Contemporary white supremacists have been working to publicly legitimate their movement. This article presents a case study of the magazine Instauration and its editor, Wilmot Robertson. The study indicates how "new racist" white supremacists present a discourse of "stigma transformation." First, I introduce Instauration and Robertson's books and review his longstanding efforts to present an intellectualized rhetoric of racism and white supremacy. I then analyze other impression-management techniques suggested in these writings. Both Robertson and contributors to Instauration proffer techniques to neutralize and/or transform the stigma of "racism." I discuss some of the broader implications of racism that is framed as intellectual argumentation.It is important to stress that, in America at least, no matter how small and how badly off a particular stigmatized category is, the viewpoint of its members is likely to be given public presentation of some kind. . . . An intellectually worked-up version of their point of view is thus available to most stigmatized persons.Erving Goffman, StigmaIn this article I offer an analysis of some white supremacists' stigma management techniques. I present a case study of one wing of the white supremacist movement that strives to manage the stigma of that movement and its ideologies by presenting white supremacists as nonviolent intellectuals, countering the common view of uneducated boorish terrorists. This strategy of "intellectualization" is presented to other white supremacists as having long-term stability (and thereby, they hope, saving an endangered "race"). But it is also forthrightly laid out that an intellectual approach offers a way of improving the movement's image. Several techniques of neutralization are deployed in and through this discourse.I thus look at white supremacist racism as a stigma (Dobratz and Shanks-Meile 1997) and at intellectualization as its disidentifier: The stigma of white supremacist racism evokes impressions of hatred, boorish irrationality, and violence or violent intent. Some
Working from literature on the social construction of ethnicity and on white ethnic identity, I explore contemporary white supremacist discourse aimed at presenting whites as a "pan-ethnic" community of European descendants, whose ethnicity is equivalent to that of established ethnic and minority communities. First, I look at how white supremacists struggle with uniting all "whites," negotiate the meanings and boundaries of "whiteness" and "European-American,'' and conceptualize their putative ethnicity as lamentable. Second, I look at discourse on efforts to organize "White Student Unions." The use of the hyphenated-American strategy and the development of white student unions both reflect tactical breaks with the past and are part of a "new racist" focus on putting forth a more presentable image for white supremacy and presenting whites as an ethnichinority group, with ethnic-like concerns and traits. If indeed there is an emergent pm-ethnic phenomenon among "European-Americans," then it may prove important to recognize when this phenomenon is rooted in white supremacy and when it is not.
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