Columnist

Christine Emba is a Post opinions writer and editor.

A week ago, millions of Americans awoke to the news that a Las Vegas shooter had killed at least 50 innocents. A tragedy.

That same morning, many of those millions realized that their second emotion — right behind horror — was one of relief that the shooter was white instead of black or brown. This was a tragedy of a different kind.

The blame for the latter lies not at the feet of an inscrutable killer but at our commander in chief's. When he became president, Donald Trump inherited the responsibility of helping hold our country together in the face of tragedy. But this latest national crisis illustrates how thoroughly he has torn it apart.

Our national response to devastation is always complex. There's sadness and anger, inevitable politicization, a search for a narrative to make sense of it all. This complexity has often weighed most heavily on minorities. As perpetual outsiders, we're always suspect. If a killer happens to look like us, we know we'll be asked to perform our American bona fides, to prove that one deranged stranger doesn't represent our whole race or ethnicity or religion. If a killer doesn't happen to look like us, we'll be expected not to complain that the most frequent purveyors of such massive tragedy — white men — get depicted as lone wolves or troubled youths but never terrorists or violence-prone criminals. They aren't seen as representatives of their race.

Yet despite those injustices, moments of national sadness have remained rare opportunities for those of all races and creeds to come together. Under Democratic and Republican presidents, these have been moments to set aside our divisions, step outside ourselves and grieve together.

At least, they used to be.

After the 9/11 attacks, President George W. Bush famously gave a speech at the Islamic Center of Washington for the explicit purpose of knitting our nation together. He reminded Americans that Muslims were their "brothers and sisters," friends and fellow citizens. But we've seen a shift with this administration. The opposite is now the norm: President Trump is more likely to retweet the ratings for the news coverage of a grisly event. And so a climate of fear, stoked by a president trying to energize the most unsavory elements of his base, has bred selfishness, not selflessness. Rather than coming together, we're running scared. Instead of standing shoulder to shoulder, we're barricading ourselves in our corners.

And can you blame us?

What would the response to Las Vegas have been if the shooter had been black — after weeks of racial uproar stoked by a white-nationalist march, presidential comments calling black NFL players a "son of a b----" and simmering slander of Black Lives Matter as a terrorist organization? It's not hard to imagine something nastier than tiki torches in Charlottesville.

Or imagine being Hispanic this week, or an immigrant, had Stephen Paddock's last name been García or Pérez. We already have the threat of a wall, of midnight deportations, of a rescinded homeland for children who have never known anywhere else. If our president's response to the devastation in Puerto Rico is any indication of how much he cares about the safety of Hispanic Americans, all this could quickly get much worse.

And what if the shooter had been Muslim? Anti-Muslim violence has spiked since Trump ran for office, fueled by his extremist rhetoric. Candidate Trump touted plans for a Muslim registry, and his surrogates approvingly cited World War II's shameful internment camps for U.S. citizens and noncitizens of Japanese descent as a positive precedent. If someone with an Arab-sounding name killed 58 from a hotel-room window, one can see how those plans might more easily come to fruition.

For many in Trump's America, these are not idle imaginings. And thus, the seemingly selfish response — this peculiar relief kind of relief that the shooter wasn't "one of us" — is as understandable as it is regrettable. Is it any wonder that we don't reach out to others when so many of us already feel under siege? Fear breeds selfishness, and for America, that's tragic, too.

Tragedy often has a clarifying effect. The Las Vegas massacre should cause us to think about what, as a nation, we've become.