Terrorism By White Men and the Failure to Properly Classify Their Attacks
He wears the crown well. Not to be worn on his head — it’s more like an invisible shield of entitlement earned at birth, but only while his skin is white. In a world where people think racism, bigotry, and prejudice no longer exist because a black man was elected president, ignorance is not only bliss, it’s deadly for the unenlightened. White privilege has systematically defined our social, political, educational and economic infrastructure since the Mayflower arrived.
When whites fail to recognize privilege, progress is halted, and opportunities to advance the dialogue are or re-establish the U.S. based on truth, grow in the distance. Any person who ignores the blatant and continuous fortune that is afforded to a select few, is perpetuating white privilege, because they know that fortune is determined by race. Beyond easy fixes, white privilege must be discussed in-depth, and analyzed. White privilege is a topic that should be discussed just as often, if not more often, than the fear of ISIS entering U.S. borders.
Due to the current political climate, presidential candidates scapegoat foreign entities like ISIS because talking about ways to defeat them is a popular grade school esque political maneuver.
The FBI plans to further its efforts to quickly identify and prevent domestic terrorism before it happens. In order to do so, the FBI should marshal its resources and investigate hate groups romanticizing race war and harboring would-be lone-wolf terrorists. The United States, land of the free, home of the brave, is also home of homegrown terrorism. Terrorism that we encounter on a daily basis.
In fact, according to The Southern Poverty Law Center (“SPLC”), “there are 784 active hate groups in the United States as of 2014.” The SPLC defines hate groups as “groups that have beliefs or practices that malign an entire class of people.” As of today, there are 72 active Ku Klux Klan groups and 142 Neo-Nazi themed groups. Scott Shane of the New York Times, published an article focusing on homegrown extremism and how its grown since the 9/11 attacks. Shane remembers, “Since Sept. 11, 2001, nearly twice as many people have been killed by white supremacists, anti government fanatics and other non-Muslim extremists than by radical Muslims: 48 have been killed by extremists who are not Muslim, including the recent mass killing in Charleston, S.C., compared with 26 by self-proclaimed jihadists…” It’s important for Americans today to decipher reality from fantasy.
Wake up America. Everyone is capable of killing at any place and at any time. Enough fear mongering and spreading of false rhetoric about our Muslim neighbors, friends, and co workers. We must stop perpetuating ideals that view brown people as the only possible terroristic threat.
Understanding that any person, regardless of skin color, has the capability of committing an act of terror, is critical. Not just brown people, or people of a particular faith, but ALL people. Those 784 hate groups operating in the U.S. hold the crucial element to ending domestic terrorism. Yet their existence goes mostly unreported. They pose more of a threat to U.S. citizens than ISIS. As Dr. John G. Horgan, terrorism researcher at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell, notes, “There’s an acceptance now of the idea that the threat from jihadi terrorism in the United States has been overblown [while] the threat of right-wing, antigovernment violence has been underestimated.” This seems abundantly clear from the group of heavily armed white terrorists occupying federal property in Oregon. Terrorists come in all shapes and sizes — choosing to only worry about the perceived threat of Muslim terrorists, in this country is naive and racist.
After 274 days passed in 2015, by October 1, there were 294 mass shootings. Domestic Terrorism is alive and well. Do the names Dylann Roof, Adam Lanza, James Holmes, Jared Loughner, or Robert Dear come to memory? A list of five white male perpetrators of violent, radical, terroristic atrocities does not complete the entire list of mass shootings that took place in the U.S. However, the facts are undeniable; white men commit more acts of terror than any other race. It’s just not reported as such. Recall, white men committed nine of the eleven high-profile gun massacres that have occurred during President Obama’s tenure. CNN’s Dana Ford writes, “According to data compiled by Mother Jones magazine, which looked at mass shootings in the United States since 1982, white people — almost exclusively white men — committed some 64% of the shootings.”
With countless reports of mass shootings nationwide, the U.S leads the developed world in mass shootings. Questions of it ending soon, rise every time a new mass shooting greets us in a movie theatre or grocery store. But the truth is, America’s has it’s own large crop of homegrown “ISIS” like terrorists roaming the streets. Failing to recognize the king of domestic terrorism, the white man, is more fatal than we imagined.
