When media and political elites frame racist violence as a matter of individual hatred or mental illness, they obscure its systemic nature and global reach. Seeing racism only as hatred is not only deadly. It serves as an excuse that only benefits those in power and allows systemic racism to flourish indefinitely.
The coverage of Robin Westman, the 23-year-old white transgender woman who killed herself on August 27 after committing a mass shooting in Minneapolis, Minnesota, is yet another example of this wrongheaded paradigm. Westman shot through the windows of a church on the grounds of Annunciation Catholic School, wounding 17 people (including 14 children and three elderly parishioners) and killing two children.
It should not be difficult to grasp that one’s gender identity and worldview do not have to align. White transgender women like Westman can be drawn to white supremacy, just as it is often embraced by cisgender white men and women. Yet in a New York Post op-ed, pundit Karol Markowitz responded with transphobic and ableist overtones, writing: “If any other mental condition produced a pattern of murder, we would collectively discuss and decide on strategies to help those ailing. But there’s no discussion allowed about what to do when a child declares themselves transgender.” She provided no evidence of any connection between Westman’s depression, suicidal thoughts, and obsession with mass shootings and her gender identity, all while deadnaming her.
The implications for confronting racist violence are obvious. Too often, media with wide platforms frame racism as an individual defect, an expression of hate or illness, whether in the US or abroad. But the racism-equals-hatred paradigm has no chance of ending systemic racism or the vast, deadly inequalities it produces. What is erased in such coverage is the structural racism that oppresses billions globally.
The news media’s coverage of violent incidents in which an individual of one race attacks individuals of another often defaults to discussions of mental health or a brief conversation about eradicating racist hatred. Westman’s mass shooting and her stream-of-consciousness “manifesto” unfortunately fit this pattern. With scrawlings such as “6 million wasn’t enough,” “kick a spic,” and other racial slurs (though authorities offered no further specifics), Westman’s words allowed ableism and the racism-as-hatred paradigm to flow freely from public officials’ lips. As Minneapolis police chief Brian O’Hara put it, Westman “harboured a whole lot of hate towards a wide variety of people and groups of people…[and] had a deranged obsession with previous mass shooters”. Acting US Attorney for the Minnesota District Joe Thompson added: “The shooter expressed hate towards Black people, the shooter expressed hate towards Mexican people, the shooter expressed hate towards Christian people, the shooter expressed hate towards Jewish people. In short, the shooter appeared to hate all of us.”
The fact is, racism is not primarily about hate. All forms of racism, structural, institutional, interpersonal, and internalised, are about maximising power and wealth by ensuring that those who are its victims lack the resources necessary to resist. In 2014, cultural commentator and radio show host Jay Smooth narrated a series of videos for the antiracist NGO Race Forward that broke down what racism is in all its guises. Smooth explained the two components of systemic racism: Institutional racism, “the racist policies and discriminatory practices in schools and workplaces and government agencies that routinely produce unjust outcomes for people of colour”; and structural racism, the same “racist patterns and practices” that operate “across” society’s many institutions. But because US and Western news media, along with powerful figures, mostly focus on “individual stories, this distorts our sense of how racism works,” the interrelationship between individual and systemic forms of racism is erased. This encourages millions “to see racism only as a product of overt, intentional acts by individuals” like Robin Westman, people who can (or cannot) “be fixed simply by shaming and correcting [their] individual defects”.
Sure, racist hatred at the individual level exists and can, and often does, lead to racist violence, white domestic terrorism, white vigilantism, and police lethality. But as a historian and educator, it is willful lunacy to believe that racism is primarily the product of hatred. Racism is too well planned, from slavery and Jim Crow segregation to housing discrimination, Indigenous removal, the reservation system, and countless other policies. As I have told thousands of students since 1993: “If I could wave a magic wand to wipe out the racist hatred in the hearts and minds of everyone in the US, all the systems that maintain racial discrimination would remain.” White people suddenly liking Black and Indigenous people would not erase the huge gaps in wealth, life expectancy, and social mobility built up over the past four centuries. Hatred is not how racism works, and ending racist hatred cannot end racism, no matter how many antiracism workshops academics like Robin DiAngelo and Ibram Kendi host. To misquote the late music icon Tina Turner: What’s hate got to do with it?
In one of my Africana studies classes at the University of Pittsburgh in 1990, we watched a segment of a conversation between the journalist Louis Lomax and Malcolm X. It was part of the 1959 television documentary The Hate That Hate Produced, a programme about the rise of Black nationalism in the US and abroad. Lomax co-produced the documentary with the late Mike Wallace, who later became the lead reporter for CBS’s 60 Minutes from 1968 to 2006. What struck me as most odd was the constant framing of “Black supremacy” and hate as Wallace’s and Lomax’s way of explaining the rise of groups like the Nation of Islam. “These Black supremacists, Muslims and United African Nationalists are not practitioners of hate just for hate’s sake… Rather, theirs is a hate that hate has produced: The hate that some Negroes are returning for the hate that all Negroes have received in the past 300 years,” Wallace said. Wallace and Lomax sensationalised this alleged hatred for the racist white gaze of a mostly white television audience.
Whether Wallace and Lomax in 1959, or O’Hara and Thompson in 2025, this framing treats all forms of racism as the same, reducing it to hate and the violent rhetoric and deadly actions that hatred can provoke. This line of reasoning obfuscates the incredible power of systemic racism to maintain huge wealth and tremendous power advantages for affluent white people, especially rich white men, over everyone else, including less well-off white people. Any Black person’s interpersonal hatred towards someone white is nowhere near equivalent to having a latticework of laws, policies, and practices designed to deny human and civil rights to millions over generations.
The racism-equals-hatred paradigm also persists outside the US. It makes sense that those aligned with systemic oppression and racism would twist the idea of racism as hatred for their own purposes. Pro-Israel groups in the US, Germany, France, and Australia have for years declared anyone opposed to Zionism “anti-Semitic”, especially while Israel commits genocide in Gaza. In India, Hindutva adherents and their allies often paint activists who oppose anti-Muslim violence in Kashmir as “Hinduphobic”. Prime Minister Narendra Modi himself has echoed this framing, portraying critics as anti-Hindu or antinational. Meantime, India’s Muslim population has endured eight decades of military occupation, political repression, and frequent Hindutva violence, a clear sign of systems-level religious persecution and racism.
“If hate crimes applied to whites, they applied to Blacks. Racism should not be tolerated, no matter what colour you are.” A social media user allegedly posted this in response to a viral video of a brawl between Black and white partiers on July 26 in downtown Cincinnati, Ohio. Comments like this show how those who benefit most from racism can muddy the waters with the assumption that everyone is equally racist, rendering systemic racism irrelevant and invisible in the US and across the globe. But framing racism primarily or solely as hatred does nothing to confront it. The default in this logic is to deny that racism is a central component of the US nation-state and of the West as a dominant force in world culture. Until humanity prioritises confronting racism as a system of power and profit head-on instead of treating it as just personal hatred, it will continue to structure inequality and violence on a global scale.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
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