During his inaugural address last week, President Joe Biden delivered an unprecedented repudiation of white supremacy and, in the same breath, declared that America “must confront” and “will defeat” domestic terrorism. Accomplishing this urgent mission requires our justice system remedy one troubling reality, in particular: white supremacists who commit mass murders and use violence to undermine and attempt to overthrow our democracy rarely are prosecuted as domestic terrorists. Therefore, to truly confront and defeat this homegrown scourge, our nation needs a new federal domestic terrorism statute, like New York’s state law, to hold domestic terrorists accountable for their reprehensible actions.
Two years ago, James Harris Jackson entered a Manhattan courtroom with the look and backstory of a man that did not match the “criteria” of a terrorist in post-9/11 America. That’s to say, he did not have brown skin, practice Islam, come from the Middle East determined to murder American infidels, or align with any of the other prejudicial stereotypes arising out of the U.S. War on Terror.
