Sisters in Hate: American Women and White Extremism

by Seyward Darby

Appalachian foothills and chilly air pricks the lungs. The news on the car radio felt just as piercing: Donald Trump had won the presidential election.

A month after white supremacist Dylann Roof murdered nine black people in a South Carolina church in 2015, the flag’s owner bought advertising space in a Virginia newspaper. “Because of all the trouble the democrats and black race are causing, I place this ad,” the text read. “No black people or democrats are allowed on my property until further notice.”

Was the unseen person white? The woman’s sneering sentence sounded like an accusation of tribal treason. She seemed disgusted that someone would debase themselves instead of standing with their own kind.

White Americans are often quick to distinguish between everyday prejudice and radical bigotry, between what I saw in Harrisonburg and what happened in Charlottesville, almost as if one doesn’t have anything to do with the other. It’s a convenient distinction, if a false one.

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.

Anglin once wrote, “I ask myself this, in all things: WWHD? (What Would Hitler Do?)”

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.

To be red-pilled is to know that white people are under threat in a country that’s rightfully theirs and, as Spencer once suggested, that women’s “vindictiveness knows no bounds.”

There are at least two assumptions here: that women likely wouldn’t fight against their own interests, and that if they did, their power and influence would not rival that of the men in their orbit. Neither, however, is accurate.

We don’t have to imagine what is already true: Women have been in backrooms and classrooms, chat rooms and newsrooms, boardrooms and bedrooms. Far from being incidental to white nationalism, they are a sustaining feature.

Who counts as white—what they look like, where they come from, even what they believe—has shifted over time according to what Painter describes as “individual taste and political need.”15 White supremacy, however, is a constant. It began with slavery and the extermination of Native people; endured in the wake of the Civil War; found footholds in the Reconstruction, Jim Crow, and Progressive eras; seeped into policies governing everything from education to immigration to incarceration; and shaped lasting cultural paradigms.

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.

“anti-communism was used as an alibi for racism.”18 The alibi stuck, and others followed: Heritage not hate. It’s okay to be white. All lives matter.

I was angry, sad, and scared, but I wasn’t surprised.

America is at a precarious juncture, and not only because of Trump’s demagoguery and disdain for democracy.

This is magical thinking—there is no grand plot against white America—but it resonates with a real trend.

And white women are more likely than white men to hold “exclusionary views about what it means to be American, preferring boundaries around the nation’s identity that maintain it in their image.”21 Having group consciousness doesn’t automatically translate into prejudice, but they are two sides of the same coin.

In 2018, the number of murders committed by people who identify with the far right reached its highest point since 1995, the year of the Oklahoma City bombing.

Only in 2019 did the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) acknowledge that white supremacy is a national security threat.

Men are the far right’s most recognizable evangelists, and bombings, shootings, and rallies are the most obvious manifestations of the movement’s strength. But there is other work keeping the flames of hate alive. That work is often done by women. Sisters in Hate is about this truth. Any errors in the telling of it are my own.

She once competed in bodybuilding, which prizes sharp lines, bulbous contours, and cartoonish movements. To be attractive in that world is to be awkward by any conventional standard of beauty.

Cloaking was a matter of strategy, an effort to widen what sociologists call the Overton window—the range of ideas considered viable or tolerable in public discourse.7

wondered, too, if she hadn’t been trying to feel something—anything—deeply by taking abuse while a camera rolled. Maybe she hoped pain or shame could pierce her emotional shield, the way talking about embalming a corpse made her face light up. Or maybe choosing to be hurt restored a sense of agency she’d lost somewhere.

“We keep looking back to race because of its familiarity,” journalist Angela Saini writes in her book Superior: The Return of Race Science. “For so long, it has been the backdrop to our lives, the running narrative. We automatically translate the information our eyes and ears receive into the language of race, forgetting where that language came from.”5

but there is a more complex, useful, and frightening description. 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.”

Once installed in the Nazi machinery, they reaped social and political rewards. And because the Reich’s cause was genocidal, they were conditioned “to accept violence, to incite it, and to commit it.”

Ritual and action signal belonging and do harm in the same stroke. We see this when people burn crosses, scrawl graffiti on synagogues, or harass their critics. They are reinforcing their place in a community by inflicting terror. Before all that happens, though, they start out in a place familiar to most any human being: They are looking for something, even if they can’t quite put their finger on what it is.

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.

Maybe they sense a gap between who they are and who they imagine they deserve to be; maybe they want to feel stronger than circumstances allow; maybe they want to protect a privileged status.

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.

Though Rockwell never held public office, Simonelli notes that “his significance is in the strategic legacy he bequeathed the racist right.”17 It is also in Rockwell’s aesthetic—many prominent white nationalists, from David Duke to Richard Spencer, have since mimicked his wholesome, clean-cut presentation.

As a pair, Rockwell and Devi stand as the prototypical example of how white nationalism came to embrace a veritable buffet of identities, so long as beliefs in the sovereignty of white people and the preservation of whiteness as power were central to their worldview.

The NSM dubbed the Phoenix rally “America First,” a slogan that, in the early twentieth century, had been used by isolationist politicians and the Klan; Donald Trump would later invoke it in his race to the White House.

After several warnings, the gym she belonged to kicked her out—the sort of incident Corinna could carry to a unit meeting as evidence that she was fighting the good fight.

She told herself the NSM was a legitimate political group with intellectual underpinnings—never mind that she’d never been able to convince another neo-Nazi to read Mein Kampf and discuss it with her.

Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson explain that humans are prone to self-justification of everything we say, do, and believe, no matter how wrong or cruel it may be, because “it allows us to create a distinction between our moral lapses and someone else’s and blur the discrepancy between our actions and our moral convictions.”

All true, and yet. “What does a racist joke do,” writes journalist Joe Bernstein, “except create the cognitive distance necessary to do harm, dissolve the bonds of moral obligation?”

Talking about bigotry as a matter of degrees and justifying it by way of comparison is for the benefit of the people doing it.

More than fifty years later, Bryant admitted that she hadn’t told the truth about what happened with Till.i It was a searing reminder of another way in which the women-are-wonderful effect is problematic: It risks blinding people to the ways in which women can be terrible.

Feminist historians of the Holocaust have documented the postwar fable of “the apolitical woman,” a victim of the Third Reich even if, as a proud German, she participated in its work.

“When we listen to what enslaved people had to say about white women and slave mastery, we find that they articulated quite clearly their belief that slave-owning women governed their slaves in the same ways that white men did,” Jones-Rogers writes. “Sometimes they were more effective at slave management or they used more brutal methods of discipline than their husbands did.”9

By 2005, there was a magazine targeting female white nationalists; called Homefront, it was available to download online and featured articles about organic diets alongside anti-Semitic diatribes.

“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

White nationalism has never been homogeneous; it is comprised of small outfits and personality cults, splinter factions and reactionary groups, alliances and feuding parties.

“Those who recruit, they’re good at attaching themselves to people,” Corinna said, particularly “weird loners who spend too much time on the internet.” Loners, that is, like her.

After the war, Gillars was arrested by U.S. forces. She claimed that she didn’t support the Third Reich so much as she opposed the war and that the Nazis had intimidated her into fame. According to the New York Times, at her 1949 trial, Gillars “cut a theatrical figure in tight-fitting black dresses, long silver hair, and a deep tan. She had scarlet lips and nails.” Gillars was found guilty, becoming the first woman convicted of treason against the United States. She served twelve years in prison, was paroled, and moved back to Ohio, where she lived reclusively until her death in 1988.3

This was certainly a danger to the world, but American policy makers’ frenzied focus on radical Islam diverted attention from other homegrown threats that fed on simmering resentments—the kind embedded in the country’s existence, liable to flare up under the right conditions.