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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.
But Alma White was correct: Women’s political participation was crucial to the perpetuation of white supremacy.
Research showed that black women tended to favor the amendment,17 while its adversaries drew strength from the memberships of racist organizations like the Klan, the John Birch Society, and Women for Constitutional Government, which described its female-led opposition to civil rights as a matter of “racial self-respect.”18
Since the demise of the ERA, white women have often challenged egalitarianism or opposed its champions. 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 The most high-profile legal cases against affirmative action have been headlined by white women, and a 2014 Harvard study found that nearly 70 percent of white female respondents somewhat or strongly opposed the policy.21 In the South, research shows that white women have played a critical role in moving politics to the right. They’ve been
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They reveal, as political analyst Alexis Grenell wrote in a 2018 New York Times op-ed, that “the gender gap in politics is really a color line.”24
It is easier to be the kind of feminist you want to be than it is to question how that identity might be harmful to other women.
Nazi women “made the world a more pleasant place in which to live for the members of their community. And they simultaneously made life first unbearable and later impossible for ‘racially unworthy’ citizens.”23 More to the point, “they made possible a murderous state in the name of concerns they defined as motherly.”
Lest women below the Mason-Dixon Line bear the full weight of criticism for massive resistance, mothers in the North led their own campaigns. Among them were councilwoman Louise Day Hicks and other “militant mothers” who opposed busing in Boston. They tended not to employ slurs or racist science in their public campaigns—they focused instead on couching integration enforcement as a violation of parental rights by government overreach.
“The tiniest bit of knowledge can make us feel like an expert,” authors Steven Sloman and Philip Fernbach write in their book, The Knowledge Illusion. “Once we feel like an expert, we start talking like an expert. And it turns out that the people we talk to don’t know much either. So relative to them, we are experts.”14 On and on the cycle goes, reinforcing knowledge that isn’t. “This,” Sloman and Fernbach note, “is how a community of knowledge can become dangerous.”
Those pages bore the UDC’s influence: The organization lobbied for the creation of state commissions to determine which textbooks schools could distribute, then ensured that the selections were “fair and impartial” to the Confederacy. The UDC’s historian general warned against any volume that “calls a Confederate soldier a traitor, a rebel and the war a rebellion; that says the South fought to hold her slaves; that speaks of the slaveholder as cruel or unjust to his slaves; that glorifies Lincoln and vilifies Jefferson Davis.”
tenacity of a movement more than its stated goals? Perhaps so, which posed considerable risks should the world ever go—
