ABSTRACT
People in organized racist groups tend to be disingenuous, especially when it comes to describing their racial commitments and activities. Not surprisingly, they want to present themselves and their groups in the most favorable light and thus are loath to accept pejorative terms such as 'hate'. The seeming memory of racial 'conversion' that these racist women relate as their route to racist groups was thus a post hoc reconstruction, grounded in their current racist commitments, rather than an accurate recounting of their original motivation to join. This chapter focuses on recent theorizing in the sociology of emotions and sociological studies of racial hatred and ethnoviolence, as well as the empirical work on racist activists in the 1920s Klan, the contemporary organized racist movement, and what are commonly known as 'hate crimes'. The role of hate in practices of intergroup conflict and tension is generally regarded, at least implicitly, as a matter of individual psychology.
