“A gentle loner”

“A mountain culture person”

“Adrift and alienated”

By these descriptions, you’d think the media was talking about a soft-spoken nature lover who likes to sip tea and take long walks in the rain. Honestly, you probably wouldn’t guess that the person being described is a ruthless terrorist who shot three people in cold blood and injured nine others.

After the Colorado Springs shooting, I was pretty appalled by how quickly news outlets jumped to euphemize the shooter, Robert Dear, with discreet journalistic band-aids such as the ones listed above. But the issue of overlooking and sympathizing with white terrorists runs deeper than we’re willing to admit.

What’s interesting is that the Colorado shooting took place amid the controversy of Laquan McDonald, a black 17 year old who was fatally shot by a Chicago police officer 16 times. The dashcam video was recently released, showing that McDonald was facing away from the officers as he was shot repeatedly.

So let’s compare these two incidents. Dear was taken alive despite having fatally shot three people, while McDonald was killed for threatening an officer with a knife (though the video shows no evidence of this during the time he was shot). What’s more, the officer who shot McDonald was held at a $1.5 million bail, but was released after his father paid a tenth of the amount, not to mention the ongoing controversy of Chicago Police attempting to cover up McDonald’s murder.

Kind of makes you wonder about double standards…

And let’s not forget Dylan Roof, who shot and killed nine black parishioners in a Charleston church last June. After he was arrested, Roof was escorted from the station in a bullet proof vest. How about we compare his treatment to Eric Gardener, a black New York man who was put in a chokehold by police and killed for selling loose cigarettes?

But there are more acts of violent racism that mysteriously fail to make it into our field of concern. What about Hunter Park and Connor Stottlemyer, who threatened to shoot black Mizzou students on Yik Yak? What about Officer Ben Fields, who flipped a black high school student for refusing to get out of her chair in South Carolina? What about Scott and Steve Leader, who urinated on a homeless Hispanic man because they were “inspired by Trump” and his comments on illegal immigrants?

The list goes on and on. How many more people have to be battered or killed before someone realizes that the civil rights period never ended? Black Lives Matter protests echo in the footsteps of their predecessors from the 1960’s movement, fighting for the same cause.

Maybe it’s not that Americans are becoming more racist, but that they are able to openly express a long stifled racist sentiment while it’s accepted as normal or justified. I mean, leading candidates like Donald Trump, who retweeted (from a Neo-Nazi account) a completely false statement about black on white crime, are celebrated as bold and authoritative. If that doesn’t paint a clear picture of the deep-rooted American race issue, I don’t know what does.

The fact remains that if Americans are to truly conquer racism, we must first turn inwards and admit that a problem exists. The subsequent reaction is not political, but rather, ideological, in the sence that racism isn’t an issue that can purely be beaten with legislation. A wide-scale moral change is necessary here- a societal shift forged in interaction and mutual understanding.