with Nura A. Sedique for an issue of the “Harvard Civil Rights – Civil Liberties Law Review” that was published last month.The title of the article is a play on words, so it refers to the “great replacement theory,” speaking about this rising tide of White anxiety that’s pushing, in many respects, this White supremacist violence that we see because White folks feel as if Brown, Black, immigrants are replacing them. That’s the central thesis of the original “great replacement theory.
Also, let’s say the Department of Homeland Security, or the executive branch at large, chooses to focus in on White supremacy as this new front of terrorism—how does that indemnify these institutions themselves that also perpetuate White supremacy? A distinct form of legal and political White supremacy? Those are some critiques that we have.
It’s institutional culture. The fact that within these institutions there is already a sort of established understanding that we see terrorism specifically through the anatomy of the Muslim terrorist, is deeply entrenched. It’s been perpetuated by news media, perpetuated by film and television. There needs to be a cultural shift that reconditions how these institutions and the individuals who work at these institutions imagine terrorism, and then police terrorism, and then enforce it.
I think there needs to be a neutral definition about how we think about terrorism, apart from the political subjectivity of individuals who occupy positions of power. Again, if you strip down the definition of what terrorism is, it’s mass violence motivated by some sort of political ideology. That is terrorism. It can be liberal in nature, it can be anarchist in nature, it can be religiously inspired, it can be politically inspired.