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In June 2015, days before Xinyu Liu first arrives in the United States, ten Black churchgoers were shot in Charleston, South Carolina. Nine died. A week later the funeral of Clementa Pinckney, one of the victims, was held with President Obama delivering the eulogy. It was during this eulogy that he began to sing Amazing Grace, a rare public display of genuine emotion and grief from an elected official. Mass shootings and hate crimes in the US are frequently met with thoughts, prayers, and other platitudes but rarely, if ever, with actual reform. The President Sang Amazing Grace is Liu’s attempt to process the disconnect between the reality and the rhetoric of that moment, and to explore how it has colored his time in this country.
It has been 10 years since those events in Charleston, The President Sang Amazing Grace reminds us how the country has and has not changed in that time.
