The response in the US to the shooting on 17 June of nine African American churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina, when compared to the mass hysteria that greeted the Boston marathon bombings in 2013, reveals a lot about the entrenched racism of the US establishment.

If you’re a white mass murderer, you’re a disturbed individual who has been let down by the mental health system; if you’re a Muslim, you’re part of a network of terror dedicated to tearing apart Western civilisation.

The Charleston suspect, 21-year-old Dylann Roof, if found guilty, is by any definition of the term a terrorist – that is, someone with a political project of killing innocent non-combatants with the sole purpose of spreading fear.

This young man, raised in the former slave state of South Carolina, where the Confederate flag still flies proudly within the capitol grounds, allegedly entered the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal church with the express purpose of killing as many Blacks as he could.

A relative of one of those who escaped informed the press that Roof had told one of the congregation as he reloaded his pistol: “I have to do it … You rape our women and you’re taking over our country. And you have to go”.

And then there was the Facebook photo showing Roof wearing patches emblazoned with the flags of the racist former regimes of South Africa and Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe).

With racism obviously established as a motive, some said that his was, as Charleston mayor Joe Riley put it, the act of “just one hateful person”.

The problem is that South Carolina seems to have an awful lot of “hateful persons”, many of them holding high political office. Like the flag-flying governor for example. Like the thousands of members of the nearly two dozen white supremacist or neo-Nazi groups that exist in the state.

Like the law enforcement agencies, including the police, who have fired their weapons at 209 suspects in the last five years, with African Americans disproportionately the target. The victims include 50-year-old Walter Scott, who in April was shot in the back five times and killed by officer Michael Slager in North Charleston, just 16 km from the scene of last night’s mass murder.

To the shameful treatment of African Americans we might also add the Latino population of South Carolina, which also feels the stinging lash of the modern day plantation owners.

The truth is the entire political structure of South Carolina is riddled with racism. Roof is not the exception but the rule. The Republican Party and the police forces have close connections and overlapping memberships with the white supremacist groups in the state.

Charleston police chief Greg Mullen may have said, “It is unfathomable that somebody in today’s society would walk into a church while they are having a prayer meeting and take their lives”. But there is no mystery to this massacre. As Anthea Butler, an African American academic at the University of Pennsylvania, wrote in the Washington Post, the mass shooting in Charleston was “a manifestation of the racial hatred and white supremacy that continues to pervade our society”.

The truth is that while the establishment since 9/11 has been focused on identifying and incarcerating suspected Muslim “terrorists”, white supremacists and cops have been carrying out deadly attacks on an almost daily basis.

Earlier this week, the New York Times stated: “Right wing extremists averaged 337 attacks per year in the decade after 9/11, causing a total of 254 fatalities … Right wing anti-government extremism is the leading source of ideological violence in America”.

These are not random acts but a pattern of racial intimidation encouraged by sections of the US political and media establishment.

It is in this context that many politicians do their best to downplay the political motives of figures like Roof. From their perspective, he just went “too far” and threatened to turn public attention to the systemic white supremacy in the US.

It is this that explains why Roof was walked to a police car wearing a bullet-proof vest, while unarmed Black teenagers at a pool party are viciously assaulted for no reason. And it is this that explains why the people of Charleston were just encouraged to “stay calm” when the hunt for the killer was in operation.

In Boston, by contrast, following the killing of three people at the city marathon in 2013, the entire city was subject to a military lockdown for 48 hours. And of course the media demanded that the entire Muslim population distance itself from and condemn the act. This is never asked of the “white community”.

The man who pulled the trigger at the Methodist church in Charleston is the spawn of a society that perpetrates institutionalised violence against the country’s African American population, to keep it enslaved, low waged and intimidated. It is terrorism on a grand scale.