The Right Shade of Terrorism
Why an Afghan gunman indicts a nation, but a white assassin is just a “lone wolf.”
Whenever there is a shooting, every Black and Brown person holds their breath and quietly hopes the shooter is white. It sounds awful, I know. But we have a very real reason. Let me explain.
Last month, a gunman ambushed two National Guard soldiers near the White House. Within hours, the alleged shooter was identified as Rahmanullah Lakanwal, an Afghan national. The next moves were brutally predictable.
“This heinous assault was an act of evil, an act of hatred, and an act of terror. It was a crime against our entire nation. It was a crime against humanity.” –Donald Trump
Almost immediately, the Trump administration froze Afghan-related immigration requests, halted visa processing for Afghan passport holders, and even paused asylum decisions across the board “pending review.” The State Department and immigration agencies announced new checks on Afghans already in the country.
One man pulled a trigger. Millions of Afghans suddenly found their lives and status under suspicion.
Now compare that to what happened just a month and a half earlier, when conservative activist Charlie Kirk was assassinated during a university speaking event. The alleged shooter in that case is a young white American man. The political right exploded with rhetoric about “leftist violence” and a “war on conservatives,” and Trump blamed “radical left lunatics” and “woke extremists” for poisoning young minds.
But notice what did not happen. No one in power suggested that young white men as a group are a security threat. No one called for a national registry of white males. No one proposed a pause on immigration from Europe. The blame landed on the shooter’s supposed ideology, not on his race or ancestry.
This is the American double standard in one short line: When a member of the majority commits political violence, we scrutinize their beliefs. When a member of a racialized minority does, we scrutinize their entire community.
The Mechanism of Blame: The Privilege of Individuality
To see how this works, you have to look not just at what people condemn, but how they condemn it.
Conservatives can point to the Kirk assassination and say: “Look, the shooter was denounced. People blamed leftist networks and campus culture. White men do get blamed.”
But that confuses two very different things: ideological blame and identity blame.
When a white, American-born shooter commits an atrocity, the story is almost always framed as personal perversion or ideological extremism. In the Kirk case, commentators went after the shooter’s beliefs. They said he was driven by anti-conservative hatred or some “woke brainwashing.” He was denounced as a violent leftist yet still treated as fundamentally an individual who made an evil choice.
So, the proposed solutions stay narrow and institutional. Crack down on “Antifa.” Investigate campus professors. Audit university diversity programs. Fund more mental health services. In that story, his whiteness, his ancestry, and his religion are background noise.
Now change the perpetrator’s identity.
When a Muslim or immigrant suspect commits violence, the narrative shifts from what he believes to what he is. The act is no longer “one man’s crime.” It becomes a data point in a supposed civilizational threat. Violence is painted as something baked into “their” culture, “their” religion, “their” homeland.
The proposed solutions scale up accordingly. Surveillance of mosques. Travel bans and refugee freezes. Loyalty tests. Extra vetting for entire nationalities. The suspicion jumps from the individual to millions of people who did nothing.
That split creates a kind of unspoken social power most white Americans never have to name: the privilege of individuality.
As Dalia Mogahed of ISPU puts it, “White people don’t face collective criminalization when ‘one of them’ behaves badly.” When a white man commits a monstrous act, other white people do not wake up the next morning wondering if they will be asked to condemn him on TV, prove their patriotism, or have their citizenship re-examined.
White violence is treated as a glitch in the system. Minority violence is treated as a virus in the blood.
One is framed as a problem of persons. The other is framed as a problem of people.
The Media’s Linguistic Gymnastics
This is not just vibes. It is measurable.
A landmark study of 136 terrorist attacks in the United States between 2006 and 2015 found that attacks committed by Muslims received about 4½ times more coverage—roughly 357 percent more—than those by non-Muslims, even when the number of victims was similar. Muslims carried out about one-eighth of the attacks in that period. They dominated the headlines.
In other words, when the perpetrator is Muslim, the story is far more likely to become a national spectacle. When the perpetrator is not, the story is far more likely to stay local or fade faster. The bias is not just in volume. It shows up in vocabulary.
Researchers comparing media coverage of the 2015 Charleston church massacre by Dylann Roof and the 2016 Orlando Pulse nightclub shooting by Omar Mateen found a stark pattern. Roof, who murdered nine Black worshippers in a historic Black church, was more often framed in terms of mental health, personal troubles, or loneliness. Mateen, who killed 49 mostly queer and Latinx clubgoers, was far more likely to be described with words like “terrorism” and “terrorist.”
Same mass murder. Same country. Different labels, depending on the perpetrator.
The language moves in other ways too:
Passive voice. When white attackers kill, headlines often blur agency: “Tragedy at a church,” “Officer-involved shooting,” “Clash turns deadly.” The violence seems to descend from nowhere.
The troubled loner story. Reporters dig into the white perpetrator’s childhood, family issues, job loss, or psychiatric history. The violence becomes a personal breakdown more than a political act.
The T-word as a trigger. When corporate media and officials use the word “terrorism,” it unlocks the full national security toolkit: surveillance authorities, special prosecutions, terrorism watchlists, immigration crackdowns. When they avoid the word, those tools tend to stay in their holster.
Same dead bodies. Different labels. Completely different consequences.
A Short History of the “Lone Wolf” Pass
For more than two decades, the deadliest extremist violence on U.S. soil has not come from foreign jihadists. It has come from homegrown white supremacists and far-right extremists. Yet again and again, the official story has been that these are “lone wolves” or “disturbed individuals,” not part of a larger terror movement.
A few examples:
Charleston (2015). Dylann Roof, a 21-year-old white supremacist, walked into Mother Emanuel AME Church and murdered nine Black worshippers during Bible study. He published a racist manifesto, posed with Confederate and apartheid flags, and said he wanted to start a race war. If a Muslim man citing ISIS propaganda had done the same thing, there is no serious doubt that “terrorism” would have led every headline. Instead, the FBI Director at the time described it as a hate crime, not domestic terrorism.
Overland Park (2014). A 73-year-old former KKK leader attacked Jewish community sites in Kansas, killing three people and shouting “Heil Hitler.” By any plain language definition, this was terrorism: political violence against civilians to advance a racist ideology. Yet media coverage tended to call it a “shooting rampage,” and prosecutors used murder and hate crime charges, not any terror-related statute.
Charlottesville (2017). At the Unite the Right rally, neo-Nazi James Alex Fields used his car as a weapon, plowing into anti-racist protesters, killing Heather Heyer and injuring dozens. Vehicle ramming is the exact tactic that ISIS encouraged its supporters to use in Western cities. When Muslims did it, those attacks were universally branded terrorism. Fields was condemned and eventually convicted on hate crime and murder charges, but there was no federal domestic terrorism charge to file. Trump responded by claiming there were “very fine people on both sides,” softening the perception of the rally and its participants.
Pittsburgh (2018). At the Tree of Life synagogue, a white supremacist murdered 11 Jewish worshippers during Shabbat services. He had ranted online about Jews “bringing invaders” into the country, echoing the “Great Replacement” and “invasion” rhetoric heard in mainstream politics. The attack had every hallmark of terrorism: civilian targets, ideological motive, intent to terrorize a community. Federal prosecutors sought the death penalty under hate crime and civil rights statutes, but not under any specific domestic terror law.
Taken together, the pattern is hard to ignore:
When the perpetrator is white and American, even open ideological violence is treated as a one-off tragedy or “hate crime case.”
The number of people killed does not fundamentally change that framing.
The ideology behind the killing does not automatically trigger a national security response.
What does change the response is the identity of the shooter. If he is coded as one of “us,” the system tries to contain and compartmentalize the event. If he is coded as “them,” the system generalizes and mobilizes.
This “lone wolf” pass has persisted even as white supremacist and far-right violence has become the most lethal extremist threat in the United States in the post-9/11 era, according to both government and independent research. Remember: this isn’t the system broken, it’s the system acting as designed.
The “Legal Gap” Is Not an Alibi
When you point this out, some defenders of the status quo (cough-libs-cough) reach for a technical argument:
“We don’t call white shooters ‘terrorists’ because there is no domestic terrorism law. Our hands are tied.”
There is a grain of truth here. Federal law defines “domestic terrorism” in 18 U.S.C. § 2331(5), and agencies like the FBI and DHS use that definition for investigations and reporting. But there is no general federal crime simply called “domestic terrorism.” Prosecutors usually rely on hate crime laws, civil rights statutes, weapons offenses, and murder charges.
By contrast, when there is a foreign or jihadist connection, the government has an entire specialized toolbox. There are “material support” charges for aiding designated foreign terrorist organizations, immigration bars and deportation tools tied to terrorism, foreign intelligence authorities, and terrorism enhancements at sentencing.
So yes, there is a legal gap. But we have to ask a basic question: who designed this gap, and who does it serve?
DHS and the FBI have been warning for years that white supremacist and anti-government extremists pose the most persistent and lethal domestic terror threat. Think tanks like CSIS have documented the same trend, and legal scholars have drafted model domestic terror statutes to close the charging gap.
Congress has still not passed a comprehensive domestic terrorism law.
That is not a natural disaster. It is a political choice. Lawmakers worry that a broad domestic terror statute could be turned on their own base or used against protesters and social movements. Rather than admit that, they hide behind the “no statute” excuse.
And even without a specific charge, nothing prevents officials or media from using plain language. The FBI has internally categorized several white supremacist attacks as domestic terrorism. Prosecutors have described defendants like Coast Guard officer Christopher Hasson, who stockpiled weapons and drafted hit lists of politicians, as “domestic terrorists” in court filings even when they charged other crimes.
If Charleston, Pittsburgh, El Paso, and Buffalo had involved Muslim perpetrators, nobody would hesitate to call them terrorism. The reluctance to use that same word consistently for white supremacist violence is not required by law. It is produced by politics.
The law does not erase the double standard. In many ways, the law is the double standard, written down.
El Paso and Buffalo: Naming Terror Without Consequences
By the late 2010s, some white supremacist attacks had become too big and too clearly ideological to shove under the “lone wolf” rug. El Paso and Buffalo forced the word “terrorism” into public statements.
El Paso (2019). A 21-year-old white man drove to a Walmart in El Paso and opened fire, killing 23 people and wounding dozens more. He posted a manifesto about a “Hispanic invasion,” echoing the Great Replacement conspiracy theory. Federal authorities quickly said they were treating the massacre as both a hate crime and an act of domestic terrorism.
Yet when the indictment came down, it was built from familiar pieces: hate crimes and firearms charges, not some overarching domestic terrorism statute, because no such charge exists. He ultimately faced multiple life sentences, but the case was prosecuted as a particularly horrific crime, not as a blueprint for a broader war on white nationalist terror.
Buffalo (2022). In a Black neighborhood in Buffalo, an 18-year-old white supremacist live-streamed himself murdering ten Black people at a Tops supermarket. He left a manifesto steeped in Great Replacement rhetoric. New York State charged him with first-degree murder and with a new offense: “domestic act of terrorism motivated by hate.” Federally, he faced hate crime and weapons charges.
President Biden flew to Buffalo and explicitly called the attack “domestic terrorism” driven by white supremacy. DHS reports and intelligence assessments now openly list racially motivated violent extremism, especially white supremacy, as a top threat.
On the surface, this looked like progress. Finally, white supremacist massacres were being named as terrorism.
But look at what did not follow. After El Paso, nobody argued that young white men should be profiled at gun stores or on social media. After Buffalo, there were no calls to pause visas from majority-white countries. White Americans as a demographic were not discussed as a suspect class.
Instead, the focus went to online platforms and fringe forums. That matters, and those systems should be scrutinized. But even in those discussions, there is a tendency to frame white shooters as somewhat tragic figures: isolated, vulnerable, groomed by algorithms, poisoned by extremist communities. That psychological nuance is almost never extended to 19-year-old jihadis.
So yes, the word “terrorism” has finally appeared more often when white supremacists massacre Black or Brown communities. That is a rhetorical step forward.
Yet for white perpetrators, “terrorism” often functions as a symbolic label. It helps acknowledge the horror without dragging along the full machinery of group suspicion and structural overhaul. For Muslims, Arabs, Afghans, and other racialized groups, the terrorism label still tends to come bundled with bans, registries, and collective punishment.
El Paso and Buffalo forced America to whisper the truth: white supremacist violence is terrorism. Liberals are quick to parrot this truth, but where is the legislation that addresses it?
“Terrorism”: The Language of the Oppressor
Here is the part this country keeps dodging:
“Terrorism” is not a neutral word waiting to be applied fairly. It was built inside empire and white supremacy. In practice it has never meant “anyone who uses violence against civilians for political ends.” It has meant their violence, as opposed to ours.
The same act can be “counterinsurgency,” “national defense,” or “a regrettable tragedy” when we do it, and “terrorism” when they do it. The label doesn’t just describe a tactic. It assigns legitimacy. It says: their violence is barbaric and irrational; ours is unfortunate but necessary. Their dead are a security problem; our dead are a national wound.
So the answer is not simply to stuff more people into the terrorism box. Expanding the label without questioning it just enlarges a category that was designed from the start to police certain bodies and spare others. The real work is to expose who the word has always been for and whose violence it has always excused.
Right now, “national security” in practice often means “protecting us from them.” “Them” is almost always imagined as foreign, Brown, Muslim, immigrant. While we pour resources into surveilling refugee families and scrutinizing names that sound Muslim, we risk missing the growing threat in our own backyard.
That does not make us safer. It is political theater that plays on fear of the Other.
Real security would mean:
Placing white supremacist and far-right violence at the center of the ‘terrorism’ category, not at the margins, if we insist on using the term.
Refusing to scapegoat any group, whether Muslims, Afghans, immigrants, white people, or Christians, for crimes they did not commit.
Building laws and institutions that treat conduct as the trigger for serious scrutiny, not race or passport.
Real justice means refusing the premise that any community is born suspect. It means treating violence as something people do, not something they are. It means dismantling the systems that let white gunmen keep the privilege of individuality while Muslims, migrants, and Black and Brown communities live under permanent group suspicion.
It also means being honest about the word we’ve built so much of this around. “Terrorism” is not a neutral description waiting to be applied fairly. It’s a political tool, shaped by empire and white supremacy, used to criminalize some people’s violence and rationalize other people’s. The problem isn’t that it occasionally fails to keep us safe. It was never designed for safety. It was designed to sort the world into people whose lives are expendable and people whose fear can be weaponized.
As long as Black and Brown people have to hold their breath after every headline and quietly hope the shooter is white, we haven’t fixed anything. We’ve just updated the branding on the same old hierarchy.
The task isn’t to reform the “war on terror.” It’s to end the idea that security requires a permanent enemy class.