Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the “Boston Bombers”.

Of course everyone in America and presumably elsewhere knows the story of the recent bombings in Boston. The perpetrators of the attack, Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev, are the center of a storm of blogging, article writing, and commentary on Tumblr and Twitter; not necessarily because of their attack per se but because of their racial identity. The importance of their racial identity can be summed up in this: most terrorist attacks against the United States have been committed by white men but in almost all of those cases the first suspects were assumed to be Arab, Black, or African. Tim Wise, the ideal type of the white anti-racist, wrote a very powerful piece on how white privilege creates the ideology that allows for everyone to be scared of Arabs when whites are doing all the killing. And here’s when the Tsarnaev brothers come in. Many anti-racist bloggers, Tim Wise included, have been using the opportunity of the bombers being white to highlight the privilege and racism embedded in how we deal with terrorism. Although I understand the purposes of these blog posts and articles, they are all missing an important point: It doesn’t matter that they’re white and making it a point of stating such leave a lot of room for blowback to occur. Continue reading →