What our news media deems newsworthy reveals so much more about ourselves and our society’s priorities than any “objective” metric of what should be shared and discussed. Like all the mass shootings before it, the recent tragedy in Santa Barbara will get news coverage and public discourse that is as intense as it is brief. But even if it is just a few weeks, what Elliot Rodger did will get coverage.

Like previous domestic atrocities, the coverage will not be framed as terrorism. There will be no hashtags and there will be no American military response, even though the women Elliot Rodger wanted to harm (and the people he ended up harming) were pursuing an education. Despite the loss of innocent life, we will not hear demands to invade Beverly Hills or conduct drone strikes in Santa Barbara. We will not dramatically curtail or outright violate the civil rights of American men in order to prevent the next mass shooting.

It’s different when men of color harm women or kill innocent people. That’s called Boko Haram. That’s called terrorism.

When it’s a white guy killing innocent people, particularly a relatively well-off white guy, we talk about mental health issues and gun control. No wait, we first blame Muslims and when we find out it’s a white guy, then we talk about mental health issues and gun control. These issues are incredibly important, but even if we could lock up all the guns and somehow solve all the mental health issues in the United States, the bitter fruits of misogyny and male entitlement will still hang on the vine, waiting for the next tragic harvest.

But even if we could all recognize and treat what happened in Santa Barbara as domestic terrorism (and that would be a huge step forward!), that is only one fragment of the suffering experienced in America. The much larger framework of oppression could be called ambient violence and that’s what I’m going to save for part two of this piece (I’m trying to keep these things under a double-spaced page in Google Docs!).