The shooting deaths of three people near Kansas City by the noted Neo-Nazi Frazier Glenn Miller has refocused the public’s attention on the violent tendencies of the White Right in the United States.

On the Tuesday edition of her MSNBC show, Rachel Maddow concluded a segment on the Republican Party’s deep denial about (and active protection of) its violent ‘Patriot” and militia wing by asking the following question: why do we overlook right-wing violence and refuse to call it terrorism?

The answer to Maddow’s question is simple.

“We” don’t talk about right-wing domestic terrorists and other extremists because ‘they” are largely white and male.

The language used by Rachel Maddow-and how it undermines the scurrilous Right-wing lie that there is such a thing as a ‘liberal media”-helps to demonstrate the above claim. Once more, a “liberal” news analyst talks around the obvious and is afraid to connect the words “white” and “male” and “conservative” in their discussions of white violence, murder, mayhem, and treason.

Domestic terrorism is an oxymoron in America when white folks are involved. Whiteness imagines itself as kind, benign, safe, neutral, normal, and good. “Terrorism” is something those “other people” do, i.e. the Muslims, or some other ambiguous cohort of black and […]