which included reports of multiple gunmen and that the police had shot Page, details began to emerge about the shooter. He was a US Army veteran whose tattoo-covered body read “like a poster text for white nationalism.”24 Page had been a member of a white power skinhead organization. The Hammerskins—which includes a (self-characterized) clandestine group of supporters called Crew 38—formed in Dallas, Texas, in 1988 and is an integral part of the white power music scene. Himself a guitarist and vocalist in a variety of “hatecore” bands (e.g., Celtic Warrior, Intimidation One, Aggressive Force, Blue Eyed Devils, and End Apathy), Page had been on the radar of various watchdog agencies for some time. The FBI announced early on that it was investigating the shooting as an act of domestic terrorism.25
The United States has an endemic history of both systemic racial oppression as well as hate- and bias-motivated crime that includes intimidation, assault, vandalism, arson, and murder. The racist right to which the Hammerskins are tied is made up of a diverse set of organizations and networks. Sociologists Pete Simi and Robert Futrell divide the movement along four branches—the Ku Klux Klan, Christian Identity and neo-Pagan racists, Neo-Nazis, and racist skinheads. While not without their disagreements, conflicts, and debates, these branches have migrated, mixed, and overlapped in a variety of ways. Before the end of the Cold War connections between groups began to solidify under the banner of RaHoWa (Racial Holy War), facilitating the movement of individuals and iconography between groups. For example, the contemporary KKK is involved in the racist music scene and has itself “Nazified” through the adoption of Neo-Nazi symbols. Also, in the mid- to late 1980s skinheads began to incorporate Nazi ideals and were themselves recruited into other groups. The Hammerskins are a part of this mixture. It is perhaps ironic that one of their founding members met Tom Metzger (founder of the White Aryan Resistance) during a taping of the Oprah Winfrey Show (February 4, 1988), which led to increased connections between the groups as well as the more active presence of the Hammerskins in the white supremacist movement as a whole.26
The distinction between hate crimes and terrorism is difficult to ascertain. The Southern Poverty Law Center, for instance, does not have a strict protocol regarding the distinct use of each term. Rather, it follows the FBI definition of “hate crime” and labels attacks it feels are politically motivated as terrorism on a case-by-case basis, admitting that there can be overlap.27 Perhaps the crucial difference is to be found in the communicative aspect of terrorism. That is, one might hypothetically murder someone of a particular race, for example, motivated by prejudices one personally holds, and perhaps without the intent of sending a message to a broader audience. However, this distinction is problematic. First, divorcing personal prejudice from broader political, social, and cultural contexts is difficult if not altogether questionable. Second, a message is likely conveyed beyond one’s victim regardless of one’s intent, be it to those targeted by violence or those who are like-minded, and this audience need not be national or international in scope.
Rather than attempting to resolve this tension, it is more useful to examine what the tension itself reveals about the definitional problem of terrorism. The lack of concrete distinction between hate crimes and terrorism, the fact that there is always a semblance of political motivation in hate crimes, further illustrates that identifying a political motive is not in itself satisfactory in recoding violence as terrorism. Again, we return to the existential, even if at first glance, situating Page therein poses a quandary. The prevalence and institutionalization of racist violence within the United States begs the question of how such actions could be recoded as threatening the very essence and structure of American society—save a disingenuous denial of white supremacy. By what means does the racist violence integral to the establishment of the United States return in the guise of a transformational threat?
The redefinition of white racist violence from a mainstay of American politics to terrorism occurs through a rereading of the racist right’s recent past. According to Heidi Beirich and Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center, the contemporary racist right is far removed from the likes of the Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s, which saw itself as a defender of culture and country. A decisive shift occurred at end of the Cold War: without the Communist bogeyman, the US government became the racist right’s foremost nemesis. They argue that, slowly ushered in and solidified through the Oklahoma City bombing, the racist right shifted from being a “restorationist effort” to constituting a “revolutionary movement” that pursues a fundamental transformation of the United States.28
Beirich and Potok released their report in 2009, the same year that a Department of Homeland Security report on the threat of right-wing extremism was decried as an attack on veterans and conservatism more generally. The backlash effectively gutted the branch of the department that dealt with right-wing extremism. I address this in detail below, but point now to how the aftermath of the Sikh temple shooting, and more recently the takeover of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon in early 2016, resulted in a revived interest (however momentary) in the workings of the racist and extreme right and how a movement the DHS called “paranoid” continues to plot “against America.”29
By no means providing a characterization of the racist right that is universally accepted in the United States, Beirich and Potok attempt to solidify the transformation of racist violence into terrorism, to further position it as “foreign” so to speak. Their report does so through an indirect invocation of the brown-Arab-Muslim-other. The otherness of this figure is imbued into white racists by emphasizing statements of affinity made in the aftermath of 9/11:
In case after case, extremists applauded the murder of some 3,000 of their countrymen. Billy Roper, then an official of the major neo-Nazi group National Alliance, said it best in an email to all 1,400 of his members. “The enemy of our enemy is, for now at least, our friends,” he wrote. “We may not want them marrying our daughters, just as they would not want us marrying theirs. We may not want them in our societies, just as they would not want us in theirs. But anyone who is willing to drive a plane into a building to kill Jews is alright [sic] by me. I wish our members had half as much testicular fortitude.”30
White supremacist web forums have featured, and not infrequently, discussions regarding whether or not Arabs are “white,” with a variety of opinions on the matter. More recently threads focused on Muslims dominate discussions therein of what constitutes an existential threat to white America. Regardless, it is through the suggested affinity quoted above that statements by the racist right, such as “that government [one led by Barack Obama] is not our government,” are given resonance as existential threats.31
The argument here is not that groups such as the SPLC are wrong in labeling racist violence as terrorism. Surely, in the current political climate, there is a strategic utility to marking violence as terrorism in order to garner needed attention. Nor is it to deny the immense terror inflicted by white supremacists (and this terror is too often denied). There are, however, serious limits to dealing with racism and racist violence in the United States through the lens of terrorism. Specifically, it begs the question as to whether conceptualizing the racist violence experienced by communities of color through a formulation of terrorism that effectively severs violence from its complex contexts—reducing the source of violence to “evil” or a “foreign” entity—can address the continued institutionalized character of that violence, particularly given the statist nature of present-day conceptualizations of terrorism (which I address below). Nevertheless, the immediate purpose here is to show the manner in which identity is deployed in efforts to communicate and redefine violence as terrorism. More than a political cause, it is violence with an aim to bring an end to society as we know it, a claim communicated through the figure of the brown-Arab-Muslim-other and the clash of civilizations baggage with which it comes, however seemingly questionable or counterintuitive the coupling might be.
The Horror at Fort Hood
On the afternoon of November 5, 2009, Major Nidal Malik Hasan, an Army psychiatrist who had joined the military out of high school, entered the Soldier Readiness Center at Fort Hood, Texas. Wearing his military uniform and brandishing a semiautomatic pistol and a revolver, he opened fire. Unleashing over a hundred
