There is a double standard: White terrorists
are dealt with as lone wolves, Islamists are existential threats
By David Sirota
Topics:
Racism,
Xenophobia,
Boston Explosions,
U.S. foreign policy,
Immigration Reform,
Muslims,
Editor's Picks,
White people,
male,
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Politics News
As we
now move into the official Political Aftermath period of the Boston
bombing — the period that will determine the long-term legislative
fallout of the atrocity — the dynamics of privilege will undoubtedly
influence the nation’s collective reaction to the attacks. That’s
because privilege tends to determine: 1) which groups are — and are not —
collectively denigrated or targeted for the unlawful actions of
individuals; and 2) how big and politically game-changing the overall
reaction ends up being.
This has been most obvious in the context
of recent mass shootings. In those awful episodes, a religious or ethnic
minority group lacking such privilege would likely be collectively
slandered and/or targeted with surveillance or profiling (or worse) if
some of its individuals comprised most of the mass shooters. However,
white male privilege
means white men are not collectively denigrated/targeted for those
shootings — even though most come at the hands of white dudes.
Likewise,
in the context of terrorist attacks, such privilege means white
non-Islamic terrorists are typically portrayed not as representative of
whole groups or ideologies, but as “lone wolf” threats to be dealt with
as isolated law enforcement matters. Meanwhile, non-white or
developing-world terrorism suspects are often reflexively portrayed as
representative of larger conspiracies, ideologies and religions that
must be dealt with as systemic threats — the kind potentially requiring
everything from law enforcement action to military operations to civil
liberties legislation to foreign policy shifts.
“White privilege
is knowing that even if the bomber turns out to be white, no one will
call for your group to be profiled as terrorists as a result, subjected
to special screening or threatened with deportation,” writes author
Tim Wise.
“White privilege is knowing that if this bomber turns out to be white,
the United States government will not bomb whatever corn field or
mountain town or stale suburb from which said bomber came, just to
ensure that others like him or her don’t get any ideas. And if he turns
out to be a member of the Irish Republican Army we won’t bomb Dublin.
And if he’s an Italian-American Catholic we won’t bomb the Vatican.”
Because
of these undeniable and pervasive double standards, the specific
identity of the Boston Marathon bomber (or bombers) is not some minor
detail — it will almost certainly dictate what kind of governmental,
political and societal response we see in the coming weeks. That means
regardless of your particular party affiliation, if you care about
everything from stopping war to reducing the defense budget to
protecting civil liberties to passing immigration reform, you should
hope the bomber was a white domestic terrorist. Why? Because only in
that case will privilege work to prevent the Boston attack from
potentially undermining progress on those other issues.
To know that’s true is to simply consider how America reacts to different kinds of terrorism.
Though
FBI data
show fewer terrorist plots involving Muslims than terrorist plots
involving non-Muslims, America has mobilized a full-on war effort
exclusively against the prospect of Islamic terrorism. Indeed, the
moniker “War on Terrorism” has come to specifically mean “War on Islamic
Terrorism,” involving everything from new laws like the Patriot Act, to
a
new torture regime,
to new federal agencies like the Transportation Security Administration
and Department of Homeland Security, to wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to
mass surveillance of Muslim communities.
By contrast, even though America has seen a
consistent barrage
of attacks from domestic non-Islamic terrorists, the privilege and
double standards baked into our national security ideologies means those
attacks have resulted in no systemic action of the scope marshaled
against foreign terrorists. In fact, it has been quite the opposite —
according to
Darryl Johnson,
the senior domestic terrorism analyst at the Department of Homeland
Security, the conservative movement backlash to merely reporting the
rising threat of such domestic terrorism resulted in DHS seriously
curtailing its initiatives against that particular threat. (Irony alert:
When it comes specifically to fighting white non-Muslim domestic
terrorists, the right seems to now support the very doctrine it
criticized Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry for
articulating
— the doctrine that sees fighting terrorism as primarily “an
intelligence-gathering, law-enforcement, public-diplomacy effort” and
not something more systemic.)
Enter the Boston bombing. Coming at the very moment the U.S. government is planning to
withdraw from Afghanistan, considering
cuts to the Pentagon budget, discussing
civil liberties principles
and debating landmark immigration legislation, the attack could easily
become the fulcrum of all of those contentious policy debates — that is,
depending on the demographic profile of the assailant.
If recent
history is any guide, if the bomber ends up being a white
anti-government extremist, white privilege will likely mean the attack
is portrayed as just an isolated incident — one that has no bearing on
any larger policy debates. Put another way, white privilege will work to
not only insulate whites from collective blame, but also to insulate
the political debate from any fallout from the attack.
It will
probably be much different if the bomber ends up being a Muslim and/or a
foreigner from the developing world. As we know from our own history,
when those kind of individuals break laws in such a high-profile way,
America often cites them as both proof that entire demographic groups
must be targeted, and that therefore a more systemic response is
warranted. At that point, it’s easy to imagine conservatives citing
Boston as a reason to block immigration reform defense spending cuts and
the Afghan War withdrawal and to further expand surveillance and other
encroachments on civil liberties.
If that sounds hard to believe, just look at yesterday’s comments by right-wing radio host
Laura Ingraham,
whose talking points often become Republican Party doctrine. Though
authorities haven’t even identified a suspect in the Boston attack, she (
like other conservatives)
seems to already assume the assailant is foreign, and is consequently
citing the attack as rationale to slam the immigration reform bill.
The same Laura Ingraham, of course, was one of the leading voices
criticizing
the Department of Homeland Security for daring to even report on
right-wing domestic terrorism. In that sense, she perfectly embodies the
double standard that, more than anything, will determine the long-term
political impact of the Boston bombing.
Timothy McVeigh, Osama Bin Laden(Credit: AP/David Longstreath)
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