Calling Dylann Roof a 'terrorist' doesn't erase the privilege of his race
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Version 0 of 1. White men can stray, be violent, indulge in excesses – even murder – without having us publicly label their race responsible. It is a privilege, therefore, to be an individual whose crime society writes off as a crime of illness, of passion, of mental instability, of personal hate: a crime that is never endemic to white culture, religion or secularity. Why not see a relationship between white supremacy and the west in the same way we see terrorism and Islam? The former has killed more, influenced more, institutionalised more hate, radicalised more youth, and yet there has never been a war on its terror. Related: Black churches taught us to forgive white people. We learned to shame ourselves | Kiese Laymon In response to the reluctance of media to label Dylann Roof a “terrorist”, the debate on Twitter about white privilege reflects a history of discomfort of white subjects in seeing themselves as “raced”. A process that disrupts the normality of their humanness, yet a disruption that coloured people constantly live with. The white gaze thus roams freely in labelling the black, Muslim, Asian, Indigenous “other”. It only randomly – if ever – labels itself. It works best in marking others through collectively characterising their foreignness. Here, debates about Roof’s apparent mental illness, his life on drugs, his loneliness and his troubled childhood, are a substitute; his illness becomes what is “Muslim” about Muslims, a story we give to explain how he exists beyond our civilised norms. Beyond highlighting hypocrisy, to name Roof as a terrorist runs the risk of encountering another white privilege: colour blindness. Consider Fox News’s Bill O’Reilly, who made the claim that Roof’s act is an act of terror “no different than Isis”. Of course, what O’Reilly will not be doing is spending 10 years helping construct a “war on whiteness”, or engage in amateur Christian theology to explain white supremacy, as he and others have done with Islam. It is simply a chosen moment before the obvious facts of Roof’s motive to him to perform objectivity. White privilege is allowed to choose when and how we concede and address the massive bias associated with being white. That is a privilege coloured minorities are not afforded. It is easy for us to ignore whiteness’s structural and racial inequalities that shape black and Indigenous lives, to claim we only oppose criminality – no mater who does it – and thus only confront racism when these inequalities culture violent killers or nasty incidents on public transport. These self-reflective moments of condemning racists, while ignoring racism, give us a teary-filled sense of our humanity, all while we enjoy the material benefits that racism has given through centuries of inhumane exploitation. Australia is no stranger to such performances. We commonly cry foul at the horrid past treatment of Indigenous Australians, while saying less about how that past materially shaped this future and its current distribution of white privileges. Racism is a far greater threat to our future than terrorism. To be sure, it is not my point to deny that Roof is a terrorist. According to reports, he was a troubled child and maybe it’s somewhat a proper response to engage in discussions on exploring “why” he did what he did; to discuss both the history of white supremacy alongside his troubled individual past without making a single excuse for his horrid act of hate. It is only my point to suggest that we do not reverse white privileges by calling Roof a terrorist, because white is not like any other racial identity. It’s not one race competing among others. The function that whiteness as a social identity performs is to momentarily dissolve other social differences – sex, age, class, region and nation – into a fantasy of crisis. The “white people” which is constructed by this crisis is taken to have more in common with each other than they do with anyone else. They particularly have in common an insecurity about black people, Asians, Jews and Muslims. Related: Agreeing to remove the Confederate flag isn't courageous. It's just politics | Jeb Lund White is the framing position: a dominant and normative space against which we measure and label difference, a point from which societies make judgments, about our normality and abnormality. Here we touch on a well-rehearsed theme: the capacity of power to make itself appear natural, normal and invisible. Calling Roof a terrorist will not make visible the stories of the “other” we have neglected to tell; it will not ensure an equal share of judgment. What is more important is to give all those who commit crimes the privilege of explaining their hatred, through a politics, an analysis, and as a departure from their foreignness – not a symptom of it. |