Arkansas. Pastor Thomas Robb (center), along with his wife, son, and grandchildren. In 1989, Robb took over the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, originally led by David Duke. In a bid to gain mainstream acceptance, he took the title of “National Director” and renamed the organization “The Knights Party.” Pastor Robb’s daughter Rachel is the highly respected national spokeswoman of the ministry.
Photograph and caption by Anthony Karen, all rights reserved.
Kentucky. A white nationalist at work selling various clothing items during an annual white unity weekend.
Photograph and caption by Anthony Karen, all rights reserved.
Washington, D.C. Forty members of a white nationalist organization demonstrate on the White House lawn in opposition to illegal immigration.
Photograph and caption by Anthony Karen, all rights reserved.
Tennessee. The late Ms. Ruth was a fifth-generation Klanswoman (L.O.T.I.E., Ladies of the Invisible Empire). A seamstress by trade, here she is sewing a ceremonial Klan robe for an “Imperial Knighthawk,” which is a security rank within the Klan.
Photograph and caption by Anthony Karen, all rights reserved.
Pennsylvania. Sabrina, an officer within a large white nationalist organization, spends time with two of her eleven children.
Photograph and caption by Anthony Karen, all rights reserved.
Women and Gender Roles
The study of the white supremacist movement is deeply gendered. From the early twentieth-century Ku Klux Klan to contemporary neo-Nazis, the committed white supremacist appears to be male. Much scholarship still depicts women as politically indifferent, manipulated, victimized, and recruited into racist organizations by their boyfriends or husbands. Many scholars and journalists see women in these groups as lacking agency and therefore unworthy of consideration. This lack of attention to women “distorts and may cause us to seriously underestimate the destructive potential of the racist movement,” warns sociologist Kathleen Blee. Her research into women and organized racism shows that many female racist activists are educated, come from financially stable and non-abusive homes, and joined on their own accord.
Women rarely assume leadership roles in these movements, and their activism is consciously antifeminist. Nonetheless, women’s roles are vital to fostering a cohesive collective identity of individual organizations. Aside from more traditional supporting roles, such as sewing Klan robes, raising the next generation of white supremacists, and selling merchandise at rallies, women have been key recruiters, propagandists, brokers of important social connections, and community builders in the movement.
Next category: “Children and the Intergenerational Transmission of Racial Beliefs”.
Further Reading:
Kathleen Belew, Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2018).
Kathleen Blee, Women of the Klan: Racism and Gender in the 1920s (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991/2009).
Kathleen Blee, “Becoming a Racist: Women in Contemporary Ku Klux Klan and Neo-Nazi Groups,” Gender and Society, vol. 10, no. 6 (1996), pp. 680–702.
Kathleen Blee, Inside Organized Racism: Women in the Hate Movement (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002).
Seward Darby, Sisters in Hate: Americans on the Front Lines of White Nationalism (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2020).
Linda Gordon, The Second Coming of the KKK: The Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s and the American Political Tradition (New York: Liveright, 2018).
