“A Skinhead at Heart with a Hate-Filled Mind”: Understanding the Themes Present in the White Power Music Scene

Zoom-ing in on White Supremacy

The Kids Are Alt-Right: How Media and the Law Enable White Supremacist Groups to Recruit and Radicalize Emotionally Vulnerable Individuals

This article delves into the intricate relationships between two opposing ideological and religious factions: white supremacists and Black supremacists. It analyzes their respective characteristics and shared denominators, focusing on the pivotal role of antisemitism as a cohesive force. Additionally, the study explores the endeavours of white supremacists to mobilize Black supremacists against Jewish people, investigating the orchestrated campaigns and attempts to legitimize violence. By illuminating these dynamics, the article contributes to a deeper comprehension of the complexities within extremist movements and their strategies for advancing their agendas. Addressing gaps in current literature, it emphasizes (a) the connections between white supremacists and Black supremacists; (b) the significance of antisemitism as a unifying factor between these factions; (c) the collaboration between seemingly opposing groups; and (d) the potential ramifications of such alliances.

Consumption, Wellness, and the Far Right

This qualitative analysis of online documents compiled from the North American Animal Liberation Press Office examines how Animal Liberation Front (ALF) activists in Canada, Mexico and the United States speak about their motivations, goals and role in the broader context of animal liberation and ecological crisis. As a clandestine, direct action, extremist movement, ALF activists are often labelled as violent, angry, misanthropic radicals and have been targeted by industry lobbyists, legislation, and law enforcement officials to suppress their activism. In this chapter, I demonstrate how activists perceive themselves as the hands of justice in a deeply unjust, damaged, and anthropocentric world. The ALF rightly perceives that humans are to blame for the ecological crisis, which is greatly exacerbated by intensive animal agriculture and the destruction of ecosystems for industrial, commercial and residential development. Yet, they do not seek to harm people, but rather to cause economic harm to animal industries in order to make it more difficult for them to profit from the use of animals. By engaging in vigilante justice, ALF activists pursue a broader goal of liberating all animals from captivity, violence and death, and destroying the industries and hierarchical structures that continue to exploit them at the cost of environmental destruction.

Chip Smith, The Cost of Privilege: Taking On the System of White Supremacy and Racism (Fayetteville, NC: Camino Press, 2007), 466 pages, paper $19.95.In The Cost of Privilege: Taking On the System of White Supremacy and Racism, Chip Smith has written a historical treatise on white racism in the United States. He provides a well researched, detailed account of the cause and effect of white privilege in the United States. The book effectively examines the influence of racial privilege on a broad range of social relations from an international to a personal level. It targets progressive white people who are consciously anti-racist and provides insights for individual self-reflection and organizational changeThis article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

Does "White" Equal "White Supremacy"? Marcia Noe (bio) What do we think of when we hear the term "White supremacy"? A Grand Dragon in a hood and sheet? A Tiki Torch-bearing neo-Nazi? Britt Halvorson and Joshua O. Reno would like to change that perception. In Imagining the Heartland: White Supremacy in the American Midwest, they offer us a new way to conceptualize White supremacy: they argue that it is less an individual mindset or pattern of behavior than it is a part of the systems and structures of power that control resources and lives. Halvorson and Reno's case rests on their analysis of midwestern works of the imagination, as well as accounts from popular media, and the ways in which these works enact a pastoral mythology that constructs the Midwest as White. Further, they maintain that the whiteness of these works enables White supremacy, which, in turn, furthers nationalist and imperialist projects. Undeniably, White supremacy is an egregiously serious problem. The Southern Poverty Law Center has identified 733 hate groups in the United States, 47 of which are categorized as White nationalist organizations.1 Many of these are located in the Midwest, and Halvorson and Reno are right to inquire about the region's participation in this heinous social movement and to analyze the ways in which midwestern discourse informs identity and shapes thinking about race. As Jon K. Lauck observes, "regional identities arise from the aspirations, visions, and self-perceptions of those who create and monopolize the discourses about the localities and regions in which they occur."2 Lauck is talking about the kinds of stories we tell about ourselves as Midwesterners. These stories, derived from agrarian principles, portray Midlanders as virtuous, industrious, and self-reliant. Are these White stories? And, if they are, does that whiteness equate to White supremacy? And does this implicate the region in national and global racist endeavors? Halvorson and Reno would answer yes to these questions. [End Page 141] Energized by the attention directed at White working-class heartland voters in the wake of the 2016 presidential election, Halvorson and Reno address what they believe is a culturally misplaced emphasis. Trumpism is not a new thing, they point out, showing how, throughout the region's history, midwestern pastoralism has been portrayed on stage and screen, in the visual arts and in popular discourse, as normative virtuousness through which good, elite Whites distance themselves from deplorable, racist Others. They contend that this conceptualization does not address the region's structural racism and its depredations. "We need fresh, new ways of thinking about and seeing what racism is and does in order to begin the multigenerational, hard, and unglamorous work of dismantling white supremacy," they assert (4). Perhaps a useful way to understand this argument is to reflect on second-wave feminism's conceptualization of "woman" compared to that of third-wave feminism. Fifty years ago, second-wave feminists talked about "women" and "women's rights" in an essentialized way that tacitly equated "women" with White, middle-class, cis-gendered heterosexual women, thus eliding women of color, queer women, and working-class women. More recently, third-wave feminists have offered the corrective of intersectionality, a term coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw. This new way of thinking jettisons a generic woman to make way for an inclusive feminism that acknowledges that oppression is experienced differently by women of different races, classes, and sexual orientations.3 Similarly, Halvorson and Reno are arguing that the Midwest has been constructed in just such an essentialized manner that elides ethnic and racial differences. However, the authors stumble when they take their claims one step further. Their argument is grounded in Frances Lee Ansley's definition of White supremacy: "a political, economic, and cultural system in which whites overwhelmingly control power and material resources, conscious and unconscious ideas of white superiority and entitlement are widespread, and relations of white dominance and nonwhite subordination are daily resonated across a broad array of institutions and social settings" (53). This definition is capacious enough to include almost everything White or "coded White" and thus fails to provide an adequate warrant for Halvorson and Reno's claims that "the whiteness of the Midwest...

Reviewed by: Country Soul: Making Music and Making Race in the American South by Charles L. Hughes Paul Devlin Charles L. Hughes. Country Soul: Making Music and Making Race in the American South. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2015. 280 pp. $29.95. Country Soul: Making Music and Making Race in the American South by Charles L. Hughes is a nuanced, elegant, and authoritative history of an important corner of the Southern popular music industry from the 1960s through the early 1980s. Hughes focuses on what he calls the “country-soul triangle” from Memphis to Nashville to Muscle Shoals, epicenters of creativity that helped create the soundtrack of the era. Stars who emerged from the triangle include Al Green, Wilson Pickett, Bobby Womack, the Staples Singers, Isaac Hayes, Sam & Dave, Otis Redding, Booker T. and the MGs, Charley Pride, Dolly Parton, and Elvis Presley, while those who traveled to the triangle in search of a particular sound include James Brown, Liza Minnelli, and the Rolling Stones. Hughes successfully navigates many potential pitfalls as he tells (and revises) the intricate story of how country and soul music have been understood as political and social proxies. The hit-making studios (such as Stax, for instance) of the country-soul triangle during this period have long been considered extraordinary sites of progressive interracial harmony. For example, a black studio band created the music for the white Mar-Keys and a white band, the famous Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section, played the music on some of the best-known tunes by the Staples Singers (at the very moment that the Staples Singers became more overtly political and aligned with a Black Power perspective). Country Soul is filled with a wide variety of similar examples. This narrative of interracial cooperation was cemented by music critic Peter Guralnick’s Sweet Soul Music: Rhythm and Blues and the Southern Dream of Freedom (Back Bay, 1986). Hughes’s goal is to both oppose and complicate the assumptions that have followed in the wake of Guralnick’s book, and from related anecdotes that have proliferated about the period. The fact that the Staples Singers used a white studio band is widely known. But what of the similarly talented black studio bands during the period who worked under difficult conditions? It may be fun to watch Louis Armstrong and Johnny Cash perform together on YouTube, but Hughes argues that broad historical conclusions should not be drawn from such glorious moments: When knitted together, these stories of cooperation offer an alternative narrative of southern history, a tradition of racial interaction that complicates or even contradicts the conventional understanding of the South’s conflicted past. Interracial music collaborations from Jimmie Rodgers and Louis Armstrong in the 1920s to Nelly and Tim McGraw in the 2000s are offered as counterpoints to racial polarization. The interracial intermingling of 1850s string bands or 1950s rock ’n’ roll becomes evidence for the limits of segregation and white supremacy. . . . . . . But those who promote this narrative (and there are lots of us, from Barack Obama to me at some points in my career) have taken it further and exhibit a disquieting tendency to imply that the music existed outside of history. Statements like “racism did not exist in the studio” or “on the bandstand, everyone was the same” or “we saw no difference between black and white” are commonplace in this discourse. Southern musical spaces— both literal and figurative—have become a kind of ahistorical interracial dreamland. (190, 191) [End Page 63] Hughes successfully uses what he calls a “labor-based analysis” (6) to attempt to replace this ahistorical interracial dreamland with something closer to reality. Hughes does not claim that the dreamland was actually a nightmare-land, but his excavation of the in-between land discards sedimented layers of myth. There is an element of truth to the idea that many people looked to the Southern music industry as a site of change, or a space reflective of the vanguard of social change. Hughes writes that Jerry “Swamp Dogg” Williams, a black country-and-soul musician, “understood that his hybrid music offered a way out of [race-based genre divisions imposed by the music industry] by...

This chapter addresses the issue of race and racism in the United States in a context of political polarization and where “whites,” as a category, no longer constitute the majority of the population. With numerical domination fading, will the color-coded hierarchy and ideology of white supremacy also fade into history? The issue of white mobilization and the interrelation between social movements and the established political parties is also discussed, particularly as this was actualized in the storming of the US capitol building.

In this article, we explore emotions as a relational mechanism that affects the stability of political movement groups by activating or weakening identities, social ties, and movement boundaries. Our goal is to specify the dynamics by which personal emotional experiences are linked to wider group processes. In this way, emotion serves as an analytic bridge, connecting the micro levels to larger social structures. We draw on data from former violent white supremacists to understand the personal/interpersonal (micro) and group (meso) level emotional dynamics in this extremist movement, especially how emotional experiences affect social movement dynamics. We draw on our evidence to build models of how emotional dynamics create trajectories of development and decline in white supremacist group membership. To demonstrate the analytic leverage provided by a focus on emotional dynamics, we then examine three findings from our study that are difficult to explain through more common frameworks of individual cognitive processes or group structure.

Social media provides the means by which extremist social movements, such as white supremacy and anti-LGBTQ, thrive online. Yet, we know little about the roles played by the participants of such movements. In this paper, we investigate these participants to characterize their roles, their role dynamics, and their influence in spreading online extremism. Our participants-online extremist accounts-are 4,876 public Facebook pages or groups that have shared information from the websites of 289 Southern Poverty LawCenter (SPLC) designated extremist groups. Guided by theories of participatory activism, we map the information sharing features of these extremists accounts. By clustering the quantitative features followed by qualitative expert validation, we identify five roles surrounding extremist activism-educators, solicitors, flamers, motivators, sympathizers. For example, solicitors use links from extremist websites to attract donations and participation in extremist issues, whereas flamers share inflammatory extremist content inciting anger. We further investigate role dynamics such as, how stable these roles are over time and how likely will extremist accounts transition from one role into another. We find that roles core to the movement-educators and solicitors-are more stable, while flamers and motivators can transition to sympathizers with high probability. Finally, using a Hawkes process model, we test which roles are more influential in spreading various types of information. We find that educators and solicitors exert the most influence in triggering extremist link posts, whereas flamers are influential in triggering the spread of information from fake news sources. Our results help in situating various roles on the trajectory of deeper engagement into the extremist movements and understanding the potential effect of various counter-extremism interventions. Our findings have implications for understanding how online extremist movements flourish through participatory activism and how they gain a spectrum of allies for mobilizing extremism online.

The Evolution of Identity Politics

The global far right is extremely broad in nature and far from monolithic. While the “far right” is often used as an umbrella term, using the term runs the risk of over-simplifying the differences and linkages between white supremacist, anti-immigration, nativist, and other motivating ideologies. These beliefs and political platforms fall within the far-right rubric, and too often the phrase presents a more unified image of the phenomena than is really the case. In truth, the “far right” and the individual movements that comprise it are fragmented, consisting of a number of groups that lack established leadership and cohesion. Indeed, these movements include chauvinist religious organizations, neo-fascist street gangs, and paramilitary organs of established political parties. Although such movements largely lack the mass appeal of the interwar European radical right-wing extreme, they nevertheless can inspire both premeditated and spontaneous acts of violence against perceived enemies. This report is intended to provide policymakers, practitioners, and the academic community with a roadmap of ongoing shifts in the organizational structures and ideological currents of radical right-wing extremist movements, detailing the difference between distinct, yet often connected and interlaced echelons of the far right. In particular, the report identifies and analyzes various aspects of the broader far right and the assorted grievances it leverages to recruit, which is critical to gaining a more nuanced understanding of the potential future trajectory of these movements.

ABSTRACTSince the January 2021 attack on the US Capitol, the influence of White Christian nationalism (WCN) has become even more pronounced and concerning. Adult educators and the public need a better understanding of whether and how WCN can be unlearned, and the roles ordinary citizens and adult educators can play in this process. After describing WCN and its reach in the United States, the article draws on three bodies of literature to consider how both the most committed proponents and sideline supporters might turn from WCN toward new beliefs and identities. These literatures are: (1) deradicalization from extremist groups and movements (e.g., terrorism, cults, gangs); (2) unlearning; and (3) personal accounts of leaving and discarding beliefs rooted in White supremacy, Christian nationalism, or White evangelicalism. Together, these sources offer useful insights into the conditions that help people change beliefs associated with extremist movements such as WCN.

Mormonism and White Supremacy: American Religion and the Problem of Racial Innocence