FBI Director Christopher Wray told the Senate Judiciary Committee the bureau has replaced an array of categories that it once used to describe and track violent extremism with the broader designation “racially motivated violent extremism,” The Wall Street Journal reports. It abandoned the term “black identity extremism,” a term Democratic senators previously called a “fabricated” false equivalency with white supremacy extremism, and countered past claims that it didn’t take white-supremacist violence seriously enough by acknowledging many domestic terrorism arrests involved white extremists (an FBI spokeswoman clarified after Wray’s testimony that the bureau has recorded about 90 domestic terrorism arrests, compared with about 100 international terrorism arrests, and that Wray misspoke when he said most domestic terror cases involved white supremacists; they made up the majority of cases with a racial motive, The Washington Post reported).
The term “black identity extremism” drew scrutiny from civil rights leaders and others over concerns that it delegitimized activism against police violence. Wray said the shift was an attempt to emphasize that law enforcement doesn’t investigate people merely for their ideology. Wray’s comments provided the most high-profile explanation by the bureau about how and why it has shifted the way it thinks about domestic terrorism and extremism. The elimination of the use of terms like “white supremacy” and “black identity extremism” was meant to reflect the FBI’s approach in domestic terrorism situations. “That was part of the reorganization of all of our domestic terrorism threat categorization. That terminology went away as part of this racially motivated violent extremism category,” Wray told Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.), who had pressed him on the “black identity extremism” label.