Kentucky. A young attendee during an annual Memorial Day weekend concert featuring various “Hatecore” bands.
Photo and caption by Anthony Karen, all rights reserved.
Pennsylvania. The eldest son of a family with eleven children (right) gives a Nazi salute while his brother and sister look on.
Photo and caption by Anthony Karen, all rights reserved.
Arkansas. A mother helps her daughter put on her helmet during a Ku Klux Klan Labor Day weekend. During this gathering, members and supporting Klan realms from five different states came together for a three-day weekend of racial unity.
Not long after this image was taken, this family resigned from the Klan.
Photo and caption by Anthony Karen, all rights reserved.
Pennsylvania. Members of two white nationalist organizations come together to host a silent community protest in opposition to the Black Lives Matter movement.
Not long after this image was taken, three individuals shown in this photo left the movement.
Photo and caption by Anthony Karen, all rights reserved.
Arizona. A white power skinhead leaves the “mosh pit” after a performance by the band Max Resist.
Photo and caption by Anthony Karen, all rights reserved.
Children and the Intergenerational Transmission of Racial Beliefs
Racial indoctrination of children and adolescents occurs in different spaces yet often starts in the most intimate of all, the home. By endorsing and exhibiting racist attitudes and using racial vocabulary, parents contribute to their children’s development of such traits themselves. Aside from behavior modeling, white supremacist parents also socialize their children through fiction and non-fiction, and cultural images that perpetuate white supremacist culture. They teach their children the perceived necessity of maintaining racial purity and separation and infuse racist customs, attitudes, and beliefs into various aspects of daily life.
The presence of children (and their mothers) is important to white supremacist organizations, as it demonstrates that they represent society as a whole and conveys a sense of the ordinariness of racist activism. Children play active roles in these organizations. They attend summer camps, youth groups, music shows, cross lightings at rallies, and demonstrations. They distribute racist flyers and wear little KKK robes and t-shirts with racist phrases and imagery. They play war games, give each other the Nazi salute, and decorate Easter eggs with swastikas.
In her book Raising Racists: The Socialization of White Children in the Jim Crow South, historian Kristina DuRocher explores the different sites in which children were trained to embrace white supremacy in the Jim Crow South. She notes that parents created and taught the ideal vision of “whiteness” by contrasting it with “blackness,” which they presented as unintelligent, lazy, and licentious. The transition from the home into white society then proved seamless, as public schools, the community, and popular culture reinforced these anti-Black stereotypes and white racial dominance.
Post-Jim Crow, it has been more difficult to achieve a total immersion in the white supremacist vision. Racist parents are forced to create networks of like-minded families in which their children can find assurance that their views are correct, even typical, writes Kathleen Blee in Inside Organized Racism. Some children of racist families attend “Aryan”-only schools, while others are homeschooled, a method that almost all white supremacist groups promote to prevent children from straying from the ideology.
Next category: “Community and Culture.”
Further Reading:
Katleen Belew, Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2018).
Kathleen Blee, Inside Organized Racism: Women in the Hate Movement (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002).
Bart Duries and Bart Soenens, “The Intergenerational Transmission of Racism: The Role of Right-Wing Authoritarianism and Social Dominance Orientation,” Journal of Research in Personality, vol. 43, no. 5 (October 2009), pp. 906–909.
Kristina DuRocher, Raising Racists: The Socialization of White Children in the Jim Crow South (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2011).
Elizabeth Gillespie McRae, Mothers of Massive Resistance: White Women and the Politics of White Supremacy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018).
Jvonne Hubbard, White Sheets to Brown Babies (Self Published, 2018)
Jennifer Ritterhouse, Growing Up Jim Crow: How Black and White Southern Children Learned Race (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2006).
Eli Saslow, Rising Out of Hatred: The Awakening of a Former White Nationalist (New York: Anchor Books, 2018).
