At a House hearing on white supremacy this past week, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) bluntly addressed the ignorance that many leaders have proven towards the threat of white supremacist violence. Even as the Anti-Defamation League concludes that every single extremism-related death in the United States in 2018 had some kind of link to right-wing extremism, President Donald Trump sits in front of the world and insists he doesn’t think white nationalism is a rising threat and as Ocasio-Cortez pointed out, the white perpetrators of this violence often escape serious, high-profile charges.
On Twitter this weekend she asked:
‘When a mass shooting is committed by a Muslim, the crime is almost automatically labeled as Domestic Terrorism. But when White Supremacists like Dylann Roof shot up a black church, or attack the Tree of Life Synagogue, the FBI declined to charge them w/ Domestic Terrorism. Why?’
When a mass shooting is committed by a Muslim, the crime is almost automatically labeled as Domestic Terrorism.
But when White Supremacists like Dylann Roof shot up a black church, or attack the Tree of Life Synagogue, the FBI declined to charge them w/ Domestic Terrorism.
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) May 18, 2019
The incidents in which Muslims have been behind high-profile violence have consistently garnered terrorism claims, like in the cases of the San Bernardino shooting attack in late 2015 and the mass shooting at Orlando’s Pulse nightclub the following year. However, in between and on top of those incidents, white perpetrators have carried out violence in the name of their race or something similar over and over again — and it’s been swept into the sometimes difficult-to-prosecute category of a hate crime rather than denounced as domestic terrorism, which has a much wider ramification.
As the Congresswoman noted on Twitter:
‘White Supremacists get charged w hate crimes. Muslims get charged w terrorism. This is a HUGE difference. Hate crimes are underreported, deprioritized, + aren’t treated as seriously as domestic terror charges. Yet in the US, Neo-Nazi violence far outnumbers Islamic extremism.’
At the hearing this past week in which she originally led a charge of bringing the issue to the forefront, she heard from figures like Heather Heyer’s mother Susan Bro, who insisted that it’s not enough to be “non-racist,” explaining:
‘Instead, we need to be actually anti-racist… To be anti-racist means to take an active stance of “I am not going to tolerate that in my presence.”‘
There’s going to be a clear chance for Americans to prove their “anti-racism” in the upcoming 2020 presidential election, in which a yet to be determined Democrat will take on Donald Trump, who’s derided immigrants as constituting an “invasion” that Americans should fear.
Check out Twitter’s response below…
Featured Image via screenshot
