he could start a race war, but the reaction from the people was more surprising. Unlike what happened when Michael   Brown was shot by a white police officer in Ferguson or Eric Garner was suffocated because the police would not loosen the grip around his neck, people didn't react as violently. The people of Charleston mourned, but they did so in a way that was like a family in the state. Could it be because when something happens in the South everyone will come together and support one another? Roxanne Gay says in her essay that the judge talked about how the families of the slain men and women were victims, but he talked about how the family of Roof was also a victim. She goes further to explain that white people believe too firmly with forgiveness and that they use it in the media to mask the world and believe that racism ended with Martin Luther King Jr. In reality Gay is right, there are still organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan that run off of the racist feels of white men who believe that white men are the dominant race and that no one else should be able to have the same place as him. And because of this, she says African-Americans do not want to forgive, they forgive so that they can survive. She says African-Americans forgave slavery, segregation, Jim Crow Laws, lynching, mass incarceration, and much more because if they had not then they would have had a negative outcome and Caucasian men would have continued the oppression. 

From Roxanne Gays' essay, it gives a viewpoint on the Dylann Roof situation from an African-American who wouldn't forgive Roof nor be silent about it, and it opens eyes when it is read. "Black Lives Matter" opens the eyes of some people because they know that African-Americans are being persecuted, but people like Roof still exist because they oppose this society and want it to continue. Caucasian men easily live life from day to day and believe that forgiveness will calm everything down and all of the hatred in the world would be gone forever, however, vocal women such as Roxanne Gay have stopped forgiving.

Other people such as Kiese Laymon have talked about how racism limits what African-Americans are allowed to do and what they can say. Laymon, from Central Mississippi and the author of the essay "How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America" talks about how racism has harassed him by racist police, overly punished him in college because of the color of his skin, and how racism drives good people to the point of wanting to end their own lives in a world where he is a hunted person, and that he shouldn't be forced to live out his life in fear, he should be able to embrace and make the best of himself instead of living with the fear that racism will shine its ugly head and oppress him once more.

People like Kiese Laymon are the people that Roxanne Gay shows hiding from Caucasian racist men because they believe forgiveness forgives everything. They believe forgiveness will bring back Trayvon Martin, who was shot by a white man and walking in the wrong neighborhood, they believe it will bring back Michael Brown and Eric Garner, they believe it will bring back the victims of the Emanuel AME church shooting, they believe it will bring back everyone who has lost their life because a Caucasian wanted forgiveness for his actions.

African Americans in America fear what might happen to them in this day and age, where the media believes that the police and the Ku Klux Klan are hunting them down like during the times of slavery when they were hunted for escaping plantations because they didn't want to forgive their "owners" for all of the labor they were forced to do. The media paints the officer in the Michael Brown shooting as a racist pig, but he was doing his job as a police officer who may or may not have felt threatened and shot Brown. Is the media really trying to make every Caucasian look like the villain of today's society? Sometimes it seems that way, but like Roxanne Gay says, Caucasians want absolutism, in this case the acceptance that forgiveness will fix everything wrong in the world. People like Gay are done forgiving, because she doesn't want to live in a society where people see things on the news about an African-American man is shot and killed by a Caucasian, they want to be able to walk in the streets and not have to fear for their lives in Cleveland, Baltimore, Charleston, Ferguson, or any place in America. America is the land of the free, the place where we hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with unalienable Rights, the among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness. Life is stripped from African-Americans when they do not feel free in the modern world and safe in the towns of this great nation. Liberty is being sought by people such as Gay and Jesse Jackson so that African-Americans are treated just the same as Caucasians and that Caucasians are fairly punished. And of course Happiness isn't living in a world where it feels like an entire culture is going against a specific group of people. Through the eyes of Laymon and Gay, African-Americans aren't truly free at last. 

