A WHITE TERRORIST. SUZETTE DORRIELAN, LCC ALLUMNI 2017.
If there has ever been a terrorist attack or mass shooting in your city or country and you are white, it’s doubtful you’ve had to experience the anxiety-fuelled mental machinations that people of colour do. First there’s the shock and fear upon hearing the news. That’s universal. And of course the relief that you or your loved ones weren’t harmed. But the difference in how a POC will react is that a single statement will pop into your head in those early moments: I hope they aren’t [insert personal racial or religious identity here]. That thought hangs over you until you get confirmation on the attacker’s identity. You silently begin to prepare for the worst case scenario. The looks you’ll get on the street. The poorly veiled rhetoric attacking your group in the media. The physical or verbal assaults that, more so these days, is not out of realm of possibility. If the attacker is white, relief washes over you briefly. It’s a quick moment followed by a more tangible and much more extended feeling of resentment of having to feel that way at all, knowing that your white counterparts didn’t experience any of the fear or paranoia that has become second nature to you. Worse still is the knowledge that white people will be unfazed, unmoved and unmotivated by the occurrence. Their personal lives aren’t affected at all by the notion of a white terrorist. And here you were ready to change your route to work or contemplated going without your hijab to “blend” in.
A white terrorist is never an indictment of white people has a whole. And it shouldn’t for reasons like common sense, human decency and that assumptions based on race, skin tone or religion is the shallowest means of judging personal character and doesn’t reflect the modern society we claim to be. But as many know, the same can’t be said for Muslim, Asian or Black people. A criminal of any of these identities are marked exclusively by that identity. The media fuels this by offering one-dimensional coverage steeped in centuries’ worth of racialised stereotyping. America’s first feature film Birth of a Nation cemented the “black brute” construct that has persisted as a reason for persecution for 102 years. Likewise, French, English and American Orientalism has been the basis for the pernicious imagery we see of Muslims and Arabs in the news media, film, novels and even art around the world. The ways in which this imagery has been used by governments in policy, like say the ill-fated War on Terror, is a study in the symbiotic relationship between the media and the government, where both use one another to inform their praxis (see Lance Bennett’s theory on indexing). It is also just one facet of institutionalised racism, where whiteness is rendered invisible in Western society. To the point we ignore the benefits – large and small – that come with being white. Like never having think or say I hope they aren’t white...
