WASHINGTON—The Federal Bureau of Investigation’s director said the bureau has abandoned the term “black identity extremism” as part of a broad reconceptualization of how it thinks about racially motivated crime.
In testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, FBI director Christopher Wray said 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 term “black identity extremism” drew scrutiny from civil rights leaders and others over concerns that it delegitimized activism against police violence and drew a false equivalence with white supremacy.
In a controversial move, the bureau has stopped characterizing white supremacy—which Democrats say poses a growing violent threat—as a separate category, considering all racially motivated violent extremism as a single broad category.
Mr. Wray acknowledged that many domestic terrorism arrests involved white supremacy. Many such cases “are motivated by some version of what you might call white supremacist violence,” Mr. Wray said in his testimony.
Democrats in Congress had been told about the adoption of the term “racially motivated violent extremism” in a private briefing, they said earlier this year. In addition, an FBI official said last month in a House subcommittee hearing that the term black identity extremism had not been used by the bureau since early 2018.
Mr. Wray said the shift was an attempt to emphasize that law enforcement doesn’t investigate people merely for their ideology. In the U.S., the First Amendment broadly protects a wide swath of hateful speech as well as the right to organize in groups around hateful ideologies. Law enforcement can only intervene if there are concerns about violence.
“We only investigate violence. We don’t investigate extremism. We don’t investigate ideology. We don’t investigate rhetoric. It doesn’t matter how repugnant, how abhorrent or whatever it is,” Mr. Wray told members of the Senate panel.
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,” Mr. Wray told Sen. Cory Booker (D., N.J.), who had pressed him on the “black identity extremism” label.
Mr. 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 controversy over the term “black identity extremism” began in 2017 when the FBI produced a 12-page report alleging that such activists were increasingly targeting law enforcement. Such extremists were acting “in retaliation for perceived past police brutality incidents,” the report said.
The issue of police killings has roiled U.S. politics since 2014 and sparked a wave of activism under the banner “Black Lives Matter” after several high-profile incidents. They include the deaths of teenager Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., and Eric Garner while in the custody of police in New York City.
As a result, the use of the term by the bureau has drawn criticism from civil-rights activists who say it raises the specter of the kind of surveillance the FBI employed against civil-rights activists in the 1950s and 1960s.
“We’re deeply concerned about the FBI’s ’black identity extremist’ designation. This is mere distraction from the very real threat of white supremacy,” said Kristen Clarke, president and executive director of the National Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, in congressional testimony earlier this year.
“It is not real. It is not a real threat. It harkens back to the dark days of our federal government abusing its power to go after civil rights activists during the heyday of the civil-rights movement. There is no such thing as black identity extremism,” Ms. Clarke said.
Write to Byron Tau at byron.tau@wsj.com