[.ca] Inside Organized Racism: Women in the Hate Movement (ISBN 0520240553)

Racist Hate, Female Style:
Kathleen M. Blee wrote _Women of the Klan_, which covered the 1920's. Because readers of that work were curious about women in the contemporary Klan, she began researching her current book, _Inside Organized Racism: Women in the Hate Movement_ (University of California Press). To do her work, she interviewed women members of the Klan, Christian Identity, and other organizations. This meant sitting uncomfortably with women with skinheads and tattoo swastikas, and also having coffee with women who ran homes and dressed themselves just as June Cleaver did, but who uttered vile declamations about blacks and Jews. (She found many of them by subscribing to racist mailings sent to her Post Office box; she says, "Going to the post office was so embarrassing. I'm sure they were horrified.") She went to the group meetings, which included church services, volleyball, pancake breakfasts, and social hours, like many a harmless community gathering, but were then capped by cross or swastika burnings. She found out that many of her assumptions about the women were wrong. For instance, the women were generally educated. Many had joined on their own, not because of a husband, family, or boyfriend. They were not seeking a hate group to agree with, but came around to racist views after joining. Learning such views included learning anti-Semitism, for while those who join racist groups often already have antipathy against non-whites, but they have to be taught to hate Jews. They eventually accepted that Jews control banks, corporations, and governments by means of an amorphous conspiracy that can be blamed for everything from global warming to a family member's case of food poisoning. They borrow the apocalyptic visions familiar to any student of fundamentalist Christianity, but expect that the "last days" battle with Satan, just around the corner, will consist of a race war, for which they prepare. The attitudes of the women toward the groups they are in, however, are less doctrinal than those of the men. Some differences in belief are due to particular women's issues. Some resent being excluded by all-male rituals of the historic Klan, for instance, or resent having to play the homemaker role that fundamentalist Christianity encourages. Many of the women admitted to Blee that they had done such unacceptable acts as have abortions, insisting that such a personal act was to be decided by the individual, not the group. (Because of fundamentalist Christian beliefs, and eagerness to breed new Aryans, abortion is forbidden as a Jewish plot, but is supported for non-whites.) Women in hate groups are more likely to bend proscriptions, allowing themselves to be on good terms with at least some homosexuals or mixed-race individuals. They are more likely to urge action by political means rather than expecting a violent race war to solve the world's problems. _Inside Organized Racism_ is a serious academic work, well referenced and footnoted. Blee's interviewees spanned the skinhead, neo-Nazi, Klan, and Christian Identity movements, and Blee's appendix explains her methodology for selecting them; this is as full a snapshot of this particular subset of humans as we are likely to get. In an important final section on lessons for our society, Blee not only defends her study as helping understand this subculture as more than just bizarre or dangerous. She has suggestions such as using the ambivalence of women as a means of encouraging defection. After working in the field of investigating racism, Blee is abandoning it, exhausted. Her next book will be on the effect on community groups of having a place to meet; she will be forgiven if it is not as immediately gripping as her current book.

A Dreary Bunch of Ladies:
Kathleen Blee, a professor of sociology at the University of Pittsburgh, spent many months interviewing thirty-four women members of neo-Nazi and racist groups. She elicited life histories from these women, which she relates rather briefly in this book, and then concludes with five "lessons" on how to deal with such deviant people and groups. My first reaction to this book was one of gratefulness to the author for having done what was, she makes clear, a most disagreeable task; these subjects weren't exactly fun to be with. The book is written with intelligence, diligence, and professionalism. The author shows a commendable familiarity with the relevant recent social science literature. Most of all, it is refreshing to see a scholarly contribution to a field that is too often left to sensationalist journalists. But my second reaction developed as I read through these dreary reports about these dreary people. I became bored and more bored as the reading progressed. I cannot believe that these people are as pathetically uninteresting as they appear in this book. That they are disagreeable and hateful is beyond doubt. But I think that anyone who has ever observed the participants in a fringe movement will testify that there almost invariably times of enthusiasm, of excitement, of peek experience, of lives lived with great intensity. Professor Blee captures little if any such spark. I think I know what went wrong. First, the author tells us about the women but not about the men in these racist organizations. That seems to me to be like writing a history of what happened on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays, figuring that the Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays belong somehow to a different world. It is a feminism run amok, in my opinion, to deal with a social movement consisting of both men and women as if the story of each were essentially unrelated to the other. Much of the spark of fringe social movements comes exactly from male-female interaction, especially in the younger age groups. More than one former member of radical youth groups has told me that it was precisely the stimulation of male-female relationships that made membership so stimulating. Second, her method of eliciting life histories puts the emphasis on individual members. Group dynamics -- the inevitable internal dissentions, the struggles for leadership and prestige -- none of that is captured in this book. Finally, the author has the unfortunale habit of quoting unrelated writers, often of the politically correct persuation, as if they were somehow relevant to her topic. "As the literary theorist Henry Louis Gates Jr. observes...." (p. 79); "As the cultural theorist Edward W. Said notes..." (p. 158); "As David Theo Goldberg argues..." (p. 174); and on and on she quotes and cites as if she were a graduate student. This writing detracts from the otherwise serious character and high purpose of this work.