white.

a moment of clarity.

words.

"...While a terrorist may be white, his violence is never based in his whiteness. A white terrorist has unique, complicated motives that we will never comprehend. He can be a disturbed loner or a monster. He is either mentally ill or pure evil. The white terrorist exists solely as a dyad of extremes: Either he is humanized to the point of sympathy or he is so monstrous that he almost becomes mythological. Either way, he is never indicative of anything larger about whiteness, nor is he ever a garden-variety racist. He represents nothing but himself. A white terrorist is anything that frames him as an anomaly and separates him from the long, storied history of white terrorism.

...If white violence is unspoken and unacknowledged, if white terrorists are either saints or demons, we don’t have to grapple with the much more complicated reality of racial violence. In our time, racialized terror no longer announces itself in white hoods and robes. You can be a 21-year-old who has many black Facebook friends and tells harmless racist jokes and still commit an act of horrifying racial violence. We cannot separate ourselves from the monsters because the monsters don’t exist. The monsters have been human all along..."

THE NEW YORK TIMES: White Terrorism Is as Old as America

SEE ALSO:

SLATE: Brow Beat Slate's Culture Blog June 19 2015 3:07 PM Larry Wilmore’s Takedown of Fox News’ Charleston Coverage Was Exactly What We Needed

ROLLING STONE: The Charleston Shooter: Racist, Violent, and Yes Political

THE NEW YORKER: Charleston and the Age of Obama