The White Power Movement in the United States
and its Transnational Aspirations
Links and Podcasts for Understanding an American Shadow

The outlook on life and way of living in the world encouraged in Open Horizons encourages us to acknowledge -- to own -- the shadow side of our individual and collective (nationalistic) lives. We cannot and should not hide from evil, pretending that it is merely the absence of good or a projection onto others. It has its own destructive power which can take over a person or a group. Witness the power of a violent mob in the lynchings of twentieth century America.
The "shadow" refers to those aspects of life that are destructive and hate-filled, rooted in fear and a sense of humiliation, which we might hide from. Owning the shadow does not mean that we obey the dictates of the shadow, or that we approve of their destructive tendencies. It means that we try to understand it, including the motivations of those who obey those dictates.
This page offers resources for understanding one of America's deepest shadows: the white power movement. The shadow of racism runs very deep in many a psyche and cannot be reduced to the white power movement. But the movement is itself a contemporary expression of the shadow that has a life of is own.
This page is devoted to understanding its more recent history with help from a book by Dr. Kathleen Belew: Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America (Harvard University Press, Spring 2018). "The book explores how white power activists wrought a cohesive social movement through a common story about warfare and its weapons, uniforms, and technologies. By uniting previously disparate Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazi, skinhead, and other groups, the movement carried out escalating acts of violence that reached a crescendo in the 1995 bombing of Oklahoma City."
The "shadow" refers to those aspects of life that are destructive and hate-filled, rooted in fear and a sense of humiliation, which we might hide from. Owning the shadow does not mean that we obey the dictates of the shadow, or that we approve of their destructive tendencies. It means that we try to understand it, including the motivations of those who obey those dictates.
This page offers resources for understanding one of America's deepest shadows: the white power movement. The shadow of racism runs very deep in many a psyche and cannot be reduced to the white power movement. But the movement is itself a contemporary expression of the shadow that has a life of is own.
This page is devoted to understanding its more recent history with help from a book by Dr. Kathleen Belew: Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America (Harvard University Press, Spring 2018). "The book explores how white power activists wrought a cohesive social movement through a common story about warfare and its weapons, uniforms, and technologies. By uniting previously disparate Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazi, skinhead, and other groups, the movement carried out escalating acts of violence that reached a crescendo in the 1995 bombing of Oklahoma City."
“They believe in a racial nation that would be transnational in scope ... based on the idea that white people are the chosen people.” That’s how University of Chicago historian Kathleen Belew describes the ideology of the “white power” movement in America. Belew is the author of a new book, Bring the War Home, that traces the origins of the white power movement to the aftermath of the Vietnam War. She examines how various racist groups — skinheads, Klansmen, white separatists, neo-Nazis, militiamen, and others — united under a common banner and took the movement in a violent and revolutionary direction. (VOX, April 13, 2018)
How the Movement Coalesced after the Vietnam War
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The White Power Movement in the US
and The Rise of the Racist Right in Europe
RELATED LINKS
Kathleen Belew, Assistant Professor of US History and the College at the University of Chicago Liz Fekete, Director of the Institute of Race Relations READING LIST Kathleen Belew, Bring the War Home - The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America, (Harvard University Press, 2018) Liz Fekete, Europe's Faultlines - Racism and the Rise of the Right, (Verso, 2018) |