On the fringe

Policy Review, Feb/Mar 2003 by Lehrer, Eli

CAROL SWAIN. The New White Nationalism in America: Its Challenge to Integration. CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS. 416 PAGES. $30.00 NE JULY afternoon in i999, a University of Illinois student named Benjamin Smith picked up a 9-mm handgun he had purchased through a classified advertisement, climbed into his car, and murdered Ricky Byrdsong as the popular Northwestern University basketball coach walked near his home in Skokie, Illinois. The following day, Smith killed two other African-Americans and an Asian in a homicide spree that cut a bloody diagonal line across Illinois. The next day, July 4, he shot an Indiana University graduate student before turning the gun on himself. Smith, a member of a white supremacist "religion" called the World Church of the Creator, had grown up in an affluent Chicago suburb and dated a Korean girl during high school. Recruited into the "church" on the University of Illinois's UrbanaChampaign campus, he became a virulent racist and anti-Semite. After the Illinois State Bar denied a law license to World Church leader Matthew Hale, Smith launched his killing spree with the hope of sparking the racial holy war "creators" fervently hope for. (On January 8 of this year, U.S. Marshals arrested Hale himself for allegedly plotting to kill a judge who had ruled against his organization in a trademark case.) While the book stops short of prophesying a race war, Carol Swain's The New White Nationalism in America argues that white nationalist groups like Smith's have "the potential to expand [their] ranks among ordinary white Americans, who increasingly find themselves frustrated by a host of unresolved public policy issues in the area of ethnicity and race." Swain, a law professor at Vanderbilt University, contends that such frustration stems from a variety of legitimate grievances from the volume of black-on-white crime to racial preferences and multicultural ideologies that exalt group rights. White nationalism, like many of the multiculturalist philosophies promoted by the left, posits that whites have distinct group interests that run counter to those of blacks, Latinos, Asians, and, often, Jews. For the white nationalist, the United States is a "white nation" that is now being hijacked. The "new" white nationalist groups Swain describes theoretically eschew violence, although many of their adherents have acted violently at times. Swain takes these groups seriously and admits that they sometimes have a point. Swain has long dealt with controversy. A onetime welfare recipient who grew up in rural Virginia, she left school in the ninth grade and gave birth to her first child at 16. Dissatisfied with life in the small African-American community where she grew up, she entered community college and eventually earned a doctorate from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She won tenure at Princeton (moving to Vanderbilt later on) and began her academic career with a study of congressional representation, Black Faces, Black Interests (Harvard University Press, 119 993), which made a convincing case against one-race congressional districts. During the multi-year sabbatical she used to write The New White Nationalism, Swain became a bornagain Christian and earned a master's degree in law from Yale. It's almost impossible to place her in any ideological camp: The back of her most recent book includes endorsements from both conservative Princeton scholar Robert P George and Harvard social democrat William Julius Wilson.

While the conclusions of her first book have become conventional wisdom - even the NAACP no longer insists on strict racial gerrymanders her latest work promises to prove far more controversial. The New White Nationalism consists of four major sections: a discussion of the growing influence of white nationalism, an examination of public attitudes toward affirmative action, an exploration of young people's opinions about race, and a discussion of policy prescriptions intended to combat the white nationalist threat. In each chapter Swain offers a wealth of scholarship and ideas. Put together, however, The New White Nationalism proves incomplete. While she sheds new light on many sources of racial tension in America and offers many valuable suggestions, Swain does not make a convincing case that white nationalism will reemerge as a major political force. WAIN'S RESEARCH on white

nationalism consists of a series of interviews with white nationalist leaders - conducted by Princeton University's Russell Nieli and collected in a March 1003 book, Contemporary Voices of White Nationalism in America (Cambridge University Press) - and a bevy of original survey data about affirmative action in employment and higher education.

Swain's interviews simply don't provide compelling evidence that white nationalist leaders have the potential to recruit a larger following. In all, she interviews io individuals and doesn't appear to have done field research at white nationalist gatherings. (As an African-American, admittedly, this might have proven difficult but her assistant Nieli, who is white, didn't seem to have any problem getting racists to talk.) Two of the individuals she considers, furthermore, are Jews and thus have almost no chance of gaining traction in a movement that is predominantly anti-Semitic. Nonetheless, the interviews provide some fascinating insight into the mindset of the white nationalist fringe.