On Saturday, a gunman targeted Buffalo’s Black community, killing ten people in a grocery store. In the shooting’s wake, some pundits have called for the incident to be labeled as “domestic terrorism.” But several pieces from our archive caution against using such a description in response to events like this. One such argument comes from Atiya Husain, whose essay on abolishing counterterrorism is being recirculated online. “We do not need the far right’s actions to be classified as terrorism, too,” she writes, “we need to void the category of terrorism completely. It cannot be salvaged because the very thing that gives it its meaning is its racial connotations.” A 2019 essay from Mark Tseng-Putterman offers another compelling case: writing in the wake of the El Paso shooting, Tseng-Putterman argued that “the label of terrorism fails to capture that recent white supremacist violence is not ideologically opposed to the U.S. nation-state. It is less a foreign ideological strain than it is a founding DNA.”

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz corroborates, arguing in one of our most popular essays that the origins of the United States are complicit with white nationalist ideology, while Stephen Kantrowitz explores the central role of women in building the KKK. But while it may have a long history, careful attention must be paid to white supremacy’s current manifestation too—including its international scope. As Bernard E. Harcourt commented in our pages after January 6, “white supremacy may be nothing new, but Trump’s incitement of it is unprecedented.”