Sisters in Hate: American Women and White Extremism

by Seyward Darby

White nationalists make explicit ideas that are already coded, veiled, or circumscribed in the wider white imagination. Hate is what many white Americans would see if they looked in a fun-house mirror: a distorted but familiar reflection.

Online, “red-pilling” has come to mean accepting the truth—a wholesale myth, in fact—about the oppression of men and white people at the hands of a liberal, multicultural establishment intent on wiping out America’s heritage.

White supremacy lurks in mediocrity and civility as much as it fuels slurs and violence. It conceals itself in the false promises of Christian kindness, race blindness, and e pluribus unum.

What they share is an outlook defined by binary thinking and perceived victimization.

Hate can be understood as a social bond, a complex phenomenon that occurs among people as a means of mattering and belonging.

“Social camaraderie, a desire for simple answers to complex political problems, or even the opportunity to take action against formidable social forces can co-exist with, even substitute for, hatred as the reason for participation in organized racist activities.”

Researchers have described the “underlying force” of extremism as “the basic human desire to matter and have meaning in one’s life.” They call this “the quest for personal significance,” and there are three main parts: need, narrative, and network.

Or, as with Corinna, a person eager for human connection might find a racist community, present themselves as a potential ally by saying all the right things, and forge friendships that solidify their place in a cause. Hate becomes a cure for loneliness.

Hate is a failing, but not an isolated one. In a perverse twist on the cliché, hate takes a village. A seeker finds a creed and a community where they can test out how white nationalism feels to them, how the language of hate rolls off their tongues in conversation or flies from their fingertips onto computer screens. They can hear how it echoes back to them, delivering the validation that they’ve been craving all along.

the savviest white nationalists are aware of the blind spot that observers often have when it comes to women, discounting their contributions to abhorrent causes because they prefer to think of them as humanity’s better angels. One of this book’s subjects put it this way: “A soft woman saying hard things can create repercussions throughout society,” Lana Lokteff declared at a white-nationalist conference in 2017. “Since we aren’t physically intimidating, we can get away with saying big things. And let me tell you, the women that I’ve met in this movement can be lionesses, and shield-maidens, and Valkyries.”14

EXITING HATE IS similar to embracing it. It involves a search for place and purpose, born of personal need. A person doesn’t necessarily exit because a veil lifts and they are suddenly able to see hate for what it is. They leave because it makes sense to them and for them.

In proudly showing off her life, Ayla demanded to know one thing: If all she wanted was safety, prosperity, and health for her family and nation, how could she be considered hateful? It was a disingenuous defensive trick, and she was far from the first woman to use it.

A majority of white women haven’t voted for a Democratic presidential nominee since 1996—and before that, the last time they had done so was 1964.20

AMERICA LOVES MOTHERS. Or so it claims. In reality, it loves wielding mothers as symbols more than it does the actual women who bear and (or) raise children. Motherhood is used for all manner of political ends as economic conditions, public policy, and social mores make the practical realities of mothering confounding and crushing. Mothers are at once venerated and subjugated, cherished and expended. Navigating the divide between the cultural meaning of motherhood and the messy experience of living it is a Sisyphean project.

In 2017, 17 percent of reported hate crimes motivated by race, ethnicity, or ancestry were committed against white people; nearly 50 percent, by contrast, were committed against black people. Among hate crimes motivated by religious bias, nearly 60 percent were committed because of anti-Jewish beliefs, while almost 20 percent were committed because of anti-Muslim ones. A mere 2.3 percent were committed because of anti-Protestant bias.

If anxiety is conspiracy theories’ fuel, technology is their propulsion. The internet offers an open, easy-to-use market in which to shill unfounded ideas, some that are spanking new and some, like white genocide, that are older than the Web itself.

Lana’s methods reminded me of a statement that Gertrud Scholtz-Klink, the head of the Nazi women’s league, once made about appealing to women. “Take it from me,” the former Third Reich official said in an unapologetic 1981 interview, “you have to reach them where their lives are—endorse their decisions, praise their accomplishments.”

Seven female field researchers worked on a 1926 study called “Mongrel Virginians,” which McRae describes as concluding that interracial relationships “had rendered a portion of the population less intelligent, less restrained, less industrious, and less moral than their ‘purer’ white or black neighbors.” The findings were used to justify segregation and violence under the auspices of Virginia’s Racial Integrity Act (RIA), which prohibited race mixing and classified only people with no trace of non-European blood as white. Women helped enforce the RIA over the next forty years. Their work as midwives, nurses, public registrars, and schoolteachers often put them in close contact with suspected miscegenators and their offspring. White women kept an eye out for ambiguous skin tones so that they could report people they believed had broken the law.

Lana rolled her eyes when she talked about Trump’s “grab ’em by the pussy” comment. “Feminists are always bragging about their vaginas, and showing their vaginas, and walking around topless,” she said. “All of a sudden, they become Puritans when the guy says the word ‘pussy.’” Countering Lana’s replies might fill a book of its own. There would be a chapter on how misogyny and love can be intertwined. Another on why a woman embracing her body isn’t an invitation for a man to touch it. How a woman might have a rape fantasy and simultaneously fear being violated. Who gets to use the word “pussy” and how. Suffice it to say, there was an unbridgeable gap in our conversation.

White nationalists have always wanted to tell their stories on their own terms—unscrutinized, mythologized. Now more than ever they have a stage with an open mic. While writing the book, I thought often of a comment I read on YouTube, left beneath a far-right video by a supportive viewer: No need to talk to any media ever. We are our own media now.

Women are the hate movement’s dulcet voices and its standard bearers. As purveyors and keepers and caretakers, they arguably tap into a wider spectrum of power than men do. They would be hate’s secret weapons, except there’s a difference between hiding and not being seen. Outsiders discount or overlook the women of white nationalism at America’s peril. The same goes for minimizing or ignoring the factors that push some women toward a politics of exclusion and hate. In our pluralist, capitalist, ever-shifting society, identity is a crucible in which people forge the future. For women, as ever, the stakes are particularly high. As the century barrels on, could white women prove increasingly vulnerable to hate’s allure? What might the consequences be?

realized how vulnerable she was and how shitty the world was, and I had to do something to make it better,” Rae explained. For so long, she’d thought that supporting hate was that “something,” because it meant speaking truth about how minorities were standing in white people’s way, making life hard in America. But now, at home caring for her daughter, worrying about money and the future, Rae began to wonder: Did her community of hate misidentify what was problematic in her life? Maybe it wasn’t people with black or brown skin or Jews with their purported monopoly on successful careers. Maybe the problem was being working class in an economic system that cared about what it got from someone like Rae, not what it could provide her.