ABSTRACT
On March 29, 2017, I sent an email to some current and past students to assemble a research team for a “long-term data analysis project focused around criminal justice and political violence.” Dozens of students responded to the inquiry, and we met in a squatted classroom on the ground floor of an old university building in the center of campus. In our first conversations among this unnamed group of students, the discussion kept coming back to a familiar pattern observed by many. Namely, that foreign-born, Arab, North African, South Asian, and/or Muslim men were frequently framed as terrorists in the media, 1 constructed as terrorists within the general discourse and State rhetoric, 2 and prosecuted as such in the courts. 3 On the other hand, the violence of American-born, white, Christian men was often treated as less terroristic—less designed to communicate fear through violence—and in effect, creates a rhetorical, legalistic, and prosecutorial “double standard.” 4
