White supremacist violence goes unlabeled as terrorism due to actors’ racial identity

Evidence

According to law professor Darin Johnson, “White supremacist terrorism is a rising threat that has been overlooked by national security authorities as a global threat” largely because of the racial identity of the actors and the invisibility and presumption of individuality it garners them. Historian Kathleen Belew traces the origins of the “modern white supremacist movement” in the United States that spawned the likes of Dylann Roof, Stephen Paddock, and Buffalo mass killer Peyton Gendron to the 1960s, when it flourished in the shadows as governments profiled and pursued immigrants, ethnic minorities, and most notably, Muslims. A globalized world, fused together by digital media and social media platforms, connected the American white supremacist movement and counterpart groups in Europe, Australia, and New Zealand; these groups interact frequently, form transnational bonds and organizations, and march toward similar goals. — Khaled A. Beydoun, The New Crusades_ Islamophobia and the…, 922

Categorization

• XREF: Directly feeds the reader’s question about how states share/learn Islamophobic techniques: the same state apparatus that labels Muslim violence terrorism overlookeds white supremacist terror as an act of its own. — connects to: White supremacist violence is analyzed without racial profiling theories. — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 606; Nearly eight in ten US domestic terror attacks in 2018 were white supremacy motivated. — Robert P. Jones, White Too Long: The Legacy of White…, 231
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: do governments anywhere officially designate white supremacist groups as terrorist organizations, and what local legal categories exempt them?
• SEED: An essay angle: the ‘terrorism’ label as a racial-identity instrument rather than a description of violence — who gets it, who is exempted, and what that asymmetry reveals about state ideology.