Years ago I was browsing in an antique store when I saw a panoramic photo of a 1914 Michigan Klan rally — hundreds of people, as far as the eye could see, and every man, woman, and child was wearing hooded whites (probably 50-thread percale). It was a surreal and fascinating image, and I nearly bought it, but then decided — even as an oddity — I didn't want it hanging in my home.
Two interesting things are happening in the world right now.
Today is Nelson Mandela's birthday (b. 1918). I think about the character this man had, to bear years of imprisonment and hard labor, yet still come out advocating peace and reconciliation when most would be seething with bitter anger. And he took on apartheid, which is about the most repugnant form of systematized hatred and intolerance one can imagine, after Nazi Germany and the Holocaust.
The other is that the KKK is holding a nationwide membership drive. From California to Louisiana and Georgia, the Klan is distributing fliers and "Kandy," touting "Save Our Land / Join the Klan," and asking if we're tired of black crime, black welfare, and "race mixing." To add "nuance" to their cause, Chris Barker, Imperial Wizard of the Loyal White Knights, elucidated that "It ain't about [blacks] any more with the Klan. It's about the immigrants who are flooding the U.S." (Oh, okay. Thanks for clearing that up...).
So...who joins a hate group? Does growing up in communities with little diversity actually foster hate? Does it come from a lack of education? From generations of economic hardship? According to Quancast, 200,000 to 400,000 people join groups like Stormfront each month; the numbers have been climbing ever since this nation elected its first black President. The Southern Poverty Law Center reports that 100 murders over the past five years can be linked to Stormfront members.
And yet in his 7/12/14 New York Times op-ed, economist Seth Stephens-Davidowitz found that conventional correlations about education and social class are no longer holding up. One interesting new dynamic is that educated under-thirtysomethings flock to hate groups in part because they don't like being marginalized by interracial dating. He also found that a garden-variety Klan member is a little better educated than the average (non-Klan) American.
Why do people choose to hate? I'm guessing it's from accepting modeled behavior — your parents hated Latinos, so you grow up with "permission" to hate, and maybe you expand that to include Asians and blacks and Jews, plus any hybrid thereof. The other possibility is that the work of self-definition, of self-awareness — the work of adult life — is so tough, the easier thing is to define one's self by deploring "the other." In other words: "This is what I am not."
There's also a fantasy-driven, self-glorifying component for lives made bleaker by lack of meaning and purpose. The work of real adult life is often dreary and hum-drum — loss of work/money, loss of love, loss of hope. This is exacerbated by our addiction to celebrity lifestyles, where concepts of "overnight success" and physical beauty are almost literally Photoshopped into perpetual highlight reels for gullible consumption. A rather pedestrian mind might wonder, "Why can't I have that? Why can't I be that?" or "How come he (who is of a different race) gets to have it, and I don't?" Eventually, someone else's years of hard work and paying dues starts to feel like grand larceny: they came into your home and stole your opportunities.
White supremacists derive drama and meaning for their lives by demonizing other groups as dangerously close to tearing apart "normal" or "moral" social order. It's lots more thrilling, perhaps, to dub yourself a Grand Dragon or Imperial Whozzats, and to work on training a paramilitary army in preparation for an imaginary dictator threatening to lead a racially teeming social Armageddon. Or to jump into a car for some adrenaline-pumping "night rides" and distribute fliers in racially mixed neighborhoods. That's lots more purposeful than going back to school, earning a degree, and maybe grooming one's self for more upward mobility.
Reports so far have said these neighborhoods aren't the least bit intimidated. Neighbors of all skin colors are gathering the KKK fliers and putting them where they belong — in trash cans. And here is the only Klan picture I'll have in my house: black ER doctors and nurses, working like crazy to save the life of a Klan member, shot at a KKK-led rally. This is the legacy of Nelson Mandela, and it's a thing worth loving.
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