(The New York Times — Race/Related) — Photo caption: White supremacists left Greenville Street Park in Newnan, Ga. after a rally last month.
The modern white power movement is much more than a resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan. It emerged in the aftermath of the Vietnam War, and drew support from veterans and even active-duty service members. That provocative finding comes from a new book, “Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America,” by Kathleen Belew, a historian at the University of Chicago. She spoke with Sewell Chan about her research.
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What are the biggest misconceptions about the white power movement?
The idea of “leaderless resistance” — intended to prevent infiltration by government operatives and prosecutions — allowed white power to sort of disappear as a movement. White power violence has too often been described as the disconnected acts of lone wolves or madmen, and this is precisely because people — the public, prosecutors, jurors, the government — haven’t understood it as a connected and coherent social movement. Relatedly, people often think of those involved in organized racist violence as uneducated, backward, or part of one class or regional identity. This is a misconception that really distorts the movement I study, which included people from all class backgrounds, from all regions of the country, from cities and rural areas alike. It also included rich people and poor people; high school dropouts and people with advanced degrees; religious leaders, along with felons; men, women, and children.
How would you characterize the white power movement today? Has it been emboldened by the Trump administration?
I should underline that I’m a historian, and my expertise ends in 1995. The kind of research I do won’t even be possible to pursue about our current moment for another five or ten years, because the archive simply hasn’t been compiled yet. But history shows that having an executive seen as sympathetic to the movement has not, in the past, worked to appease white-power activists or curb violence. The fact that the movement last turned violent during the Reagan administration — and at a moment of seeming state support for many of its goals — underlines the fact that this ideology was not aimed at electoral change.
Is the movement more, or less, powerful than it was in the mid-1990s, the endpoint of your study?
It’s difficult to say. Certainly we know from watchdog organizations that hate crimes and hate group memberships are rising. And certainly these ideas have entered the mainstream in new ways. I think the archives teach us that there has never been an effective stop delivered to this movement. The criminal prosecutions have been ineffective, there hasn’t been a turn in public opinion, and white power activity has been very effective at going underground, reforming and resurging.
Saturday, May 19, 2018