ABSTRACT
The hate groups currently enjoying a renewed popularity would have no hesitation in supporting the contention of the extreme right-wing magazine American Renaissance that “it has been more than 30 years since the civil rights era but in many respects race relations are worse than ever. In the 1960s, Americans hoped to build a nation in which race would no longer matter, and people of all backgrounds would live together in harmony. It is now clear that the assumptions of the civil rights movement were wrong” (American Renaissance, online). Indeed, many would go further to say that not only the assumptions but the intentions of the civil rights movement were wrong, misguided, even destructive of the American way of life. Consequently, from their point of view, it is time to roll back the disastrous gains of the 1960s and 1970s and reassert the “true” American identity grounded in white, male, heterosexual hegemony. In essence, hate groups represent an extreme-but not aberrant-element of a broader cadre concerned with trimming the sails of the myriad counterhegemonic forces and ideologies that have arisen out of the civil rights decades. They represent a countercounterhegemonic, or counterinsurgent force determined to rearticulate the racial and gender dynamics in the United States.
