Beyond Hate

White Power and Popular Culture

C. Richard King, David J. Leonard

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317174691
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Ethnic Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Beyond Hate offers a critical ethnography of the virtual communities established and discursive networks activated through the online engagements of white separatists, white nationalists, and white supremacists with various popular cultural texts, including movies, music, television, sport, video games, and kitsch. Outlining the ways in which advocates of white power interpret popular cultural forms, and probing the emergent spaces of white power popular culture, it examines the paradoxical relationship that advocates of white supremacy have with popular culture, as they finding it to be an irresistible and repugnant reflection of social decay rooted in multiculturalism. Drawing on a range of new media sources, including websites, chat rooms, blogs and forums, this book explores the concerns expressed by advocates of white power, with regard to racial hierarchy and social order, the crisis of traditional American values, the perpetuation of liberal, feminist, elitist ideas, the degradation of the family and the fetishization of black men. What emerges is an understanding of the instruments of power in white supremacist discourses, in which a series of connections are drawn between popular culture, multiculturalism, sexual politics and state functions, all of which are seen to be working against white men. A richly illustrated study of the intersections of white power and popular culture in the contemporary U.S., and the use of use cyberspace by white supremacists as an imagined site of resistance, Beyond Hate will appeal to scholars of sociology and cultural studies with interests in race and ethnicity, popular culture and the discourses of the extreme right.

Chapter 1
Popularizing White Power: A Brief Introduction

In January 1967, George Lincoln Rockwell, founder of the American Nazi Party, spoke at Washington State University. It was one of a series of speeches he delivered in the Pacific Northwest that month, the most recent stop on a seemingly endless tour of college campuses for the demagogue. In his talk and in a conversation with the editorial board of the student newspaper, The Daily Evergreen, Rockwell dwelled on three interlaced issues, which he understood to be fundamental problems facing American society: black-white relations, communism, and the Jews. As if updating The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, he linked communism to a broader Jewish conspiracy; while restating the outmoded tenets of the American Colonization Society and Jim Crow, he pledged, if he were President, to repatriate blacks to Africa, and argued that they were inferior in “intelligence and performance” to whites.¹ His preoccupation with these topics would have surprised no one in attendance who was familiar with his worldview or the sociohistorical moment in which he spoke—the height of the Cold War, marked by pronounced anti-communism, especially on the Right, the ongoing struggles over racial equality and inclusion, and the ideological genealogy of the American Nazi Party.

Importantly, Rockwell located many of the dangers posed by each of these questions within popular culture. He was not merely disturbed by the decreasing significance of the color line, particularly as expressed in intimate relations between blacks and whites, but became “enflamed” by a portrait of the then wildly popular Sammy Davis, Jr. and his wife.² Emergent celebrity culture posed the problem: it endorsed interracial sexuality and through the figure of a famous African American performer encouraged the public to approve of it as well. Equally troubling were Jewish artists, intellectuals, and entertainers: Karl Marx and Leo Trotsky, he believed, foisted communism on the world; Gertrude Stein, a “queer Jewish poet,” Allen Ginsburg (who likely fit into the same category for Rockwell), and Pablo Picasso (here marked as a Jew, despite his Catholic baptism) promoted the denigration of Western civilization; and on television, individuals like Ed Sullivan allowed enemies of America like Fidel Castro to use the mass media to mislead the public.³ Popular culture was a threat and television in particular endangered white America.

In many respects, his comments that evening in a small southeastern Washington college town echoed the message he rehearsed in his lectures and writings. A few years earlier, at Colorado State University, for example, he told an audience of nine hundred,

You have been brainwashed by the liberals, the peace corps, you must hear both sides of the story. You do not hear both sides, look at the radio and TV—they are completely owned by three companies—ABC, CBS, and NBC. This wouldn’t be so bad but these companies are controlled to the man, by Russian Jews.⁴

Repeating these fictions of a Jewish world conspiracy, which he understood to be enabled by their control of popular media, helped Rockwell map the dynamics of power at play in the world, position EuroAmericans as victims, and account for their inaction in response to an urgent existential threat.

In White Power (1967: 237), he reiterated this theme:

Our modern generation, soaked in Jewish television, bombarded with Jewish progressive education, lied-to by Jewish newspapers, magazines and movies, poisoned by Jewish “morality”—or rather lack of it—deprived of any real home, family, beliefs and ideals, and finally ruled ruthlessly by Jewish-dominated toady politicians who pass vicious laws enforcing race-mixing with bayonets, has sunk to the point of racial degeneracy which took Rome five centuries to reach. Unless we can find some way to make our White people once more know themselves, realize who they are, what they are, and what the alien races of Jews and Negroes are doing to us, it will be forever too late!

White civilization, according to Rockwell, teetered on the brink: deluded and degraded by popular culture, whites embraced the collapse of racial boundaries and the erasure of their distinctiveness, which threatened to bring about the end of their race and undo its achievements.

Not surprisingly, the racial rhetorics of the “American Hitler” echoed and expanded the entanglements of paranoia, persecution, and power at the heart of his namesake’s anti-Semitic account of the world. As Adolf Hitler elaborated in Mein Kampf,

By the creation of a press whose content is adapted to the intellectual horizon of the least educated people, the political and trade-union organization finally obtains the agitation institution by which the lowest strata of the nation are made ripe for the most reckless acts. Its function is not to lead people out of the swamp of a base mentality to a higher stage, but to cater to their lowest instincts. Since the masses are as mentally lazy as they are sometimes presumptuous, this is a business as speculative as it is profitable.

It is this press, above all, which wages a positively fanatical and slanderous struggle, tearing down everything which can be regarded as a support of national independence, cultural elevation, and the economic independence of the nation…

Since the Jew is not the attacked but the attacker, not only anyone who attacks passes as his enemy, but also anyone who resists him. But the means with which he seeks to break such reckless but upright souls are not honest warfare, but lies and slander.

Here he stops at nothing, and in his vileness he becomes so gigantic that no one need be surprised if among our people the personification of the devil as the symbol of all evil assumes the living shape of the Jew.⁵

These sentiments, scapegoating Jews and linking evil, power, and popular media, fueled the Nazi political project, laying the foundation for its unrealized Final Solution. Importantly, this racialized vision of the popular imperiling a supreme race (Aryans in Nazi Germany, whites in the contemporary USA) provided the template for subsequent renderings of expressive culture and mass media.

Advocates of white power since Rockwell repeatedly have found popular culture troubling at best, understanding it to be a dangerous front in an ongoing race war. Former Ku Klux Klan (KKK) leaders and now online entrepreneurs of white power Don Black and David Duke both find the media to be biased, dominated by Jews, and ultimately anti-white.⁶ David Lane, a self-described white nationalist and founding member of the Order, has stated in more overt terms that popular culture plays a leading role in an ongoing “white genocide.” Indeed, he identified “Zionist control of the media,” as one of fifteen elements of this active campaign: “multi-racial sports, entertainment, and integration are designed to destroy the senses of uniqueness and value necessary to the survival of our Race.”⁷ The “Jewish-controlled” popular culture industry, among other institutions, has “brainwashed” white women “into believing in the importance and dignity of all races of people.”⁸ Worse, in this context, sport coverage poses a dangerous distraction that threatens white men. David Duke, for instance, summarizes the harms of this media complex:

Instead of exercising and becoming strong, engaging in healthy competition, struggle, sacrifice, courage and team spirit, they watch others exercise and become stronger. Ultimately, the choice we have is to actually live our own lives or suffer a twilight existence, living through the victories and defeats of others. The jew of course is telling us to concentrate on the fiddling while Rome burns … They are taking advantage of a society they did not build nor fight to defend.⁹

Even though white supremacists, separatists, and nationalists have voiced a common critique of the culture industries, their renderings of popular culture and the media have never been singular or simply dismissive. In fact, the ideological frames of white power have fostered diverse and even competing readings of cultural texts and encouraged increasingly productive uses and understandings of media. For his part, Rockwell, drawing inspiration from the reborn KKK of the early twentieth century and the fascist pageantry of the Nazi, clearly understood the importance of spectacle and media to the promulgation of white power. One might say for a time in the middle 1960s he was iconic because he was an overt racist, arguably the most popular lecturer on college campuses. He wanted more than to establish a cult of personality via mass media. Indeed, he was a transitional figure in appreciating the importance of using the popular to disseminate white power. In addition to more traditional modes, ranging from the standard handbills like the Boat Ticket¹⁰ and periodicals, including the aptly named White Power, to countless speeches, interviews with the likes of Playboy and Canadian television, and media stunts, such as his Holocaust denial tract The Diary of Anne Fink, he tried his hand at transforming his racist ideas into the most popular of popular forms at the time, music, sponsoring a tour of the deep south, dubbed Hatenanny, modeled after the ABC TV show Hootenanny, and in response to the Freedom Riders.

Although Rockwell, for all of his infamy and clever orchestration, never established an effective counter-public, he did lay the foundation for later advocates of white power. On this foundation, for instance, David Duke moved the KKK into the television age, skillfully using the media to circulate his racist ideology and advance his personal fortunes. Later, beginning in the 1980s, public access cable channels afforded a new means of communicating with a broader public. White power advocates across the US, most notably in Kansas City, Cincinnati, Austin, and Fullerton, aired Tom Metzger’s program “Race and Reason.”¹¹ At about the same time, the emergence of punk rock and rising white resentment fostered an entire scene that breathed new life into white supremacist, separatist, and nationalist politics (see Chapter 3). Importantly, the cultural and commercial infrastructure built up around music foreshadowed the electronic networks created on the Internet in the 1990s, when savvy organizers (like Don Black at Stormfront) digitized white power, spawning virtual communities anchored in chat rooms, blogs, podcasts, and social media (see Chapter 9).

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We dwell on Rockwell because of his place in the genealogy of white power, his account of popular culture, and his efforts to harness it to convey (however unsuccessfully) his message. In a very real way, he encapsulates and foreshadows the intersections and tensions among popular media/culture and white power. On the one hand, he points to the ways in which white nationalists identified popular culture as a threat to white supremacy, domination, and civilization, imagining popular culture as a Jewish plot against a white future; popular culture has long been seen as an ideological and material enemy to white communities. On the other hand, popular and media culture has been seen as a powerful tool and instrument of recruitment and community building. It was not enough to challenge the teaching of the “Jewish-controlled media”, but rather to produce alternative narratives, images, and teachings. Likewise, Rockwell’s focus on popular culture highlights the emergence of a new white nationalist movement, one that builds upon their racist forebears in new and profound ways. Contemporary white nationalist organizations, “like such older organizations on the racist right as the Klu Klux Klan and the Nazi Party, seek to foster a sense of white racial pride.”¹² Simultaneously, these movements differ from those in the past, in that new white nationalist movements are primarily about “discourse, persuasion and ideas.”¹³ In so much as the skinheads of previous generations focused on warfare through murders and vigilante justice, new white nationalism engages in ideological battles through the Internet and talk radio. One needs to look no further than the websites of various organizations to see their near obsession with popular culture, even more so than their interest in policy issues (immigration, affirmative action, multiculturalism).

We begin our discussion of white power and popular culture with Rockwell because our thinking on the subject has taken shape on the campus where he spoke nearly 45 years ago, a campus a short drive from the former Aryan Nation compound in northern Idaho and headquarters in northeastern Washington where the Order schemed their crime spree to finance an envisioned race war. For us, Rockwell may be dead, killed by a compatriot a little more than six months after speaking at Washington State University (WSU), where we both teach, but his deeper messages of white power, Jewish conspiracies, and black inferiority still reverberate. In 1997, before either of us taught at WSU, a student used the university server to host a website devoted to Holocaust denial.¹⁴ Since the early 2000s, flyers for the National Alliance and others fashioned after Aryan Nation propaganda have been posted on campus, on at least one occasion hung on each of our office doors. Intermittently during this period, students who would demonize white supremacists and disavow the persistence of racism have hosted ghetto-fabulous parties and planned Latino gang theme parties. More recently, students have created groups on Facebook dedicated to white nationalism and established a recognized student group with ties to a white nationalist organization which the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) has noted “straddles the line between mainstream and extreme views.”¹⁵ As we drafted the manuscript, our home department received anonymous faxes exemplifying white nationalist readings of history and society. Individually, we also have confronted the entry of white nationalists into our own lives within the mainstream. Leonard’s writing on popular culture and politics has prompted discussions by white nationalists that included references to his Jewishness. Whether in direct emails or online posts, Leonard confronts and is confronted by the white nationalist movement. More recently, Leonard learned that the handyman he had hired to fix the closet in his house had ties to white nationalist organizations, which he learned about only after reading media reports about his contempt for race-mixing. This disturbed Leonard greatly, especially given the interracial nature of his family. It not only elicited anxiety but showed how the extreme (both in the physical body and in ideology) penetrates our collective homes, communities, and lives daily. The media-created bubble resulting from depictions of white nationalists as clowns, reports of far-off compounds, and the otherwise fantasy of being isolated from white nationalists has been challenged by our experiences. There is comfort in the construction of a geographic and ideological binary between the extreme and the mainstream. Yet our experiences and confrontations with white nationalists and white supremacist ideologies within our daily lives undercuts this fantasy; our contact with white nationalist writings on popular culture, even as we sit in the comfort of our own offices or homes, illustrates the ways in which the divide between the extreme and mainstream is tenuous at best. The efforts from white nationalists to produce their own popular culture products in opposition to mainstream films, music, video games, and other cultural productions, some of which we too consume, illustrate the ways in which white nationalists penetrate and engage the mainstream daily.

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Beyond Hate: White Power and Popular Culture offers a critical ethnography of the virtual communities established and discursive networks activated through the online engagements of white separatists, white nationalists, a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Popularizing White Power: A Brief Introduction
• 2 Reframing White Power and Popular Culture: Images, Otherness and Interpretive Communities
• 3 Listening to White Noise: The Sonic Landscapes of White Power
• 4 Watching TV with White Supremacists: Social Life in Black, White, and Jew
• 5 Racing Hollywood: White Power, Audience Response, and Cinematic Spectacle
• 6 Hating the Playa: White Nationalism and Sport in the Contemporary USA
• 7 Gaming the Racial Order: White Power Identities and Ideologies in Video Games
• 8 What’s not to “Like”: White Power and Social Media
• 9 Beyond Hate: Wade Michael Page, White Power, and Popular Culture
• Bibliography
• Index