During his inaugural address last week, President Joe Biden delivered an unprecedented repudiation of white supremacy and, in the same breath, declared that America "must confront" and "will defeat" domestic terrorism. Accomplishing this urgent mission requires our justice system remedy one troubling reality, in particular: white supremacists who commit mass murders and use violence to undermine and attempt to overthrow our democracy rarely are prosecuted as domestic terrorists. Therefore, to truly confront and defeat this homegrown scourge, our nation needs a new federal domestic terrorism statute, like New York's state law, to hold domestic terrorists accountable for their reprehensible actions.

Two years ago, James Harris Jackson entered a Manhattan courtroom with the look and backstory of a man that did not match the "criteria" of a terrorist in post-9/11 America. That's to say, he did not have brown skin, practice Islam, come from the Middle East determined to murder American infidels, or align with any of the other prejudicial stereotypes arising out of the U.S. War on Terror.

On that Wednesday in January 2019, Jackson, a white Maryland native and U.S. Army vet, pleaded guilty to executing 66-year-old Timothy Caughman in midtown Manhattan solely because of the elder man's Black skin—an evil deed he hoped would incite a global race war. For this senseless atrocity, Jackson, a white supremacist, became the first person in New York state history convicted of murder as a crime of terrorism, and subsequently received a life prison sentence.