Placing labels on groups sometimes backfires on targets
Any incident of mass violence throws up certain inevitable tensions in newsrooms. What to label the perpetrator?
Until not so long ago, the news media uncritically ran with the labels that came from politicians who deferred to security agencies who in turn had a vested interest in the social narrative around the incident. This was why certain events were given certain designations and in short order began to be exclusively associated with certain identities.
Terrorist: Muslim, foreigners. Think al- Qaida or Islamic State types, but any visible Muslim could be perceived as being sympathetic to them.
Homegrown terrorist: Muslims, citizens of the West. ( How were they radicalized despite growing up amid all this innocence?)
Gangs: Consisting of Black thugs, involved with drugs, guns.
Cartels: Latin Americans, narcotics.
White supremacists: Yahoos, poor, uneducated. And, during the reign of Donald Trump: Trumpists.
Notice the sleight of hand in that turn to elitism? How smoothly those terms take identity out of the picture and offer excuses instead.
It is no wonder then that people on the receiving end of unfair labels rebelled. Was that van driver a white terrorist? Was the mass shooting an act of white terrorism?
It’s an argument that has been renewed with vigour in the wake of white supremacists storming the U. S. Capitol Building Wednesday in defiance of an election that kicked out their leader, and led to the question: are white supremacists terrorists?
On Thursday, U. S. presidentelect Joe Biden called them “domestic terrorists” and said tackling domestic terrorism would now be a priority. Across the northern border, NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh launched a petition asking the prime minister to ban and designate the Proud Boys as a terrorist organization. “( Wednesday) was an act of domestic terrorism,” Singh tweeted. “The Proud Boys helped execute it. Their founder is Canadian. They operate in Canada, right now. And, I am calling for them to be designated as a terrorist organization, immediately.”
On the surface, this appears like fairness in motion. It might explain why the petition got so much support that the website crashed.
White supremacists terrorize people, but consider the terrorist label through another lens. Whowill it actually penalize?
Voicing what she called “an unpopular opinion” on Twitter, Harsha Walia, executive director of the British Columbia Civil Liberties Association, said: “Let me be clear that calling for the expansion ( of terrorism designation) to white supremacists won’t work.”
Walia, who has long been a community organizer supporting migrant communities and Indigenous land defenders, called laws around terrorism designation “fundamentally regressive.”
“I know anti- terror legal infrastructure is rotten by design.”
That infrastructure includes tighter border controls in the name of national security. Traditionally, that has led to racial profiling at the borders, targeted at non- white people, especially those perceived as Muslims. Treating them as suspicious outsiders then leads to increased surveillance, which requires funding, which means increasing police budgets.
The alienation legitimizes societal debates around criminalizing aspects of these “outsiders’ ” cultures, with policies such as banning articles of clothing ( looking at you, Quebec) and legal tools such as security certificates to detain and deport foreigners and permanent residents the country deems a security threat. In a violation of the basic principles of justice, the government can deem someone suspicious based on secret evidence that even the accused cannot access. Detainees in Canada have been stuck in legal limbo for years.
As we saw from the blatant police inaction against political rioters Wednesday, the security apparatus is simply not equipped to racially profile the “yahoos.”
Not when those yahoos included off- duty police officers and members of the military who flashed their badges and ID cards in an attempt to gain entry.
Canadian Armed Forces and police forces already count among their members those with active ties to neo- Nazi and far- right groups.
Even if our security agencies were equipped to do so, even if they were fine impartial defenders of public security who could identify domestic terrorists by sight, putting the shoe on the other foot is not the solution. We can’t claim to seek a world of dignified equality and actively seek to expand oppressive policies that will surely boomerang.
The “global war on terror and its ongoing aftermath must be dismantled, not bolstered,” Walia said.
Calling white supremacists terrorists and inviting stronger anti- terrorism measures will also likely criminalize legitimate protesters by turning them even more easily into peace disturbers and security threats.
“On the contrary, if we call them white supremacists, naming their movement as what it is, it demands a solution specific to that problem,” tweeted Lea Kayali, a digital communications manager at the American Civil Liberties Union. “Truth- telling. Reparations. Facing our history as a nation founded on white supremacy and dismantling it bit by bit.”