America’s angriest white men: Up close with racism, rage and Southern supremacy

[DonViejo]

Up close with small-town white rage, with bitter, scary men who feel left behind by economic and cultural change

MICHAEL KIMMEL

Excerpted from “Angry White Men: American Masculinity at the End of an Era”

Who are the white supremacists? There has been no formal survey, for obvious reasons, but there are several noticeable patterns. Geographically, they come from America’s heartland—small towns, rural cities, swelling suburban sprawl outside larger Sunbelt cities. These aren’t 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 America’s manufacturing centers. And that doesn’t even touch the former states of the Confederacy, where flying the Confederate flag is a culturally approved symbol of “southern pride”—in the same way that wearing a swastika would be a symbol of German “heritage” (except it’s illegal in Germany to wear a swastika).

There’s a large rural component. Although “the spread of far-right groups over the last decade has not been limited to rural areas alone,” writes Osha Gray Davidson, “the social and economic unraveling of rural communities—especially in the midwest—has provided far-right groups with new audiences for their messages of hate. Some of these groups have enjoyed considerable success in their rural campaign.” For many farmers facing foreclosures, the Far Right promises to help them save their land have been appealing, offering farmers various schemes and legal maneuvers to help prevent foreclosures, blaming the farmers’ troubles on Jewish bankers and the one-world government. “As rural communities started to collapse,” Davidson writes, the Far Right “could be seen at farm auctions comforting families . . . confirming what rural people knew to be true: that their livelihoods, their families, their communities—their very lives—were falling apart.” In stark contrast to the government indifference encountered by rural Americans, a range of Far Right groups, most recently the militias, have seemingly provided support, community, and answers.

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 people’s easy acceptance of the far right’s agenda of hate,” writes Matthew Snipp. “The far right didn’t create bigotry in the Midwest; it didn’t 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 flight”—but on steroids.

full read:
http://www.salon.com/2013/11/17/americas_angriest_white_men_up_close_with_racism_rage_and_southern_supremacy/

[Paladin]

1. You owe it to yourself to read the entire excerpt in Salon.

Very incisive, well-written detailing of where our next civil war is coming from.

[JimboBillyBubbaBob]

8. I read it in Salon and...

...I would agree with you, view the entire article.

[Populist_Prole]

2. Meh. Good points here and there but too much generalization and condescention

[Xipe Totec]

4. Do you realize how ironic your reply seems to be? nt

[Populist_Prole]

5. No. And I know irony

He painted with way too broad a brush and I got the feeling it was a case of the tail wagging the dog in that he cherry picked to reach a conclusion.

[Xipe Totec]

7. Your comment was just generalisations about the article and it was condescending. That's irony

Whether what you say about the article is true or not is not relevant. What is relevant, and ironic, is that your reply precisely described itself as much as it described the article.

That you did not see the irony just turns what was ordinary irony into dramatic irony.

Cheers.

[Populist_Prole]

10. Negative. You're just projecting because you disagree with me, or rather, agree with the writer

[Xipe Totec]

3. K&R nt

[Brigid]

6. OK, a fairly sizeable number of angry, alienated white guys . . .

Who feel they have nothing to lose, many of whom are military veterans, in a country awash with guns? Sounds like a recipe for domestic terrorism to me.

[leanforward]

9. An explanation.

I'm from the midwest and have had trouble understanding why the attitude. This article explains to me why the attitude. I left the area after military service, college graduation, and ended up in government service and on the east coast. Being familiar with the area, I've often wondered why the attitude? The folks that have remained in the rural areas and the more rural states have been left behind. I would agree that the international economic agreements are great for corporate efficiency. BUT, business interests have trumped the rural residents need for a living wage or a business opportunity.

The needs of the rural residents and residents of rust belt areas have been neglected in the interest of the bottom line. The pursuit of the corporate bottom line has left these folks behind.

I noted in this news cycle that populism may upset some plans of the establishment. But there are a lot of folks hurting out there, maybe this populism is needed to refocus on those below the poverty line. No, folks below the poverty line may not make choices some of the rest of us may make, but in the main these folks are representative of you and me. What benefits the rural residents, benefits rust belt residents, and urban residents.