Whiteness served as a racial passport granting Tarrant proprietorship over a foreign land.

Evidence

In Tarrant’s mind, and in the white supremacist imagination, claims to land are not a historical but a purely racial matter. This was true when English colonialists wiped out Australia and New Zealand’s indigenous populations from their soil and true when Tarrant—a foreign national traveling to New Zealand—walked into the two Christchurch mosques and killed fifty-one citizens and legal residents. … Tarrant was the visitor traveling to a foreign country. Yet his whiteness enabled a fluid and invisible transition, without the markings of “foreignness” and “immigrant” ascribed to Brown Muslims, even those who are full-fledged citizens. His Muslim victims were, legally and physically, at home. However, in his mind, the only formal status that mattered was his white skin. That was his racial passport, and in his mind it made him proprietor of a foreign land. The fifty-one Muslims he gunned down, who were supremely diverse in terms of race and ethnicity, were racially flattened as nonwhite as a consequence of their Muslim identity. Islam and whiteness were warring rivals, according to the old Crusades, and have been more forcefully framed as such by a white supremacist movement that integrates the civilizational tropes of the War on Terror into its worldview. — Khaled A. Beydoun, The New Crusades_ Islamophobia and the…, 909

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to The Reluctant Fundamentalist’s treatment of the racialized foreigner and to post-9/11 citizenship debates.
• ADDENDUM: Extends the ‘on sacrifice’ and worldbuilding logic to contemporary racial violence — the corpse-making logic of Christchurch.