Archive September 4, 2025

Racist violence is portrayed by the media and political elites as a result of a person’s mental illness or lack of individual hatred. It is not only fatal to interpret racism as hatred. It provides an excuse for systemic racism to continue indefinitely and only serves to benefit those in power.

Another instance of this flawed paradigm can be found in the media coverage of the white transgender woman, 23-year-old, who committed suicide on August 27 after a mass shooting in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Westman shot through Annunciation Catholic School’s windows, injuring 14 children, three elderly parishioners, and two children.

Understanding that one’s gender identity and worldview do not have to coexist should not be difficult. White supremacy is a trait shared by cisgender white men and women by transgender women like Westman and by white transgender women. In a New York Post op-ed, journalist Karol Markowitz responded with transphobic and ableist overtones, saying, “We would collectively discuss and decide on strategies to help those ailing. However, there is no discussion of what to do if a child declares themselves transgender. She deadnamed her, making no connection between Westman’s depression, suicidal ideas, and her obsession with mass shootings.

It is clear that racism can be overcome. Ras racism is often seen as an affliction, an expression of hate or illness, whether in the US or abroad, according to media with broad platforms. However, the racism-equals-hatred paradigm has no chance of erasing the root causes of widespread, deadly inequality. The structural racism that enslaves billions of people on a global scale is what is left out of this coverage.

The media frequently skips over discussions of mental health or a brief discussion about eradicating racist hatred when it comes to reporting violent incidents involving people of one race attacking other people. Unfortunately, Westman’s stream-of-consciousness “manifesto” and her mass shooting resemble this pattern. With racial slurs like “6 million wasn’t enough,” “kick a spic,” and others (even though the authorities provided no further details), Westman’s words allowed ableism and the racism-as-hatred paradigm to freely emerge from public officials’ lips. According to Minneapolis police chief Brian O’Hara, Westman “had a deranged obsession with previous mass shooters” and “harboured a lot of hate toward a wide variety of people and groups of people. The shooter also expressed hate against Black people, hate toward Mexicans, hate toward Christians, and hate toward Jews, according to Joe Thompson, the acting US attorney for the Minnesota District. In essence, the shooter appeared to hate everyone.

In reality, racism isn’t just about hate. All forms of racism, whether it is institutional, institutional, interpersonal, or internalized, aim to maximize power and wealth by ensuring that its victims lack the resources to resist. For the antiracist NGO Race Forward, cultural commentator and host of a radio show called Jay Smooth narrated a series of videos that dissected racism in all its forms in 2014. Smooth identified two types of systemic racism: institutional racism, which refer to “racist policies and practices that consistently lead to unfair outcomes for people of color in workplaces and government institutions,” and structural racism, which refer to the same “racist patterns and practices” that exist “across” society’s numerous institutions. However, the link between individual and systemic forms of racism is eliminated because the majority of US and Western news media focus on “individual stories,” along with powerful figures. This encourages people to “see racism only as a product of overt, intentional acts by people,” like Robin Westman, people who can (or cannot be “fixed simply by shaming and correcting]their] individual shortcomings.

Yes, there is racism at the individual level, which can and frequently does lead to racism in domestic violence, white vigilantism, and police lethality. However, as a historian and educator, it is willful lunacy to think that racism is primarily the result of hatred. The racism is overly well planned, covering everything from housing discrimination to Jim Crow and slavery, to indigenous removal, the reservation system, and countless other policies. All the systems that perpetuate racial discrimination would remain, as I have repeatedly stated to thousands of students since 1993. The enormous disparities in wealth, life expectancy, and social mobility created over the past four centuries cannot be eliminated by suddenly liking Black and Indigenous people. No matter how many antiracism workshops academics like Robin DiAngelo and Ibram Kendi host, ending racist hatred cannot end racism. What does hate have to do with it, to misquote the late music icon Tina Turner?

In one of my 1990 Africana studies classes, Malcolm X and journalist Louis Lomax exchanged a conversation. The Hate That Hate Produced, a program about the rise of Black nationalism in the US and abroad, was a 1959 television documentary. Lomax and Mike Wallace, who later served as the show’s lead reporter on CBS’s 60 Minutes from 1968 to 2006, co-produced the documentary. The constant framing of “Black supremacy” and “hate” as Wallace and Lomax’s method of explaining the rise of organizations like the Nation of Islam struck me as the oddest. These Black supremacists, Muslims, and United African Nationalists do not practice hate just for the sake of it; rather, they have a hate that some Negroes have returned for the hate that everyone has received in the last 300 years,” Wallace said. This alleged hatred for the racist, predominantly white television audience’s gaze was sensationalized by Wallace and Lomax.

This framing reduces racism to hate and the violent rhetoric and deadly actions that hatred can engender, whether it’s Wallace and Lomax in 1959 or O’Hara and Thompson in 2025. This logic discredits systemic racism’s incredible power to keep wealth and enormous power advantages over everyone else, including less well-off white people, thanks to its support of wealthy white people, especially wealthy white men. A lattice of laws, policies, and practices designed to deny human and civil rights to millions of people over generations is nowhere near the equivalent of any Black person’s interpersonal animosity toward someone white.

Outside of the US, the racism-equals-hatred paradigm still pervades. It makes sense for those who support systemic racism to defy the definition of racism as hatred for their own ends. Pro-Israel organizations in the US, Germany, France, and Australia have long labeled anyone opposed to Zionism as “anti-Semitic,” especially given the fact that Israel commits a genocide in Gaza. Hindutva supporters and their allies frequently refer to anti-Muslim activists in Kashmir as “Hinduphobic” in India. Critics of Prime Minister Narendra Modi have been portrayed as anti-Hindu or antinational, echoing this statement. India’s Muslim population has seen a steady stream of Hindutva violence and military occupation over the past eight decades, which is a clear indicator of system-level racism and persecution.

“Blacks were the victims of hate crimes if they were committed against white people.” No matter what color you are, racism should not be tolerated. A social media user allegedly posted this in response to a popular video of a Black and White partiers brawl on July 26 in downtown Cincinnati, Ohio. Commentaries like this demonstrate how those who profit the most from racism can muddy the waters by assuming that everyone is equally racist, making systemic racism in the US and around the world irrelevant and unobservable. However, focusing on racism or treating it as a form of hatred alone doesn’t help. In this logic, it is implicit to reject the fact that racism is a fundamental component of both the US nation-state and Western culture as a dominant force. Instead of treating racism as just a form of personal hatred, it will continue to impose its own prejudices and patterns of inequality and violence on a global scale.

A federal appeals court ruled on September 2 that the Trump administration cannot use an 18th-century law to quickly deport suspected gang members.

Its decision largely hinged on the administration’s assertion that the Venezuela-based gang Tren de Aragua had invaded the United States.

“Applying our obligation to interpret the (Alien Enemies Act), we conclude that the findings do not support that an invasion or a predatory incursion has occurred,” the ruling said.

The conservative Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals’ 2-1 decision effectively blocks the government from using the 1798 Alien Enemies Act’s fast-track process to deport people it says belong to the gang. Such an invasion or incursion is a necessary condition for the US to deport people using the law.

Here are five things to know about the Alien Enemies Act, the court’s ruling and what could come next:

How did the Trump administration use the law before the ruling?

On March 15, President Donald Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act, which lets the president detain and deport people from a “hostile nation or government” without a hearing when the US is either at war with that country or the country has “perpetrated, attempted, or threatened” an invasion or raid legally called a “predatory incursion” against the US.

That same day, the Trump administration deported more than 230 Venezuelan men to the Center for Terrorism Confinement, or CECOT, a maximum-security El Salvador prison. An investigation by ProPublica and other news organisations found the vast majority of the men had no criminal records. And none of the men’s names appeared in a list of alleged gang members kept by Venezuelan law enforcement and international law enforcement agency Interpol.

In July, as part of a prisoner exchange between the US and Venezuela, the men deported from the US and held in CECOT were returned to Venezuela.

Several legal challenges followed after Trump’s invocation of the law. But the September 2 appellate court’s ruling is the first to address whether Trump legally invoked it.

What did the appeals court say about an invasion?

The court said Tren de Aragua has not invaded or carried out a predatory incursion against the US.

The appellate court disagreed with Trump’s March assertion that “evidence irrefutably demonstrates that (Tren de Aragua) has invaded the United States.” To determine whether Tren de Aragua had invaded or carried out a predatory incursion, the court had to define what each of those terms meant.

“We define an invasion for purposes of the (Alien Enemies Act) as an act of war involving the entry into this country by a military force of or at least directed by another country or nation, with a hostile intent,” the ruling said.

As for a predatory incursion, the court said the term “described armed forces of some size and cohesion, engaged in something less than an invasion, whose objectives could vary widely, and are directed by a foreign government or nation”.

The court ruled that a country “encouraging its residents and citizens to enter this country illegally is not the modern-day equivalent of sending an armed, organised force to occupy, to disrupt, or to otherwise harm the United States”.

The court said the mass migration of Venezuelan immigrants did not constitute an armed or an organised force.

Was any part of the ruling favourable to the Trump administration?

The court said it does not have the power to rule on the accuracy of the information the Trump administration presented about how closely Tren de Aragua is tied to the Venezuelan government led by President Nicolas Maduro.

But the court ruled that Tren de Aragua can be considered a government or nation for the law’s purposes, assuming Trump’s assertion is true that the group is being led by the Venezuelan government.

Nevertheless, the court ruled, there’s no invasion.

Trump’s assertion about the Maduro administration’s links to Tren de Aragua was contradicted by an intelligence community assessment.

“While Venezuela’s permissive environment enables (Tren de Aragua) to operate, the Maduro regime probably does not have a policy of cooperating with TDA and is not directing TDA movement to and operations in the United States,” the National Intelligence Council said in an April report.

In May, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard fired two National Intelligence Council officials who wrote the assessment, according to The Washington Post.

What did the court say about due process?

The appellate court said, based on available information, an updated process the government is using to inform people they will be deported under the law seemed to follow due process requirements. However, it asked the lower federal court to rule on what constitutes sufficient government notice.

In May, before the government updated its notification process, the US Supreme Court ruled in an unsigned opinion that the Trump administration hadn’t given immigrants who it said it would deport under the Alien Enemies Act enough time to exercise their due process rights.

At the time, the government had given immigrants about 24 hours’ notice that they would be deported without information about how to contest the deportation. The Supreme Court asked the appellate court to determine how much notice is necessary for the government to uphold immigrants’ constitutional due process rights.

While the case was being decided by the appellate court, the Trump administration updated the document it gives immigrants as notice that they will be deported under the law. Part of the change included giving immigrants seven days to challenge the deportation.

What will likely happen next?

The appellate court’s decision stops Alien Enemies Act deportations in the three states in its jurisdiction: Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas. Other courts could use the ruling as precedent in their decisions.

The Trump administration can appeal the appellate court ruling either to the full appeals court or to the US Supreme Court. The White House didn’t specify whether it would appeal or to which court.

In the face of uncertainty surrounding the world’s economy, the gold market is booming as investors look for a safe haven for their investments.

Over the past year, gold’s price increased by nearly a third, surpassing $ 3,550 per ounce on Wednesday, making it its highest ever price.

In the midst of a tumultuous geopolitical environment, some analysts anticipate that prices will continue to rise.

Why is gold currently so popular?

According to Tim Waterer, chief market analyst at KCM Trade in Australia, gold has long been preferred by investors during times of uncertainty or upheaval because of how consistently it is valued, especially in relation to stocks.

Gold is typically the go-to asset for traders in these circumstances, according to Waterer, who stated for Al Jazeera, “because the one thing that financial markets hate is uncertainty.”

In the wake of the conflicted international circumstances caused by the wars in Ukraine and Gaza and US President Donald Trump’s trade war, gold has historically generated only modest returns, but its price has increased sharply over the past two years.

Investors are also more favorable to gold because it can be held and stored physically, making it a better investment for them.

How does gold get bought by investors?

The main ways to trade gold are two.

The first is by purchasing bullion in the form of bars, ingots, jewelry, or coins.

Trading financial products is a second option.

Investors also invest in exchange-traded funds that monitor the price of gold, as well as contracts to purchase or sell it at a specific price.

Financial products offer institutions the advantage of not having to physically handle or store large amounts of bullion, despite the fact that it is simple to purchase.

Gold’s value is inversely related to the currency because it is typically expressed in US dollars.

Gold typically rises when the dollar falls, and vice versa.

How is Trump causing gold prices to rise?

When Trump announced his “Liberation Day” tariffs on a large portion of the world in April, which caused a period of significant uncertainty about the future of global trade.

Prices have increased more recently as a result of Trump’s ongoing attacks on the US Federal Reserve’s independence, which has long been seen above politics.

Trump has repeatedly pressed the central bank to lower interest rates in an effort to encourage economic growth, and he wants the dollar’s value to decline to lower in order to lower US export prices.

According to Kyle Rodda, a senior financial market analyst at Capital.com, either scenario increases the value of gold to investors.

According to Rodda, “gold loses appeal as interest rates rise because I can get more for my money by putting it in an interest-bearing asset like a bank account.”

“But if interest rates go down, I receive fewer of those interest payments, increasing the value of gold,” she says.

Other interest-bearing assets, such as bonds, also have this effect.

Foreign investors who trade in other currencies besides the dollar may also look to purchase more gold as the dollar declines, Rodda said. They will receive more value for their money as the dollar falls.

What is going on abroad?

Other factors have bolstered the case for gold, in addition to the economic jitters there.

Concerned about the worsening state of the public finances in the United Kingdom and Japan, the British sterling and the Japanese yen have fallen recently.

Instability in Japan’s ruling party has also affected the yen.

Because, unlike currencies, gold is seen as a good asset to protect against inflation risks because its supply is more finite in nature and is less prone to price dilution. Waterer argued that the same holds true for other nations, including Turkey and Egypt.

Foreign governments who need to store large amounts of the US dollar made from trade but who are less confident in government bonds as a result of Trump’s policies are starting to use gold, Rodda said.

A nation typically uses these funds to purchase Treasuries so that it can be safely parked and earned an interest rate on them, according to Rodda.