Positioning Hate

Abstract

A year after the publication of my book on women in the contemporary organized racist movement, 'Inside Organized Racism: Women in the Hate Movement' (2002), I received a series of emails from a woman I will call Jenny. The study of racist activists in this book was based in part on my interviews with women in the Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazi and white supremacist skinhead groups, and Christian Identity communities. Although Jenny was not among those I had interviewed or even met in the course of the study, she had heard about my book–although not read it, as I later discovered–and contacted me to complain. Jenny insisted that I had inaccurately characterized people in the racist movements as motivated by hatred. In her experience, the movement, at least in the past, had been composed largely of “well-meaning” and “fairminded” people. Only recently had it attracted less savory characters who were just “looking for a home for their hate”—people, Jenny concluded, who were making the racist movement less comfortable for the good people like her.

Keywords

• hate
• neo-nazi
• ku klux klan
• jewish