A few cases all those years ago doesn't stand up against the dozens more white men who committed acts of terror since then and never got dubbed terrorists. When the cops caught the white terrorist who murdered those people in an historically black church, they bought him Burger King. You don't buy terrorists Burger King.
I promise you I'm not talking out of my backside here, this is an unfortunately extremely well documented phenomenon, and I say that as a professional member of the media myself.
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Despite the fact that Charleston Police Chief Greg Mullen said early on that “this is a hate crime” and that a witness reported that suspect Dylann Roof said to the black people he killed, “you rape our women and are taking over our country”, conservative columnist AJ Delgado maintained that the “odds would favor [the crime] NOT being racial”, Republican presidential candidate Lindsey Graham called him a “whacked-out kid” and suggested he was “looking for Christians to kill them, and USA Today referred to him as a “lone wolf”. The Daily Beast described the killer – a man who reportedly sat with a bible study group for an hour before he started to kill people – as “quiet and soft spoken”, averring that he had black friends on Facebook, even as his nine victims remained unnamed and uncelebrated.
The excuses to call a white, male mass-killer anything but “a terrorist” are familiar – they’re part of a refrain repeated over and over again when a horrific crime intended to terrify a group of people is committed by a white man. It’s a refrain of denial. (The same denial happened when Elliot Rodger penned a misogynist manifesto before his killing spree: He’s not sexist, he’s just crazy!)
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Why don't Americans call mass shootings 'terrorism'? Racism | Jessica Valenti | Comment is free | The Guardian
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But listen to major media outlets, and you won’t hear the word “terrorism” used in coverage of Wednesday’s shooting. You haven’t heard the white, male suspect, 21-year-old Dylann Roof, described as “a possible terrorist” by mainstream news organizations (though some, including The Washington Post, have covered the growing debate about this discrepancy). And if coverage of other recent shootings by white men is any indication, he never will be. Instead, the go-to explanation for his alleged actions will be mental illness. He will be humanized and called sick, a victim of mistreatment or inadequate mental health resources.
That narrative has formed quickly for Roof. Soon after his arrest Thursday, former FBI special agent Jonathan Gilliam appeared on CNN, saying that Roof probably “has some mental issues” and didn’t know he had done anything wrong. That is the power of whiteness in America.
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