stop linking terrorism to immigration, a white guy just killed 59 in vegas for f*ck’s sake

On Tuesday, 29-year-old Sayfullo Saipov plowed a truck through a crowd of bicyclists and pedestrians in lower Manhattan, killing six. Saipov, an immigrant from Uzbekistan, apparently left a note in his truck pledging allegiance to ISIS, which is all you need to do to get the president to condemn you more quickly and strongly than a guy who kills 59 people just days before and who is white.

In the day that followed the Las Vegas massacre by Stephen Paddock last month, President Trump told reporters at a news conference, “Well, we’re not going to talk about that today. We won’t talk about that. We’ll be talking about gun laws as time goes by.”

In contrast, after the attack in New York, Trump vowed within hours “to step up our already extreme vetting program” and called for a complete immigration overhaul.

Trump’s response to New York Islamist terror attack which killed 8 vs Trump’s response to Vegas attack by white “lone wolf” which killed 59 pic.twitter.com/nhGivAov3c

— Shehab Khan (@ShehabKhan) October 31, 2017

Trump isn’t the only one who allows white supremacy to determine whose evil is more and whose evil is less. This is why domestic grown white nationalists pose the biggest terror threat in the US, but the face of terrorism is always foreign brown people.

It’s also why Dylann Roof was taken to Burger King by police after murdering nine Black churchgoers, and why there seemed to be an uptick in media figures asking if the motive for terror even matters after the Vegas shooting:

When you’re a white guy, the reasons you commit the violence you commit aren’t worth interrogating, because to do so would mean deconstructing whiteness as a violent system. Apparently, we just aren’t interested in that.