Dylann Roof being escorted by police. Demotix/The Shelby Star. All rights reserved.In the wake of the November 13 2015 attacks by IS in Paris, like the Charlie Hebdo attacks on January 7 before them, we heard the increasingly familiar accusations that most Muslims are supporters of terrorism, if not terrorists themselves, and demands for Muslims to prove the opposite by apologising, denouncing terrorism and terrorists, locating their moderates and fixing their communities and religion.
In the wake of the shooting of five African Americans at a Black Lives Matter protest in Minneapolis, Minnesota by alleged white supremacists on November 24, like the shooting at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina on June 17 by Dylann Roof before it, we heard many ask why is it not called terrorism when white people do it? This was reiterated, with ‘Christian’ replacing or added to ‘white’, following the attack on the Planned Parenthood clinic by Robert Lewis Dear in Colorado Springs, Colorado on November 27.
This claim/question and attempts to identify ‘white terrorism’ has been the focus of memes and the #whiteterrorism hashtag on Twitter, and developed in posts from Tim Wise, and articles such as Big Think’s ‘Why does the media refuse to call white murderers terrorists? and Salon’s ‘Why is it always the white guy’ and ‘Let’s deport the white males?’. One Senator, Sherrod Brown (D-OH), also added his voice, saying about terrorists: ‘Normally, they look more like me than they look like Middle Easterners … [t]hey are generally white males, who have shot up people in movie theaters and schools.’
