Why does white America struggle to talk about its racist mass murderers?

One travelled two hours to attack a black church, the other drove ten hours to open fire in a supermarket he knew he would be full of hispanics and Mexicans. One used a semi-automatic pistol, the other a semi-automatic rifle.

Both posted racist screeds online, claiming people of colour were taking over. Both were 21-year-old white men, determined – allegedly in the case of one of them – to commit mass murder.

The similarities between Dylann Roof, who killed nine African Americans after attacking the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, in the summer of 2015, and Patrick Crusius, charged with murdering 22 people when he opened fire at a Walmart in El Paso last weekend, are more than passing.

Striking too, has been the similarity of the reaction to the mass killings, that many have sought to write off as the work of fanatical outliers, people who, in the words of Donald Trump, were “very, very seriously mentally ill”.

The issue of mental health is often reached for when such carnage briefly shock the nation’s senses, before it, and the media, move on to something else. Yet studies have shown mental health is only associated with a tiny fraction of violent incidents.

Rather, it conveniently obscures a simple truth: the United States has a long, shameful history of white supremacism and racist violence many here seek to ignore or dismiss. Indeed, the nation’s very founding was established on the notion that white people were there to rule and control.

If violence was needed to assert that dominance, whether to go to war to retain slavery, the ethnic cleansing of indigenous peoples, or the lynching of thousands of black people carried out in the years after the failed “Reconstruction”, there were plenty willing to do the job.

In the years since the attacks of 9/11, an overwhelming focus of agencies such as the FBI has been on countering the threat of foreign, Islamist terror. Data shows, however, that domestic terrorism, invariably carried out by far right white supremacists, is a far greater source of deadly violence than anything else.

The Anti-Defamation League, a national organisation that monitors hate crimes, said in 2018, right-wing extremists carried out more killings than in any year since 1995, the year Timothy McVeigh, a young white man, blew up the Oklahoma City federal building, which remains the nation’s worst incident of domestic terrorism. The Atlantic pointed out in the past decade, around three-quarters of extremist-related killings were carried out by domestic right-wing extremists, with one-quarter the work of Islamist extremists.

It suits Christopher Wray, the head of the FBI and Trump, to claim there is not a problem with white extremism, globally or nationally, as the president did in March following the attacks on the New Zealand mosques that left 50 Muslims dead, an attack praised by the alleged El Paso shooter.

In reality, as they will tell you themselves, white supremacists such as those who sparked deadly violence in Charlottesville, who occupy forums of sites such as the Daily Stormer, or else are stockpiling weapons in what has been termed the “American Redoubt” of the north east of Washington state, have been given encouragement by having Trump as president. Much of his rhetoric, such as about the “invasion” of immigrants, parallels what many of such groups say.

For many, talking about race appears a challenge. On the flight to El Paso last weekend, I sat next to a white woman from the city who was a supporter of the president and said she would vote for him again.

She said she had watched some of the Democratic debates, and had been impressed by the performance of Kamala Harris. She could never vote for the California senator, she said, because she had voiced support for some sort of reparations for slavery. Would it not be good for the country to have such a conversation, an acknowledgement that America’s wealths and global dominance was the result largely of slave labour, even if it did not involve financial compensation, I asked?

Will we all be responsible for the sins of our fathers, the woman said before returning to her book. “How far do you want to go back?”

It is not true that all Americans do not want to talk about racism, or white supremacism. It is white Americans who largely elude such conversations.

On Wednesday, as Donald Trump flew to El Paso to pay his respects, Cory Booker, an African American senator from New Jersey who is seeking to challenge the president in 2020, delivered a speech about hatred, racism and violence. He did so at the church in Charleston known to locals as Mother Emanuel, that was targeted four years ago.

“White supremacy has always been a problem in our American story – if not always at the surface, then lurking not so far beneath it,” said Booker.

“Silence in the face of these injustices is a choice. To be passive is to be complicit. To ignore hate is to empower it. It is to fall back on that easy false virtue of tolerance.”

He added: “As much as white supremacy manifests itself in dangerous and deadly acts of terror, it is perpetuated by what is too often a willful ignorance or dangerous tolerance of its presence in our society.”