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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsThis is quite a read.
Interested in the thoughts of people. I found it interesting but the writer somehow absolves the men he's talking about from their responsibility for creating some of the dyamics imapcting their lives. These men are not total victims.
http://www.salon.com/2013/11/17/americas_angriest_white_men_up_close_with_racism_rage_and_southern_supremacy/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=socialflow
Americas angriest white men: Up close with racism, rage and Southern supremacy
Up close with small-town white rage, with bitter, scary men who feel left behind by economic and cultural change
MICHAEL KIMMEL
Who are the white supremacists? There has been no formal survey, for obvious reasons, but there are several noticeable patterns. Geographically, they come from Americas heartlandsmall towns, rural cities, swelling suburban sprawl outside larger Sunbelt cities. These arent the prosperous towns, but the single-story working-class exurbs that stretch for what feels like forever in the corridor between Long Beach and San Diego (not the San Fernando Valley), or along the southern tier of Pennsylvania, or spread all through the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, across the vast high plains of eastern Washington and Oregon, through Idaho and Montana. There are plenty in the declining cities of the Rust Belt, in Dearborn and Flint, Buffalo and Milwaukee, in the bars that remain in the shadows of the hulking deserted factories that once were Americas manufacturing centers. And that doesnt even touch the former states of the Confederacy, where flying the Confederate flag is a culturally approved symbol of southern pridein the same way that wearing a swastika would be a symbol of German heritage (except its illegal in Germany to wear a swastika).
In that sense, the contemporary militias and other white supremacist groups are following in the footsteps of the Ku Klux Klan, the Posse Comitatus, and other Far Right patriot groups who recruited members in rural America throughout the 1980s. They tap into a long history of racial and ethnic paranoia in rural America, as well as an equally long tradition of collective local action and vigilante justice. There remains a widespread notion that Jews, African-Americans, and other minority-group members do not entirely belong, which may, in part, be responsible for rural peoples easy acceptance of the far rights agenda of hate, writes Matthew Snipp. The far right didnt create bigotry in the Midwest; it didnt need to, Davidson concludes. It merely had to tap into the existing undercurrent of prejudice once this had been inflamed by widespread economic failure and social discontent.
And many have moved from their deindustrializing cities, foreclosed suburban tracts, and wasted farmlands to smaller rural areas because they seek the companionship of like-minded fellows, in relatively remote areas far from large numbers of nonwhites and Jews and where they can organize, train, and build protective fortresses. Many groups have established refuge in rural communities, where they can practice military tactics, stockpile food and weapons, hone their survivalist skills, and become self-sufficient in preparation for Armageddon, the final race war, or whatever cataclysm they envision. Think of it as the twenty-first-century version of postwar suburban white flightbut on steroids.
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This is quite a read. (Original Post)
Skidmore
Apr 2015
OP
RKP5637
(67,111 posts)1. This, is a very interesting read. It sums up what I gathered was going on but had never seen it so
explicitly stated!
CanSocDem
(3,286 posts)2. Good article.
But I do think you can absolve the individual who is a victim of cultural indoctrination. We have to believe that they can be 'saved'.
'On the extreme Right, by contrast, race is a proxy for class. Among the white supremacists, when they speak of race consciousness, defending white people, protesting for equal rights for white people, they actually dont mean all white people. They dont mean Wall Street bankers and lawyers, though they are pretty much entirely white and male. They dont mean white male doctors, or lawyers, or architects, or even engineers. They dont mean the legions of young white hipster guys, or computer geeks flocking to the Silicon Valley, or the legions of white preppies in their boat shoes and seersucker jackets interning at white-shoe law firms in major cities. Not at all. They mean middle-and working-class white people. Race consciousness is actually class consciousness without actually having to see class. Race blindness leads working-class people to turn right; if they did see class, theyd turn left and make common cause with different races in the same economic class.'
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