"These groups have committed murders, bombings, attacks on gay bookstores," Potok says. Of the 474 deaths at the hands of domestic extremists between 19, according to the Anti Defamation League, the majority were committed by white supremacists. This is one of the ways new members get their start, according to Blee-they "slide" in from the side, more due to camaraderie than doctrine, and don't fully confront the movement's racist beliefs until they're already bonded with the people in the group.īut somewhere along the way, the hate takes over. "There was a lack of connectedness in my family growing up, but the skinheads gave me a sense of unconditional belonging." The skinheads gave me a place where I could focus the rage and anger I was experiencing," explains Martinez, who grew up in a middle-class household with a mechanical engineer dad and stay-at-home mom. Like, Me being this way can't be my fault so it must be someone else's fault. She says it wasn't really about racism for her, at least not in the beginning. "I had hung out with a bunch of punks and scene kids, but the skinheads were the angriest people I knew. "I believe, in retrospect, that my entrance into the white power movement came as a near-direct result of the self-loathing I felt from that assault," she told. After being raped at age 14 by two men-both white-at a party, she was compelled by what she saw as skinheads' raw and unrelenting anger. "And the enemies are Jewish people, gay people, Muslims, nonwhites and on down the list."įor Martinez, the attraction to white supremacy was rage. "The groups with Neo-Nazi beliefs tend to be the most violent groups out there now," says Mark Potok, senior fellow at the SPLC. Since the founding of the Ku Klux Klan in 1866, dozens of other destructive organizations have sprouted in its wake, including Neo-Nazis and racist skinheads gangs. White supremacist groups have plagued this country for more than a century.
Some of the leaders tell me if you recruit women, you get their kids and husbands, too." "They're interested in women because they see them as less likely to attract police attention and less likely to be police informers. "Some have been actively reaching out to women," says Blee, who has interviewed members of the Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazi groups, Christian Identity sects, and white power skinhead gangs across the U.S.
today, most are dedicated to white supremacy. The movement appears to be growing overall-the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), which tracks hate groups and their activity, tallied a 48% increase in membership over the last 15 years, and estimates that of the 892 hate groups in the U.S. White supremacists may believe the country belongs to white men, but it's an increasing number of white women who are fighting for the cause, says Kathleen Blee, University of Pittsburgh sociology professor and author of Inside Organized Racism: Women in the Hate Movement. Despite having himself retweeted messages from apparent white supremacist accounts, Trump eventually disavowed the movement (which had, by this point, celebrated him in the official Knights of the Ku Klux Klan newspaper and held a parade in honor of his presidential victory) and its online contingent, the so-called "alt-right."īut that's done nothing to darken the movement's growing spotlight, or deter the people who are drawn to its beam. White supremacists have gained national attention in the wake of the 2016 presidential election, with former Ku Klux Klan Imperial Wizard David Duke and white nationalist leader Richard Spencer voicing enthusiastic support for President-elect Donald Trump. It made them feel, she says, tough and powerful.