Inside Organized Racism: Women in the Hate Movement

by Kathleen M. Blee

published

July 9th 2003 by University of California Press

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binding

Paperback, 272 pages

isbn

0520240553 (isbn13: 9780520240551)

description

Following up her highly praised study of the women in the 1920s Ku Klux Klan, Blee discovers that many of today's racist women combine dangerous racis...more

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Christen rated it:

04/09/08

Read in April, 2008

Riveting subject matter, but I wasn't thrilled with the way it was presented.

Some of the problems may not be Blee's fault: the book draws on a few dozen interviews, conducted over the course of several years, with women involved in the contemporary hate movement. Many groups are represented, but the interview subjects had to be female, had to be somewhat active in a racist group, and they had to be willing to speak to her in safe settings under safe circumstances. (That said, Blee faced vio...more Riveting subject matter, but I wasn't thrilled with the way it was presented.

Some of the problems may not be Blee's fault: the book draws on a few dozen interviews, conducted over the course of several years, with women involved in the contemporary hate movement. Many groups are represented, but the interview subjects had to be female, had to be somewhat active in a racist group, and they had to be willing to speak to her in safe settings under safe circumstances. (That said, Blee faced violent threats -- both direct and indirect -- through the course of her research, and narrowly escaped a few violent episodes.)

The sample of women interviewed is -- understandably -- so skewed and limited that it would be difficult, in my opinion, to draw meaningful generalizations from it. Yet that is precisely what this book aims to do. For instance, in an early chapter, Blee provides a demographic breakdown of the women interviewed and states that popular assumptions about people in the hate movement are absolutely untrue. Possible, but I can't draw the same conclusions her data led her to. She introduces a paragraph about racist women's educational levels with the statement, "Most were educated." Reading further, however, she states that one-third of her interview subjects were high school dropouts. It is interesting to note that the other two-thirds had at least graduated high school, and a notable number of those had attended or graduated from college. But the number of dropouts in the general population is far lower than it is in this sample size -- and the sample size is, as I said, necessarily flawed. I'm not sure what, if anything, it means that a slender majority of the small number of racist women willing to be interviewed had a high school education.

Blee tries again and again to deduce the big picture based on the narratives that were presented her -- but I wanted her to get out of the way and let the interview subjects and narratives speak for themselves. Also, very little context is provided for the reader. Instead, a general familiarity with the history of the hate movement and its contemporary players and problems is just assumed. I get that Blee is a sociology professor and this work may be intended as a text, but given that the subject is of likely interest to a general audience -- and the general audience may not have done additional reading about the far right -- I think the book is unfortunately limited.

The book suffers from problematic writing. Several points are repeated more than once, for reasons I couldn't discern. Also, Blee's use of language is sometimes maddeningly imprecise. An example of both: At several points she mentions that, while her subjects addressed their opinions of African-Americans and Latinos by relating unpleasant (if often banal) anecdotes, they spoke of Jews with abstract, conspiratorial vitriol.

However -- again, this comes up at least twice, maybe three times during the course of the book -- when pressed, Blee writes, not one of her subjects "could name a single Jewish person." Two or three offered a mangled version Alan Greenspan's name, or simply issued the name "Rothschild" with no first names attached -- and these women did not seem to know much if anything about the history of the Rothschild family. Because she contrasts this lack of knowledge with the anecdotal vitriol reserved for other ethnic groups, I interpreted that Blee pressed for the name of ANY Jewish person, living or dead, famous or personally acquainted by the interview subject -- and that "Alan Greenberg" was the best any could do. Given that these women came from all over the country and all socioeconomic backgrounds, I found it fascinating (and implausible) that not one had encountered, in their lives, a person she knew to be Jewish.

I was right: later, Blee states that some of the women acknowledged they maintained ties to Jewish friends (unbeknownst, of course, to their partners or racist friends). Likely, then, that in the conversations referenced earlier, Blee had been pressing for specifics about the interview subjects' espoused notion that Jews control history or banking, not about whether they had any personal experience with Jewish people. But that should have been clarified.

Still, Blee offers some interesting data and conclusions. I found it noteworthy that while some of the women interviewed were raised in the hate movement, many were not -- nor were they brought into the hate movement by racist boyfriends or husbands -- and very few went out looking for a hate group to join in order to validate and act on previously-held racist ideas. Instead, most encountered hate groups through some other social tie (having a friend in the group, or attending a skinhead-heavy party) and gradually became more enamored of racist ideas. Also, while men in the hate movement speak of feeling "empowered" by their involvement in it, most of the women Blee spoke to felt burdened by their knowledge of "how things really work" and would not recommend that their children become involved in racist activism. I maintain that these generalizations may be dangerous to make, but the observations provide some insight into how hate-group recruiting really works, and how it may be possible to get women out of them....less

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