To distinguish between terroristic acts on the basis of skin color is the essence of racism.
I am old enough to remember in the 60s when perpetrators of crime would separately be identified as being black, but white perpetrators would not be identified by race. The implicit message was not only the reinforcement of the stereotype of black people as criminals, but also something subtler. The idea that an American who happened to be black was somehow “other,” not a standard American. Whereas of course, so the implication went, white Americans are normal and standard. Eventually that practice stopped because people called it out and editors were finally persuaded that it was at the very least not “objective” journalism if not downright racist.
Flash forward to the time when Islam entered the popular American consciousness in a big way: the Iranian hostage taking of 1979. Muslims since then, especially since 9-11, have been the targets of another form of prejudice, and the bad actors such as Islamists, Wahabists, etc., have rightly been labelled terrorists.
But the term terrorism has rarely been applied to anything any white people do, at least in American journalism. Perhaps that term has been used in conjunction with Northern Ireland. But if you apply it to the bombing of a black church in Birmingham in 1963, that is the exception proving the rule.
http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/four-black-schoolgirls-killed-in-birmingham
I submit that this lack of the application of the term “terrorism” to these acts, performed for the purpose of extending Jim Crow, among other purposes, is because the perpetrators were white. To me this is the height of racism. White people have been performing acts of terror on this continent for 500 years, primarily to red and black people. It is time we came to grips with a national history filled with terrorism.
Finally, now, the term terrorism is finally be applied to the recent tragedy in Charleston. At last. Maybe then we won’t be so eager, as is Bill Maher, to be pointing the finger at Islam. As the cartoon character Pogo once said, “we have met the enemy and he is us.”
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When my husband or I read about a crime, we ask...is there a picture of the criminal, if the answer is no, the criminal is likely to be a white offender..and more times than not, we are right 
