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.
