A reply to 'The Ku Klux Klan is coming'

Commentaries to the KKK post were fascinating.

First of all, let me say that the KKK post was in part, at least, a tongue-in-cheek piece. Hence the reference to the graffiti at the start of the post. This is not to say that I do not take the Klan seriously as a “hate group” in the United States. For the sake of simplicity only, I will drop the quotation marks around hate groups.

I will reply, for now, only to comments on the KKK post and place the issue in the context of hate groups in the US. The issue of the US being a “Titanic” evoked two different types of comments, one “international” and the other “domestic”. Although some of the relevant issues were dealt with in a previous post, I will deal with them separately on another occasion.

The US is a big country. To most outsiders it would seem that the people of the country have historically been aligned with mainly two political parties — the Republicans and Democrats. This duopoly belies the complexity of actual political alignments in the US. (For an appreciation of the range of “other” party-political persuasions in the US, follow this link.)

As with most political categories, the boundaries that separate them are blurry; for instance, a politician on the right (like Ron Paul) may in general be as opposed to the US occupation of Iraq as any leftist with internationalist, anti-war or anti-imperialist tendencies.

The same would go for journalists or political activists and commentators. For example the proto-conservative Alex Jones is fiercely opposed to groupings such as the World Economic Forum or the Bilderberg group — an apparent solidarity he shares with anti-capitalist or anti-corporatist formations around the world. Beneath all this apparently high-profile formations and opinions lie a range of movements described as hate groups.

Hate groups in the US
In 2007 the Southern Poverty Law Centre (SPLC) recorded at least 888 such hate groups in the US. The SPLC defines hate groups as those formations whose activities can include criminal acts, marches, rallies, speeches, meetings, leafleting or publishing.

The groups referenced by the SPLC include only organisations and their chapters that are known to be active, and which have “beliefs or practices that attack or malign an entire class of people, typically for their immutable characteristics”. Based on SPLC estimates, my home state of South Carolina seems to the hotbed of hate groups in the US. See the graphic below.

The states with the highest number of hate groups are in the table below; if one considers the population of each state, South Carolina stands out as, well, quite a hateful state.

The hate groups in my home state include organisations such as the Nation of Islam, described as a black separatist group; the Council of Conservative Citizens (White Nationalists); several neo-confederate groups (such as the League of the South); and, of course, the KKK. One should not scoff at these groups. Their crimes range from simple extortion to outright violence.

For example, the SPLC reports that in March this year a 62-year-old white woman and two of her mentally challenged companions were allegedly beaten by four black men in a public park (in Florida) for not paying a fee for being white in the park.

In January, a 21-year-old university student in Nebraska, Brittany Williams, was shot to death while she was in the drive-through lane of a fast-food restaurant. Kyle Bormann, a 19-year-old white man who allegedly made statements indicating race was a motive in the killing, was charged with murder.

Also in January, a Philadelphia kindergarten classroom in a Jewish centre that includes a synagogue, school and community centre was set alight. A swastika was painted on the rear of the building two weeks before the fire. (See this link.)

And then there are the more insidious forms of bigotry and chauvinism. Also in Philadelphia, there was a shopkeeper who refused to serve clients who did not, would not or could not speak English.

When viewed in the context of my spazza theory of isolated incidents, we see some kind of pattern. For example, one ubiquitous bumper sticker in the US suggests that this country’s troops made the world safe for English! (See below)

There are many different forms of hatred; hate groups are not unique to the US. In this country, the Klan is simply one such group. Since loosely affiliated klans emerged in Tennessee in 1866, their membership was drawn from former members of the Confederate Army; for instance, their first Grand Wizard was Nathan Forrest, a celebrated general during the Civil War. The Klan’s targets have almost always been immigrants, black people and Jews. For example, they successfully “restored” white rule in North Carolina in the late 1800s.

Back to the future … While there is no need to be concerned about a “race war” if Barack Obama is elected to the Presidency in November (I say “if” because there is no guarantee of an Obama presidency, the general indicators notwithstanding), each individual murder, each swastika sprayed on the walls of a synagogue and each a person killed for not being black or white is a blight on society. This is true even if hate groups are allowed to recruit and grow under the rubric of democracy, or freedom.