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I need help with a book review that should be around 850 words. The format should be in APA. These are the guidelines for the assignment: This assignment is not like a book report you may have completed in high school; you should avoid summarizing or re-stating the themes of the book. Instead, use your book review to address the following three questions. The book is titled Sisters in Hate: American Women on the Front Lines of White Nationalism by Seyward Darby.
a. What does the text suggest about the gender politics of white nationalism?
b. Based on the authors’ or editors’ approach to the issues or any explicitly stated
philosophy, what is the text’s underlying political and social agenda? The answer
to this question should not be: “the book’s subject is…”, but rather, an
identification of what the authors’ or editors’ want. What changes in policy,
practice, or social structures do they want to bring about? What are they trying to
persuade their readers of?
c. How does the text relate to the course reserve readings, lectures or other
materials? Be very explicit— citing other readings, concepts from lectures, films,
or speakers specifically. What does the text add to your understanding of the
issues we are addressing in this course? Just mentioning other materials is not
adequate. You should explain how they relate to the book or vice versa.
Again, the book is Sisters in Hate: American Women on the Front Lines of White Nationalism by Seyward Darby. I attached a pdf of the book.
In addition, around 2-3 of the course readings listed below should be incorporated in the book review for part C.
– Gender and the Far-right in the United States Female Extremists and the Mainstreaming of Contemporary White Nationalism by Alexandra Minna Stern
– Racializing Mysogyny by Sophie Bjerk-James
Unformatted Attachment Preview
Copyright © 2020 by Seyward Darby
Cover design by Julianna Lee
Cover art by Shutterstock
Author photograph by John Michael Kilbane
Cover copyright © 2020 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.
Hachette Book Group supports the right to free expression and the value of copyright. The purpose
of copyright is to encourage writers and artists to produce the creative works that enrich our
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The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book without permission is a theft of the author’s
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author’s rights.
Little, Brown and Company
Hachette Book Group
1290 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10104
littlebrown.com
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twitter.com/littlebrown
First ebook edition: July 2020
Little, Brown and Company is a division of Hachette Book Group, Inc. The Little, Brown name
and logo are trademarks of Hachette Book Group, Inc.
The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.
The Hachette Speakers Bureau provides a wide range of authors for speaking events. To find out
more, go to hachettespeakersbureau.com or call (866) 376-6591.
Excerpts: (here) “Worstward Ho” copyright © 1983 The Estate of Samuel Beckett. Used by
permission of Grove/Atlantic, Inc. Any third-party use of this material, outside of this publication, is
prohibited; (here) “Lynchburg” from the book Breaking the Fever. Copyright © 2006 by Mary
Mackey. Permission granted by Lowenstein Associates, Inc.; (here) “Persephone the Wanderer”
from Poems 1962–2012 by Louise Glück. Copyright © 2012 by Louise Glück. Reprinted by
permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
ISBN 978-0-316-48779-5
E3-20200611-DA-NF-ORI
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Introduction
Part I: Corinna
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
Part II: Ayla
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
Part III: Lana
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
Conclusion
Acknowledgments
Discover More
Notes
About the Author
For my family
Explore book giveaways, sneak peeks, deals, and more.
Tap here to learn more.
There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need
for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do
language. That is how civilizations heal.
—Toni Morrison, The Nation
Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again.
Fail better.
—Samuel Beckett, “Worstward Ho”
Introduction
The Fun-House Mirror
Once a battlefield, ever a battlefield—so goes the story of this land. During
the Civil War, the North and South fought fiercely in the Shenandoah Valley,
clashing in places with quaint names like Tom’s Brook and New Market. In
1862, Stonewall Jackson advanced north through the region to threaten
Washington, D.C., and the Confederacy held the Shenandoah with such a firm
grip for so many months that it became known as “the valley of humiliation”
for the Union. Then the tide turned, flooding southward. In 1864, the Union
waged a scorched-earth campaign to destroy everything the Confederacy had
built and sown.1
The war became embedded in Virginia’s landscape. Poet Mary Mackey
writes of bodies revivified in nature:
the Confederate boys made themselves
into grass
and the Yankee boys made themselves
into gravel roads
they made themselves into cold fronts
coming in from the north
and tornadoes
sweeping across from the west
and hurricanes blowing in
from the Gulf
and sycamores
and pines
and red dirt.2
I visited Virginia in November 2016, on the cusp of winter, the time of
year when the midday sun slants sharply against the Appalachian foothills
and chilly air pricks the lungs. The news on the car radio felt just as piercing:
Donald Trump had won the presidential election. Hillary Clinton had taken
Virginia by five points, but the state’s electoral map, carved up into counties,
showed far more red than blue. In the Shenandoah, people had voted
overwhelmingly for Trump.3 On roadsides and in yards, MAGA signs stood
alongside Confederate flags.
One of the flags was huge—twenty by thirty feet, strung up an eighty-foot
pole—and already infamous. A month after white supremacist Dylann Roof
murdered nine black people in a South Carolina church in 2015, the flag’s
owner bought advertising space in a Virginia newspaper. “Because of all the
trouble the democrats and black race are causing, I place this ad,” the text
read. “No black people or democrats are allowed on my property until
further notice.”4 Since then, the owner had doubled down on his political
messaging, painting the phrases “Vote for Trump” and “Lock Her Up” on the
side of his barn.5
My husband and I were in the Shenandoah for Thanksgiving, seeing
family. When it was time to go, our last stop before snaking north of the
Mason-Dixon was a gas station near the city of Harrisonburg. I went inside
to get a bottle of water. At first, the only other customer was a black woman
who had come in with two little girls; she was waiting while they used the
bathroom. Then the station’s glass door opened. I heard the sucking noise of
its rubberized edges giving way and the weak ding of an automatic bell. A
white woman stormed inside. Her hair was in a loose ponytail, and she wore
a burgundy sweatshirt. She looked to be in her thirties, around my age. She
began yelling at the black woman.
Don’t you know how gas stations work?i she demanded. Or are you just
lazy and stupid? She was driving an SUV and needed to pump gas.
Apparently, the black woman had parked her sedan next to the only available
tank.
The white woman turned her ire on the two female cashiers—also white
—behind the store’s counter, demanding to know why they didn’t do
something. She threatened to never buy gas there again. She said that she was
a longtime customer; the station would lose her good business.
The encounter couldn’t have lasted more than a minute. The white woman
turned on her heel and shoved the door open. Sucking sound. Weak bell. And
a parting insult.
Fucking nigger!
She said it without looking back.
The women behind the counter said nothing. The black woman’s face
revealed only mild surprise—or maybe it was practiced defense. Just then,
the little girls returned from the bathroom. Before she left the station, I asked
the woman if she was all right. She could’ve just asked me to move my car,
she replied with a shrug.
* * *
NINE MONTHS LATER and a
short drive away, hundreds of demonstrators
gathered after sundown on the campus of the University of Virginia. The tiki
torches they carried glowed bright against their white skin and the inky night
sky. The group kicked off their march with a collective yell that coursed
through their winding formation of bodies: two by two, shoulder to shoulder,
trooping forward.
The iconic images from August 11, 2017, the eve of the Unite the Right
rally, show illuminated male faces—grimacing, grinning, threatening. Women
were there too, but in fewer numbers than men. Amid chants of “You will not
replace us” and “One people, one nation, end immigration,” some marchers
broke ranks to scream at people recording or protesting the event. In one
moment, captured in a shaky video that was later posted on the internet, a
woman stepped out of line. She wore a loose-fitting white top and jeans, and
her long blond hair gleamed. She stood facing a manicured lawn that
stretched toward one of UVA’s signature white colonnades.6
“You sound like a nigger!” she shouted.
The target of her ire, presumably a critic of the march, wasn’t visible on
camera.
“You sound like a nigger!” the woman yelled again.
Five words that spoke to nearly four hundred years of accumulated racial
privilege and contempt. The slur rang harshly, and “like” spoke volumes.
Was the unseen person white? The woman’s sneering sentence sounded like
an accusation of tribal treason. She seemed disgusted that someone would
debase themselves instead of standing with their own kind.
The woman repeated herself a third time before falling back in step with
the marchers. She held her shoulders back, chin up, and torch aloft as she
strode away. She looked proud.
* * *
BY THE TIME Charlottesville happened, I was already researching women who
support white nationalism—the belief that America should remain a
predominantly white country, led by white people. I had embarked on the
project right after Trump’s election, when exit polls showed that more than
half of white women nationwide had voted for the president. The women I
was observing and interviewing were like the one caught on camera at Unite
the Right, the most prominent display of organized racism in recent memory.
But I was also interested in women like the one at the gas station. Her banal
malice was a paradox, so similar to what was chanted and championed in
Charlottesville yet so unremarkable that it scarcely rattled the other people in
the store. That scene planted a seed in my brain about white women’s
singular capacity to sow hate in ways both loud and quiet, blatant and not.
White Americans are often quick to distinguish between everyday
prejudice and radical bigotry, between what I saw in Harrisonburg and what
happened in Charlottesville, almost as if one doesn’t have anything to do
with the other. It’s a convenient distinction, if a false one. “We like to think
that the white-supremacist movement is in fact a ‘lunatic fringe.’ Yet the
vitriol of hate groups is not so much an aberration as it is a reaffirmation of
racist and gendered views that permeate society,” writes sociologist Barbara
Perry. “The political rhetoric of hate does not fall on deaf ears.”7 White
nationalists make explicit ideas that are already coded, veiled, or
circumscribed in the wider white imagination. Hate is what many white
Americans would see if they looked in a fun-house mirror: a distorted but
familiar reflection.
White nationalists have long exploited ideological intersections with the
political mainstream. Recently, they have capitalized on the wide appeal of
Trump’s race-baiting and xenophobia. Around the 2016 election, many of
them identified as part of the alt-right, a motley movement of racist
pseudointellectuals, nihilistic internet trolls, conspiracy theorists, neo-Nazis,
and other extremists. The alt-right tried to seem cutting-edge. It had its own
slang, operated in every corner of the internet, and projected a smug,
exclusive vibe. But it was merely laundering the old tenets of white
nationalism, the hand-me-downs of scientific racism, anti-Semitism,
antifeminism, and other forms of intolerance. “There’s not really anything
‘alt’ about it,” sociologist Kathleen Blee, one of the foremost experts on
organized hate, told me in 2017. The scavenged worldview of the alt-right
drew from America’s paleoconservative movement and France’s Nouvelle
Droite (New Right), among other extremist philosophies. In railing against a
purported white genocide and rhapsodizing about ethno-states, they echoed
terrorist groups like the Ku Klux Klan and Aryan Nations.
Polling in 2016 and 2017 suggested that between 6 and 10 percent of
Americans supported the alt-right’s ideology.8 Still, it was hard to say how
big the movement really was. It’s just as difficult now, a few years down the
line. People aren’t necessarily forthcoming when pollsters ask them about
controversial beliefs or affiliations, and gauging the strength of a diffuse
social crusade is a nearly impossible challenge in the digital era. There’s no
centralized membership database; counting heads requires wading into an
abyss of avatars, bots, and pseudonyms, where nothing may be what it seems.
J. M. Berger, a researcher of extremism, attempted to tally the number of altright believers on Twitter, and the best he could come up with was an
“extremely conservative” baseline of two hundred thousand. “The broader
far-right community on Twitter,” he concluded, “almost certainly runs into the
millions.”9
The mainstream media response to the far right has centered on male
figures like Richard Spencer, who is college educated and telegenic, partial
to dapper suits and hair gel. “He’s able to be mainstream because he looks
like a freaking weatherman,” a former white nationalist told me.10 At a
conference in late 2016, Spencer elicited a heil Hitler salute in honor of
Trump’s victory, and he later got socked in the face during a media interview,
launching a thousand “punch a Nazi” memes. On the even more extreme end
of the spectrum is Andrew Anglin, founder of the neo-Nazi website the Daily
Stormer. Anglin has urged his readers to unleash torrents of online abuse
—“troll storms,” he calls them—against handpicked targets, including the
first black woman elected as the student body president of American
University.11 Anglin once wrote, “I ask myself this, in all things: WWHD?
(What Would Hitler Do?)”12
The journalistic coverage of these men has been, by turns, fair, glib, or
naive. Meanwhile, there has been a comparative shortage of reporting—good
or bad—on the women of the far right. There seems to be a loose consensus
that while protesters in pink pussy hats have become icons of the resistance
to Trumpism, women aren’t nearly as significant on the other side of the
battle for America’s soul. The relative paucity of women in Charlottesville
has advanced this narrative. So has white nationalists’ cross-pollination with
misogynists—men’s rights activists, men going their own way, incels, and
other groups—to the point that they share lingo. “Red pill,” a term that
originated on chauvinist message boards, is a reference to The Matrix, in
which Neo, the protagonist played by Keanu Reeves, must choose between
swallowing a blue capsule that will allow him to live in ignorant bliss or
downing a red one that will reveal a terrible conspiracy against humankind.
Online, “red-pilling” has come to mean accepting the truth—a wholesale
myth, in fact—about the oppression of men and white people at the hands of a
liberal, multicultural establishment intent on wiping out America’s heritage.
To be red-pilled is to know that white people are under threat in a country
that’s rightfully theirs and, as Spencer once suggested, that women’s
“vindictiveness knows no bounds.” It is to believe, in Anglin’s words, that
black people’s “biological nature is incompatible with White society” and
that a white woman who wastes motherhood on mixed-race children is a
traitor. “It’s OUR WOMB,” Anglin once wrote. “It belongs to the males in
her society.”13
Washington Post gender columnist Monica Hesse summed up well the
popular sentiment about these repellent gender politics. “It’s hard to imagine
a woman volunteering to be the backroom support staff for a group that
believes women’s liberation contributes to the deterioration of
civilization,”14 she wrote in 2019. There are at least two assumptions here:
that women likely wouldn’t fight against their own interests, and that if they
did, their power and influence would not rival that of the men in their orbit.
Neither, however, is accurate. We don’t have to imagine what is already true:
Women have been in backrooms and classrooms, chat rooms and newsrooms,
boardrooms and bedrooms. Far from being incidental to white nationalism,
they are a sustaining feature.
When I went looking for the women of the far right, it didn’t take long to
find them. They’d been there all along. So had the legacies of white women
whose racist advocacy dated back more than a century. This book tells their
story.
* * *
“RACE IS AN idea, not a fact,” writes historian Nell Irvin Painter. In America,
the edifice of whiteness is as mutable as it is entrenched. Who counts as
white—what they look like, where they come from, even what they believe—
has shifted over time according to what Painter describes as “individual taste
and political need.”15 White supremacy, however, is a constant.
It began with slavery and the extermination of Native people; endured in
the wake of the Civil War; found footholds in the Reconstruction, Jim Crow,
and Progressive eras; seeped into policies governing everything from
education to immigration to incarceration; and shaped lasting cultural
paradigms. White supremacy lurks in mediocrity and civility as much as it
fuels slurs and violence. It conceals itself in the false promises of Christian
kindness, race blindness, and e pluribus unum.
According to legal scholar Frances Lee Ansley, white supremacy is “a
political, economic and cultural system in which whites overwhelmingly
control power and material resources, conscious and unconscious ideas of
white superiority and entitlement are widespread, and relations of white
dominance and non-white subordination are daily reenacted across a broad
array of institutions and social settings.”16 For the purposes of this book,
Ansley’s definition is a baseline. Sisters in Hate is about women whose
raison d’être is the preservation of white supremacy. In their chosen cause,
they imagine solutions to problems both political and personal—their
frustration with contemporary feminism, say, or their sense of dislocation in a
rapidly changing country. Their commitment to white supremacy is what
makes them white nationalists, denizens of the far right, supporters of the hate
movement.
White nationalism is not a monolith. Supporters come from varied social,
religious, and political backgrounds. Some are comfortable with overt
cruelty, while others are quick to embrace a narrow definition of bigotry in
order to sidestep personal culpability in the suffering of others. What they
share is an outlook defined by binary thinking and perceived victimization.
Flattened and facile, white nationalism possesses a near-apocalyptic sense of
urgency: The time is now or never for white people to protect their own kind.
For women, that means bearing white babies, putting a smiling face on an
odious ideology, promising camaraderie to women who join their crusade,
and challenging white nationalism’s misogynistic reputation.
Three women are this book’s main subjects. They are among the most
notable female figures to emerge on the far right in the new millennium. “The
internet is full of strange people,” Gawker wrote in 2010. “Corinna [Olsen]
may be the strangest.” Gawker was referring to Corinna’s interests, which
included embalming, bodybuilding, amateur pornography, and neo-Nazi
activism. It was a bizarre list but an intelligible one, if you knew her:
Corinna is a seeker who craves extreme experiences that she hopes will give
her life gravity. Ayla Stewart is also a seeker. A college-educated, Christian
stay-at-home mother of six, Ayla is better known online as Wife with a
Purpose. She once considered herself a liberal feminist, until she found the
way, the truth, and the light of white nationalism. She became a proselytizer
of traditional gender roles, white pride, and personal redemption. Among the
catalysts of Ayla’s hard right turn was the third woman featured in Sisters in
Hate: Lana Lokteff. With her husband, Lana runs Red Ice, an online media
platform that presents itself as a viable alternative to mainstream news. In
reality, it’s a propaganda machine that promotes conspiracy theories in the
service of a far-right agenda.
Corinna cooperated fully with my reporting. Lana and Ayla did so for a
few months, before deciding that I was a leftist, feminist journalist who
couldn’t be trusted. They were also loath to give up control of their image
and message, which they can curate tightly on social media. I gathered
additional information about all three women’s lives from blogs, Twitter
feeds, personal websites, and other digital sources, and from people who
know them or once did. Taken together, their stories reveal how abstract,
toxic ideas can become knitted into people’s lives and how women in
particular can be swept up in a cause that seeks to circumscribe their
freedoms. Corinna, Ayla, and Lana have much in common, but their
differences are also important. They offer avenues for examining the breadth
and depth of female participation in white nationalism over time, and how
closely those contributions have tracked with white women’s wider impact
on establishment politics and social mores.
Since its nascence, the hate movement has fed on social anxiety, offering
racist explanations for seismic change that has rattled many white Americans.
The KKK formed in response to perceived racial dispossession after the
Civil War and reached its zenith in the 1920s, on the coattails of a national
fervor for purity: social reform, nativism, Prohibition, eugenics.
“Civilization’s going to pieces,” Tom Buchanan says in The Great Gatsby,
published in 1925. “If we don’t look out the white race will be—will be
utterly submerged. It’s all scientific stuff; it’s been proved.”17 Meanwhile,
the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) found fuel in popular
nostalgia. Established in 1894 by two Southern society women, the UDC
worked tirelessly to perpetuate the lore of the Lost Cause. Its members edited
school textbooks to teach children that slavery didn’t cause the Civil War,
rewarded students who wrote essays in support of the Klan, and erected
some seven hundred Confederate monuments—the ones that people continue
to fight over today. The UDC’s work, undertaken during the entrenchment of
Jim Crow, didn’t soften the legal regime’s cruel blow so much as suggest that
there was none at all: America was merely re-creating the halcyon days of
noble white overlords, dependent blacks, and national peace.
Neo-Nazism was born amid the Red Scare of the 1950s, and a woman
was among its most influential ideologues, helping to imprint the doctrine,
policy, and symbolism of the Third Reich on America’s far right. White
Citizens’ Councils and other organs of resistance emerged in reaction to the
civil rights movement; women were among the backlash’s most important
proponents. By the 1970s, outright bigotry was less socially acceptable than
ever before, giving way to Lee Atwater–style dog whistles. White
nationalism became an iconoclastic project, a platform for wannabe
revolutionaries, warriors, and prophets with a vision of the future that looked
strikingly like the past. It was nourished by other forms of social upheaval,
including second-wave feminism and its discontents, veterans’ mass return
from the failure of the Vietnam War, and the rise of the new Christian right.
The three women at the heart of Sisters in Hate were born in 1979, a year
of profound geopolitical significance. The United States and China
established diplomatic relations. The Soviets invaded Afghanistan. The Shah
fell in Iran, prompting a global oil shock. The year was also a critical one in
the history of white nationalism. On November 3, the day before the Iran
hostage crisis overtook headlines, a group of white supremacists attacked an
antiracism event organized by members of the Communist Workers’ Party in
Greensboro, North Carolina. Four white men and a black woman were shot
and killed. The perpetrators were acquitted in both state and federal court.
Among them were neo-Nazis and Klan members who found common cause in
their opposition to liberal politics—“distinctions among white power
factions melted away,” writes historian Kathleen Belew, and “anticommunism was used as an alibi for racism.”18 The alibi stuck, and others
followed: Heritage not hate. It’s okay to be white. All lives matter.
The organizers of the Greensboro Massacre dubbed themselves the United
Racist Front, much like, some four decades later, the white supremacists in
Charlottesville would call their event Unite the Right. In the intervening
years, enterprising groups and leaders had packaged white nationalism as
what Barbara Perry calls “button-down terror”—a seemingly modern,
palatable version of the movement. It was intended to appeal to Americans
who didn’t want to be skinheads or separatists but who agreed that the
country would benefit by doubling down on white supremacy. White
nationalists had also mastered the internet, an infinite, unbridled space where
they could communicate and recruit, evading scrutiny and the countervailing
influence of reason and facts. Combined with epochal events—the September
11 attacks, two endless foreign wars, the financial crisis, the election of a
black president, rising immigration, Trump’s populist candidacy—the digital
revolution heralded white nationalism’s next groundswell. National unease,
for reasons both real and imagined, was rampant. Recoil was all but
inevitable. And women were likely to be on the front lines.
* * *
BY THE TIME Unite the Right happened, Corinna Olsen had renounced the hate
movement. Ayla Stewart was invited to deliver a speech at the rally. Lana
Lokteff wasn’t there only because she had a new baby to care for.
I wasn’t in Charlottesville either. I followed Unite the Right from afar,
refreshing my social media feeds obsessively for the latest news about an
event that would ultimately leave one woman murdered, two police officers
dead in a helicopter crash, dozens of people injured, and countless more
traumatized. I was angry, sad, and scared, but I wasn’t surprised.
Because Sisters in Hate is about identity and ideology—how each can
reinforce the other—I want to give a plain accounting of the personal lenses
through which I view the material. I am a white woman married to a white
man. I am a feminist and a progressive. My middle name, Lanier, comes from
the poet Sidney Lanier, an ancestor of mine who, in addition to writing
pleasant verse, was a private in the Confederate army. Several of my
forebears fought on the wrong side of the Civil War, and most of my family
still lives in the South. I was raised in North Carolina, in a small city a few
hours east of Greensboro. A Confederate monument standing in front of the
county courthouse a half mile from my childhood home honors “the heroes of
1861–1865.” It was erected by the UDC. My parents are liberal; the place
where I grew up is not. I once had a babysitter who referred to the
predominantly black side of my hometown, situated across a set of railroad
tracks from where she and I lived, as “Niggertown.” A college coliseum a
short drive from my parents’ house is where, in the summer of 2019, a
fervent audience chanted “Send her back” at a Trump rally, referring to a
woman of color serving in the U.S. House of Representatives.
America is at a precarious juncture, and not only because of Trump’s
demagoguery and disdain for democracy. By the middle of the twenty-first
century, white people will be a minority in America. White nationalists claim
that this demographic shift is evidence of a determined attack on their race,
waged by an army of liberals, feminists, immigrants, Muslims, Jews, and
supporters of Black Lives Matter. This is magical thinking—there is no grand
plot against white America—but it resonates with a real trend. Concerns
about growing diversity “have driven some whites to turn inward, to circle
the wagons,” writes political scientist Ashley Jardina. “Whites are bringing
their racial identity to bear on their political attitudes and behavior in
important ways.”19
Jardina’s groundbreaking research shows that some 20 percent of white
Americans—roughly forty million people20—now have “strong levels of
group consciousness,” meaning they “feel a sense of discontent over the
status of their group.” These people tend to be less educated but not
financially vulnerable. “Most own houses, have average incomes similar to
most whites in the United States, are employed, and identify as middle
class,” Jardina writes. And white women are more likely than white men to
hold “exclusionary views about what it means to be American, preferring
boundaries around the nation’s identity that maintain it in their image.”21
Having group consciousness doesn’t automatically translate into
prejudice, but they are two sides of the same coin. To further their agenda,
white nationalists may well exploit the grievances and fears shared by a
growing number of white Americans. In his seminal history of the movement,
journalist Leonard Zeskind notes that its supporters have never been
“paranoids or uneducated backwoodsmen with tobacco juice dripping down
their chins, the ‘extremists’ of popular imagination. As a movement, white
nationalists look like a demographic slice of white America.”22 What
happens when their proximity to the rest of the pie proves more important
than the thin lines that separate them from it?
* * *
HATE IN AMERICA is surging. As of this writing, the Southern Poverty Law
Center (SPLC) is tracking 940 hate groups nationwide.23 In 2018, the number
of murders committed by people who identify with the far right reached its
highest point since 1995, the year of the Oklahoma City bombing.24 We know
relatively little about how to combat hate effectively; while scholars of the
subject have toiled in the margins, the federal government has cut funding for
programs to counter right-wing extremism and blocked the dissemination of
data on the subject.25 Only in 2019 did the Department of Homeland Security
(DHS) acknowledge that white supremacy is a national security threat.26
The gaps in knowledge mean that journalists, politicians, and concerned
observers too often rely on flawed assumptions—for instance, that white
nationalism is the province of “angry white men” intent on being seen and
heard. Men are the far right’s most recognizable evangelists, and bombings,
shootings, and rallies are the most obvious manifestations of the movement’s
strength. But there is other work keeping the flames of hate alive. That work
is often done by women.
Sisters in Hate is about this truth. Any errors in the telling of it are my
own.
Footnotes
i Throughout the book, quotes drawn from memory—mine or that of a source—are italicized.
Part I
Corinna
The Grieved—are many—I am told—
There is the various Cause—
Death—is but one—and comes but once—
And only nails the eyes—
—Emily Dickinson, “I measure every Grief I meet”
1.
When I met her, Corinna Olsen lived in a salmon-pink house with two
balconies and a three-car garage. It wasn’t her house; she rented a wing—a
studio apartment—from the elderly woman who owned it. Her only
roommate was a Japanese Chin named Smithers, a small dog with silky fur
and a lolling tongue. Corinna had adopted him off Craigslist because she
wanted something cute to take care of.1
The pink house sat at the bottom of a steep hill in a quiet middle-class
neighborhood of Tacoma, Washington. At the crest was a panoramic view of
the city’s harbor. It was early morning when I arrived to spend a day with
Corinna. In the distance, the ocean looked gray and somnolent.
Corinna didn’t invite me in. She heard me pull up in the driveway in my
rental sedan and came out the front door, stiffly clutching her keys and purse.
Over time, I would realize that she often looked inflexible, like doing even
the most ordinary things was unnatural. She moved through the world as if it
didn’t feel like home. The only time I would see her at ease in her body was
when she handled dead ones.
It was a workday for Corinna, a professional embalmer, and she wore all
black—a suit jacket, a knee-length skirt, tights, and ankle boots. A faux-pearl
barrette kept her bright blond hair out of her face. When Corinna greeted me,
her voice was deep and steady. She had square features beneath a straight
brow line. Her countenance was severe, even when she smiled, which almost
always happened a beat after I expected it, as if she had to remind herself,
This is what people do. Corinna was petite—just over five feet tall—but
strong. She once competed in bodybuilding, which prizes sharp lines,
bulbous contours, and cartoonish movements. To be attractive in that world
is to be awkward by any conventional standard of beauty. By the time I met
her, Corinna hadn’t done bodybuilding in a few years; her health couldn’t
take the wear and tear. She stayed in shape by going to the gym and by lifting
corpses and caskets.
We climbed into her Dodge minivan, and Corinna scooted close to the
steering wheel. A gallon of distilled water sat on the passenger-side floor
next to a dog-eared trade paperback. There were no seats in the back of the
van. Corinna had removed them to make room for side-by-side stretchers,
where she strapped the bodies that she ferried from morgues to funeral
homes. An empty orange can, which once held a sugary energy drink, was
lodged in the console between us. Corinna had kicked drug and alcohol
addictions, leaving caffeine as her vice of choice. We stopped for a fresh
round at a gas station. She dispensed hot coffee into a Styrofoam cup, then
sipped it through a straw.
“So where is this body?” I a
