White Lies

Race, Class, Gender and Sexuality in White Supremacist Discourse

Jessie Daniels

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134716456
• Print ISBN:
  9780415912891
• Subtopic: Discrimination & Race Relations

White supremacist groups have traditionally been viewed as "fringe" groups to be ignored, dismissed, or at most, observed warily. White Lies investigates the white supremacist imagination, and argues instead that the ideology of these groups is much closer to core American values than most of us would like to believe. The book explores white supremacist ideology through an analysis of over 300 publications from a variety of white supremacist organizations. It examines the discourse of these publications and the ways in which "whites," "blacks," and "Jews" are constructed within that discourse.

1 Introduction

DOI: 10.4324/9780203760420-1

A good deal of time and intelligence has been invested in the exposure of racism and the horrific results on its objects … that well-established study should be joined with another, equally important one: the impact of racism on those who perpetuate it.… The scholarship that looks into the mind, imagination, and behavior of slaves is valuable. But equally valuable is a serious intellectual effort to see what racial ideology does to the mind, imagination, and behavior of masters.

—Toni Morrison , Playing in the Dark, 1992

This book is an investigation into the white supremacist imagination. I explore here the terra incognita of publications produced by extremist white supremacist organizations in the contemporary United States, and what I find is disturbing.

An illustration of a white man shows him standing before towering skyscrapers and bridges while an airplane flies overhead; the caption reads, “White Men Built this Nation, White Men Are this Nation!” In another drawing, a buxom white woman stands bare-breasted, holding a machine gun, and casts a seductive glance at the viewer; the caption reads, “Get a White Man and Screw the System.” A caricatured drawing of a Black man—complete with exaggeratedly large lips, protruding eyes, bulging crotch, and a gun—is labeled “Today’s Young Coon.” In another drawing an obviously pregnant Black woman—again, caricatured with huge lips and protruding eyes—stands dazed from smoking what appears to be a crack pipe, while in her hand she holds several government checks; three anonymous, white, male hands offer her other forms of government assistance. The caption here reads, “There’s a Lot of Talk These Days about Civil Rights … But Never a. Word about Civil Wrongs!” A Jewish man, denoted by his large nose and the Star of David symbol on his tie, appears menacingly in another drawing; beneath him, the caption reads, “The Evil Jew.” And a woman who is signified as Jewish (again by her excessively large nose) and as lesbian (by the two-women symbol tattooed on her arm) represents the “Jew-dyke-feminist conspiracy” that turns “women into dykes.”

These horrifying images provide a quick glimpse of what is conjured up by the white supremacist imagination in the publications of contemporary white supremacist organizations in the United States. What is most alarming about the white supremacist discourse produced by extremists is that it shares much in common with the white supremacist discourse produced by elected officials, Madison Avenue, mainstream political debate, academic intellectuals, and popular culture representations. In this book I analyze the ways this discourse is situated within the particular racial and class context of institutionalized white supremacy. I also examine the ways certain notions of gender and sexuality are woven into white supremacist discourse. My argument here is that central to the “white lies” on which white supremacist discourse rests is the construction of “whiteness”; and that white supremacist discourse legitimates and sustains privileges of race, class, gender, and sexuality that are inherent in a white supremacist context.

Extremist white supremacist discourse, and the people and organizations that produce that discourse, represent for most of us an unexplored region of kooks, cranks, and crazies ranting about race with a zeal that clearly marks them as the extremists they are, far removed from everyday life or encounters. Most of us do not know anyone personally who is, or would even consider being, a member of one of these organizations. Recently, most Americans have become acquainted with white supremacists through films, news reports and a variety of popular books, or through their frequent appearances on talk shows such as “Geraldo,” “Donahue,” “Oprah,” and “Sally.” Who are these people who call themselves “white supremacists,” “white separatists,” or simply those who “stand up for white rights”?

White supremacists are “true believers,” in Eric Hoffer’s sense of that term. White supremacist organizations attract people who are seeking a refuge from the “anxieties, barrenness and meaninglessness of an individual experience” (Hoffer, 1951). As Ben Klassen, founder and former leader of the Church of the Creator, one of the organizations examined here, noted about his followers, “They’re activist young people who know something’s wrong but they don’t know what to do about it. They encounter the Church of the Creator and find the answer.” Yet this explanation for the existence and increasing growth of white supremacist organizations is not very satisfying. Such an analysis could just as easily apply to people in fundamentalist religions, whether Christian, Islamic, or Jewish, or those in religions otherwise known as “cults,” or those zealously committed to a host of other extremist causes. As Lipset and Raab (1970) have pointed out, extremism is a part of American culture. Yet the argument that white supremacists are “just part of the extremism” that is endemic to United States society tends to “e-race” the very specific manifestation of white supremacist organizations and their discourse, and does not tell us anything about their connection to the broader context of racial politics.

Any endeavor to analyze the discourse of white supremacist organizations can be hindered by an impulse to dismiss the organizations, or their discourse, as irrelevant. Questions often arise which reflect this, such as: How seriously should we take white supremacists? Are they a real threat, or are they part of a lunatic fringe that, if simply ignored, will go away? Or, alternatively, are they part of a lunatic fringe that will always exist? These questions seem to be shaped by a white paradigm in which the study of “race” has meant an almost exclusive focus on the purported pathology of people of color. Asking whether or not white supremacists are a real threat misses the point that white supremacist discourse has very real consequences for people of color. However, the question of how seriously we should take white supremacists must also be addressed here. Although the focus of this book is explicitly on the discourse of white supremacist organizations, rather than on why or how individual people come to appropriate that discourse and or join white supremacist organizations, arguments which assert that white supremacists are only a distant threat tend to undermine any serious analysis of this discourse.

The argument I want to address, then, is this: White supremacists constitute a very small number of people and therefore are not a threat. Out of over two hundred and fifty million people in the United States, only about 40,000 are white supremacists, less than 1 percent of the population. In addition, those white supremacists represent an extreme fringe of racist sentiment that does not reflect the sentiment of most Americans. Public opinion polls consistently show that Americans are becoming more tolerant with regard to race.

Furthermore, white supremacist organizations are full of individuals who are marginal members of society. They tend to be unemployed and/or poor, uneducated, and probably mentally unbalanced. Given the context of a faltering economy, these people are easily duped into seeing white supremacist organizations as an answer to their own economic distress. Once the economy improves, then white supremacists, and their organizations, will disappear.

The marginal individuals who are attracted to white supremacy are most often Southerners. White supremacy is an affliction of one, especially racist, region of the country, the South. White supremacist organizations do not have nationwide appeal, and therefore, white supremacy is not a national issue, it is a regional one.

Finally, white supremacist organizations represent a vestige of an older, more racist era. Eventually, white supremacists will simply fade from the American landscape. Like dinosaurs, they will become extinct. More importantly, white supremacist rallies are often more heavily attended by protesters than supporters, sometimes by ratios of 10 to 1. Clearly, white supremacists are not a real, widespread threat if this is the kind of response that greets them.

Though these may seem to be compelling arguments, they have some serious flaws. Let me consider each of these arguments in turn. First, while it is true that white supremacists constitute less than 1 percent of the population, let me suggest that what you consider a “small enough” number to not constitute a threat has a great deal to do with positionality. If you are among the vast majority of the white population that is not a member of a white supremacist organization, such organizations may simply represent for you an annoyance, or perhaps an offense to your sensibilities of what is good and just. Thus, the 1 percent of white supremacists may seem an insignificant, if unfortunate, statistic. If, however, you are a person of color, and you are a target of white supremacists and their discourse, then white supremacists may represent a material threat to your life. Thus, the thought of 40,000 avowed white supremacists means that there are that many more threats in the world that you must deal with.

And it is worth noting that estimates of the numbers of white supremacists are notoriously imprecise. White supremacists often give media sources numbers which are too high to boost their visibility, and those who wish to minimize the impact of white supremacists often underestimate their numbers. Still, the most reliable information available suggests that the “small numbers” (depending on where you’re standing) of white supremacists are growing steadily. Klanwatch, an organization which monitors white supremacist activities in the United States, estimates that there were 362 white supremacist organizations here in 1992, an increase of just over 27 percent from the previous year. In addition, the lessons of history teach us that relatively small numbers can grow astronomically in astonishingly short periods of time.

While it is true that surveys consistently show a trend over time toward increasing attitudes of “racial tolerance,” public opinion polls also show that a majority of white Americans agree with many of the basic ideas white supremacists espouse. In fact, according to the 1991 General Social Survey, 78 percent of whites thought Blacks were more likely than whites to prefer living on welfare, and 74 percent thought Hispanics more likely to prefer welfare. In the same study, 62 percent of whites thought Blacks were less likely to be hard-working; 56 percent thought Blacks were more prone to violence; 53 percent of whites thought Blacks were less intelligent; and 51 percent thought them less patriotic (New York Times, January 10, 1991, B10).

The notion that white supremacists are poor or unemployed, uneducated, and mentally unbalanced is a persistent one. It is also a comforting notion somehow to think that those who advocate the glaring racism examined here are set apart from those of us who are not poor, or those who are at least gainfully employed, educated, and relatively stable mentally. Unfortunately, this is no more than a comforting fiction. Studies which compare members of white supremacist organizations to the general population reveal that, in terms of aggregate statistics, members do not differ significantly from the population as a whole on measures of income, education, and occupation. Of the leaders in the white supremacist organizations represented in this study, five out of eight hold college degrees and two hold advanced degrees (see chapter 2).

The relationship between white supremacist organizations and the economy is a complex one and remains less than entirely clear. While it is possible that an increase in white supremacist organizations may be related to economic decline, it is certainly not a causal relationship. Indeed, the most popular resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan occurred during an era of unprecedented economic prosperity, the 1920s. Moreover, this explanation relies on a facile class-race model, which is no longer feasible given more complex understandings of race and class.

White supremacist organizations, while at one time a predominately Southern phenomenon, are no longer restricted to a particular region of the country. In fact, white supremacy is a regionally diverse, national movement.

With every incarnation—from the Reconstruction Era of the 1860s, to the 1920s resurrection, to the present manifestation—white supremacist organizations have been reported to be dying out, the last vestige of a bygone era. What seems clear, however, is that rather than a momentary aberration (or a recurring nightmare)’ white supremacist groups are an entrenched feature of United States racial politics. The persistence of white supremacist organizations may be a testament to Derrick Bell’s assessment of the “permanence of racism” in American culture (1992).

And, finally, while it is true that white supremacists are often outnumbered at their own rallies 10 to 1 by counter-demonstrators, the sad irony is that these protests themselves often turn violent. It is difficult to think of a more tragically misdirected or ineffective strategy than, as frequently happens at such rallies, to resort to violent attacks against white supremacists because “they hate people.”

More importantly in terms of response to white supremacist organizations, government leaders at the highest levels have been virtually silent on this issue. The United States government has pursued white supremacist organizations for “sedition,” but not for racism. In addition, white supremacist discourse is protected under the aegis of the First Amendment. These two strategies, on the one hand pursuing white supremacists for “sedition,” but not for racism, and taking a protective stance in favor of their speech on the other hand, combine to institutionalize white supremacy, tacitly approving its message.

Perhaps more to the point, whites are not, by and large, organizing to dismantle institutionalized white supremacy or to combat white supremacist discourse in arenas outside extremist groups, or white supremacist ideology, on an ongoing basis. Instead, anti-Klan demonstrations are typically conducted on an ad hoc, sporadic basis in response to specific actions by white supremacists.

Given this context, there has traditionally been little space available for “seeing race” at all in white supremacist movements. Analyses which lump white supremacists into the category “extremists” miss the otherwise self-evident point that white supremacist organizations and their discourse are first and foremost “about” race. For people whose lives may depend on what actions individuals take based on white supremacist discourse, there is little doubt that they are to be taken dead seriously.

Throughout this book, I point out the ways that the ideologies of the white supremacist movement are connected to more mainstream representations of white supremacy; and further, how these are related to notions of gender and sexuality. I will now lay out in preliminary fashion my argument about white supremacist organizations and their discourse.

Theoretical Origins

In this book, I make three main theoretical arguments. First, I contend that central to the “white lies” on which white supremacist discourse rests is the construction of “whiteness.” The construction of “whiteness” linked to the social, historical, and ongoing political process responsible for the ascendancy of “race”; and the mechanisms of this process become clearly visible in efforts within the discourse to construct “whiteness,” “Blackness,” and “Jewishness” as essential identities.

Second, I contend that it is impossible to examine the construction of race without simultaneously interrogating class, gender, and sexuality This suggests that in terms of understanding theoretical linkages between race, class, gender, and sexuality, instead of conceptualizing these as separate or discrete categories, we need to look at the process of creating these divisions as a singular one.

Third, I demonstrate that the themes of race, class, gender, and sexuality that appear in extremist white supremacist discourse resonate effectively in mainstream politics, advertising, academia, and popular culture. I further assert that white supremacist discourse—whether produced by extremists, Madison Avenue, or academics—serves to sustain privileges of race, class, gender, and sexuality which are endemic to a white supremacist context. In the following section, I briefly trace the theoretical antecedents which led me to these assertions.

My primary theoretical interest is research with white supremacy and the connections to class, gender, and sexuality. So, rather than beginning with an interest in white supremacist groups per se (which may have led me to a more sociologically conventional avenue of investigating of the groups as “deviants” or as one of many types of “extremist” social movements), my own intellectual path, given my previous research on lynching, led me to view white supremacist organizations and their discourse as connected to a context of institutionalized white supremacy.

A key development in recent scholarship theorizing race is the racial formation approach, which highlights contemporary political contestation over racial meanings. From this perspective:

there is no unitary racial ideology in the United States, but there are a number of competing political projects which seek to articulate a particular understanding of race and its meaning for social and political life. (Omi, 1990:2–3)

The implication here is that the idea of “race,” rather than being a biological certainty, is a socially and politically constructed category. Furthermore, Omi’s reference to the “c...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• CHAPTER 1. Introduction
• CHAPTER 2. White Supremacist Movement(s) in a White Supremacist Context
• CHAPTER 3. Visions of Masculinity, Glimpses of Femininity: White Men and White Women
• CHAPTER 4. “Rapists,” “Welfare Queens,” and Vanessa Williams: Black Men and Black Women
• CHAPTER 5. “ZOG,” Bankers, and “Bull Dyke” Feminists: Jewish Men and Jewish Women
• CHAPTER 6. The Ends of White Supremacy
• Appendix A: Methodology
• Appendix B: Publication Inventory
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index