"Half the Battle": Cultural Resonance, Framing Processes, and Ethnic Affectations in Contemporary White Separatist Rhetoric

Abstract

A recent critique of frame analysis in social movements suggested that future studies (I) be sensitive to bridging micro- and macro-levels of analysis, and (2) attend better to human agency and emotions in the framing process. This paper addresses those and other issues in an examination of the “new racist” (NR) rhetoric of contemporary white separatists (WS's) who focus on legitimating their movement using a cultural pluralist master-frame. In the context of theories about social movements, affect, and the social construction of ethnicity, I describe how NRWS's engage in frame-transformation and frame-alignment by (a) consciously packaging a “hate-free” racism, (b) developing strategies of equivalence and reversal–presenting whites as equivalent to ethnic and racial minorities, and (c) deploying ideas about “love,” “pride,” and “heritage-preservation” to evidence both their putative lack of animosity toward others as well as their ethnic credentials. I interpret these ethnic affectations as contextually bound efforts at truth construction that offer an opportunity to explore the role of affect in social movements. I conclude that the product of these claims is Kultural Pluralism: a blurring of distinctions between Cultural Pluralism and white supremacist racism, designed to emotionally appeal broadly to moderate and mainstream conservative whites.