ABSTRACT
In the mid-1990s, I conducted life history interviews with 34 women members of U.S. racist groups, including Ku Klux Klan, Christian Identity, neo-Nazi, and white power skinhead groups, for a study of changing gender dynamics in organized racism. 2 One of these interviews was with Susan, 3 a longtime member of a West Coast Nazi group, who spoke of her conflicted feelings about being white. She pondered why she had remained active in the racist movement despite what she regarded as unprovoked assaults by antiracist groups and investigations by the government: “The masses of whites that are so brainwashed have convinced me to stay with the cause and to struggle to reeducate them. Our race is so guilt-ridden and ashamed of its own accomplishments and that is amazing. We [i.e., her group] have received hate mail and a good portion of it claimed to be from whites that said, ‘I am white and ashamed,’ [and] ‘I take no pride in being white,’ [and] ‘I was born white, not by my choice.’ “With scorn tempered by sympathy, Susan described “the masses of whites” as lacking a sense of white pride and racial ability. Their racial quiescence, she noted, was imperiling the race. Against all evidence, Susan saw whites as an endangered race, facing demographic and cultural extinction brought by social institutions that she decried as “blatantly anti-white”: “The masses of white folks have been stripped of their culture, heritage, history, and pride. That is why we do the things that we do—to educate, to instill a sense of pride in these people, to offset the effect of the regular mainstream media which is blatantly antiwhite. Whites are the true endangered species. We are less than 9 percent of the world's population. We are the ones in danger of dying out in one or two generations.”
