[Paleopsych] Abby L. Ferber: Of Mongrels and Jews

[Premise Checker]

Of Mongrels and Jews: The deconstruction of racialized identities in
White supremacist discourse
by Ferber, Abby L., Social Identities, 13504630, Jun97, Vol. 3, Issue 2

[Lots of pomo jargon about social construction, which I can by now easily 
penetrate, but there was very little about defining the precise boundaries 
of who is White. Greeks? Turks? Armenians? Lebanese? Asian Indians? 
(Having grown up in Colorado, I still think of Indians as American 
Indians.)]

ABSTRACT: This research explores the construction of race and mixed race
identities in a wide variety of white supremacist newsletters and
periodicals published between 1969 and 1993. While traditional accounts
of the white supremacist movement treat it as a movement concerned with
race relations, I read this discourse as a site of the construction of
race. In white supremacist discourse, interracial sexuality is defined
as the ultimate abomination, and mixed race people pose a particularly
strong threat. This paper explores the ways in which mixed race people,
and Jews in particular, threaten the construction of a supposedly pure
white racial identity. Drawing upon the insights of poststructuralism,
this analysis will explore the role of boundary maintenance and the
threat of border crossings in the process of constructing racial
identities.

Traditional studies of the white supremacist movement approach it as a
far right movement representing white, and specifically white male,
interests. The movement is defined as both racist and anti-semitic, and
viewed from a race relations approach. Journalists, historians and
sociologists have attempted to explain who the members of this movement
are, and what factors explain why they join, as well as documenting the
activities of the movement and accounting for its increasing or
decreasing power and popularity at various historical junctures and in
various social contexts. It is usually taken for granted that the
movement represents the interests of a segment of the white population,
and espouses hatred and advocates violence against blacks, Jews, and
other nonwhite racial groups. Racial identities are assumed and accepted
as given. This research, in contrast, explores white supremacist
discourse as actively constructing racial identities.

This research is part of a larger project which explores the
construction of racialised, gendered identities in contemporary white
supremacist discourse. Producing the illusion of racially pure
identities is at the heart of the white supremacist project. I have
reviewed the publications of a wide variety of white supremacist
organisations published between 1969 and 1993 (for a complete list of
primary sources, see reference list). While white supremacist discourses
are diverse and varied, and have changed over the past thirty years
responding to changes throughout society, there are certain constants
within the discourse.

Because white supremacist discourse is primarily concerned with
constructing white identity and maintaining white privilege, the variety
of white supremacist publications share an obsession with interracial
relationships, perceived as the ultimate threat to that identity. This
obsession has remained pervasive throughout the history of the white
supremacist movement in the US and Europe, and this paper will explore
precisely why this issue presents such a constant threat. I read white
supremacist discourse here as ideological narratives which produce
racialised identities and subjects. Not simply about race, this
discourse constructs race.

Constructing Racial Essence

While white supremacist discourse adamantly supports the notion that
race is a biological and/or god-given essence, a review of the discourse
reveals the social construction of that essence. As Diana Fuss points
out, 'there is no essence to essentialism ... essence as irreducible has
been constructed to be irreducible' (Fuss, 1989, p. 4).

Throughout white supremacist discourse, whiteness is constructed in
terms of visible, physical differences in appearance. According to one
article, true whites are Nordics, 'the thin, fair and symmetric race
originating in Northern Europe' (Instauration, February 1980, p. 13). In
another article, Nordics are described as

the only cleanly chiselled faces around. And there are other ways they
stand out. The world's finest hair and finest skin texture are in
Scandinavia. Some of the world's tallest statures, largest body size and
most massive heads are also found in Northern European regions.
(Instauration, January 1980, p. 15)

Jews similarly are constructed as a race in this discourse, made
identifiable by physical markers such as 'long kinky curls and typical
hooked nose, thick fleshy lips, slant eyes and other typical Jew
features' (Thunderbolt, no. 301, p. 6).

According to Christian Identity theology, difference is destiny -- it is
god-given. Non-whites, and especially blacks, are not simply different
biologically or genetically from whites, they are also not considered
God's children. They are defined as pre-Adamic mud people, not the
offspring of Adam. As a Thunderbolt article claims, 'the coloured and
mongrelised races do not have God's Spirit and cannot be accepted ...
[we] cannot change God's laws' (Thunderbolt, January 1974, p. 10).

Eschewing religion, other publications provide an evolutionary
perspective. An article in Instauration entitled 'Evolution vs
Integration' emphasises this, explaining,

the Negro brain is only 10.6 per cent smaller than a white's. But in
regard to the more recently attained capacity for abstract and rational
thought, the gap is much larger ... There is no underlying unity upon
which to build or maintain a functioning social matrix. Despite all
attempts to integrate them, the five races of mankind are still
following Coon's separate lines of biological and historical evolution.
(Instauration, January 1980, p. 21)

This article suggests that any attempt to integrate the races runs
counter to the natural course of evolution, and is bound to fail.
Genetic difference, and evolution as the path of increasing
differentiation, are constructed as rooted in nature, thereby also
reifying inequality as a natural, permanent fact of life.

A great deal of effort is put into physically distinguishing races from
one another. Both the book and film that go by the name Blood in the
Face take their name from some white suprernacists' supposition that
Jews cannot blush and only true whites show 'blood in the face'
(Ridgeway, 1992). Rather than revealing race as a biological essence,
this discourse reveals the continued effort required to construct racial
differences. Judith Butler suggests that identities are constructed
through 'the reiterative and citational practice by which discourse
produces the effects that it names' (Butler, 1993, p. 2). The
construction of identity is not a singular act or gesture, but rather, a
process which must be continually repeated 'in order to establish the
illusion of its own uniformity and identity' (Butler, 1991, p. 24).

Ironically, this process of reiteration which constructs racial
difference also reveals the construction of these identities, thereby
putting this

identity permanently at risk ... That there is a need for repetition at
all is a sign that identity is not self-identical. It requires to be
instituted again and again, which is to say that it runs the risk of
becoming de-instituted at every interval. (Butler, 1991, p. 24)

As we find in white supremacist discourse, even though racial identity
is posited as a biological or god-given fact of nature, a tremendous
amount of effort is put into defining them.

While a great amount of written space is devoted to delineating physical
racial differences, these physical differences are always interpreted as
signifying deeper, underlying differences. Physical differences produce
the illusion of an inner racial essence. This racial essence is
represented as immutable. As an NSV Report article about Jews claims,

We fight for things that they cannot understand because of their nature;
and because of their nature, they can never understand because they are
aliens. Even if they changed their religion, they will not be a part of
our Folk. They can never be a part of our Folk for they are aliens. They
might as well be from another planet because they are not of our world.
(NSV Report October/December 1987, p. 1)

Constructing the illusion of a racially pure white identity is central
to the white supremacist project. It is not surprising, then, that
mixed-race people serve as a powerful threat to the maintenance of
racial purity. Interracial sexuality is referred to as the 'ultimate
abomination' (Ridgeway, 1990, p. 90) and white supremacist discourse is
obsessed with miscegenation. In Bodies That Matter, Judith Butler
contends that this threat is central to the construction of subjects.
Butler suggests that the central point of deconstruction, often missed
in social constructivist analyses, is that the construction of subjects
simultaneously produces abjected identities.

Hence, it is not enough to claim that human subjects are constructed,
for the construction of the human is a differential operation that
produces the more and the less 'human', the inhuman, the humanly
unthinkable. These excluded sates come to bound the 'human' as its
constitutive outside, and to haunt those boundaries as the persistent
possibility of their disruption and rearticulation. (Butler, 1993, p. 8)


Gender and race are not identities imposed upon bodies, but, rather,
bodies only become culturally intelligible as they become gendered and
racialised. The heterosexual imperative produces as subjects those who
conform to the gendered norms of cultural intelligibility. At the same
time, this regulation produces a domain of abjection, a realm of the
culturally unintelligible. As Butler points out, it is

important to recognise that oppression works not merely through acts of
overt prohibition, but covertly, through the constitution of viable
subjects and through the corollary constitution of a domain of unviable
(un)subjects -- abjects, we might call them ... Here oppression works
through the production of a domain of unthinkability and unnameability.
(Butler, 1991, p. 20)

The assumption of properly gendered identities occurs in relation to
this realm of the abject. The regulation of heterosexuality constructs
gendered subjects, and identification always takes place against a
corresponding threat of punishment, yet the production of subjects is
frequently constrained not only by the regulation of heterosexuality,
but by other regulatory regimes as well. Exploring white supremacist
discourse, the regulation of interracial sexuality emerges as central.

While Butler demonstrates the production of culturally intelligible
gender identities, and the simultaneous production of a realm of
abjection, Omi and Winant suggest that there is a similar process at
work in the production of coherent racial identities. They point out
that

one of the first things we notice about people when we meet them ... is
their race. We utilise race to provide clues about who a person is. This
fact is made painfully obvious when we encounter someone whom we cannot
conveniently racially categorise -- someone who is, for example,
racially 'mixed' or of an ethnic/racial group with which we are not
familiar. Such an encounter becomes a source of discomfort and
momentarily a crisis of racial meaning. Without a racial identity, one
is in danger of having no identity. (Omi and Winant, 1986, p. 62)

Racialised identities govern our notions of culturally intelligible
humans. As Omi and Winant here suggests, the production of coherent
racial identities, like the production of coherent gender identities,
requires the simultaneous production of 'unviable (un)subjects' (Butler,
1991, p. 20). Informed by this theory, my research explores the
regulation of heterosexual and 'racially pure' sexuality in white
supremacist discourse, where the production of culturally intelligible
racialised identities at the same time relegates mongrels and Jews to
the realm of the inhuman.

Mongrels: Border Crossings

The production of racialised subjects requires the corresponding threat
of punishment, and throughout this discourse that threat plays a central
role as it is reiterated over and over. The subject must repeatedly
disassociate itself from the abject to construct itself as a subject.

It is this repeated repudiation by which the subject installs its
boundary and constructs the claim to its 'integrity' ... This is not a
buried identification that is left behind in a forgotten past, but an
identification that must be levelled and buried again and again, the
compulsive repudiation by which the subject incessantly sustains his/her
boundary ... subject-positions are produced in and through a logic of
repudiation and abjection. (Butler, 1993, p. 114)

The figures of abjection, then, are essential to the production of
racialised subjects. The construction of stable racial identities can
only occur in relation to the production and regulation of the 'impure'.


It is through the construction and maintenance of racial boundaries and
the demarcation of 'whiteness' as a racially pure identity that the
white subject is constructed. For white suprernacists, the construction
of racial purity requires a policing of the racial borders. The
construction of distinct races requires border maintenance and
interracial sexuality is the greatest threat to this maintenance.

Poststructuralism has highlighted the importance of paying attention to
boundaries and the role of borders in constructing coherent conceptual
categories. The meaning of any identity is derived from its relationship
with its binary opposite. However, binary oppositions conceal the
interdependence of the two terms; the two terms depend upon each other
for meaning. Additionally, as Jacques Derrida points out, this
relationship is hierarchical, one side of the opposition is always
constructed as more important, primary or originary than the other
(Derrida, 1976; Scott, 1988). Blackness, for example, as long as it is
carefully separated and subordinated to whiteness, poses no threat to
the existence of a white identity; in fact, blackness is necessary to
the definition of whiteness. While blacks are the focus of a tremendous
amount of attention in white supremacist discourse, they are primarily
constructed as a threat to white identity, privilege and safety. White
supremacist discourse argues that blackness must be carefully bounded
and controlled; the threat must be neutralised. The discourse presents
the possibility of white and black co-existence as long as the races are
geographically separated. Separation and the maintenance of racial
boundaries are the key. It is precisely for this reason that mixed race
people pose such a great threat. Those who are mixed race threaten the
white/black binary; they signify the instability of that opposition.
While those who are discovered to be mixed race are actually legally
defined as black in the US, they nevertheless represent a particularly
strong threat to the construction of racial identity based on the
illusion of white racial purity. Mixed race people signal the
instability and permeability of racial boundaries, and threaten the
construction of racial identity as a natural, inherent essence.

If subjects only become culturally intelligible in this discourse as
they become racialised, mixed race people cannot be granted subject
status; they symbolise the realm of the unlivable. It is in relation to
this realm of the unlivable, and through the maintenance of racial
boundaries, that white subjects are produced and their identity is
secured. They become visible, racialised subjects through the abjection
of the impure. The realm of the abject, however, haunts the subject 'as
the spectre of its own impossibility, the very limit to intelligibility,
its constitutive outside' (Butler, 1993, pp. xi-xii).

Throughout this discourse, mixed race individuals serve as figures of
racial punishment, figures of abjection. 'Mongrels' do not meet the
racialised norms of cultural intelligibility 'which qualifies a body for
life within the domain of cultural intelligibility' (Butler, 1993, p.
2). For example, in The Turner Diaries, a widely read white supremacist
utopian novel which served as a model for the Oklahoma City bombing,
readers are warned,

The enemy we are fighting fully intends to destroy the racial basis of
our existence. No excuse for our failure will have any meaning, for
there will be only a swarming horde of indifferent, mulatto zombies to
hear it. There will be no White men to remember us. (Macdonald, 1978, p.
2)

Not only is race at stake then, but what it means to be human, as well.
As Omi and Winant and Butler have suggested, the construction of human
subjects occurs through the construction and regulation of intelligible
racial and gender identifies. Macdonald suggests that there will be no
humans left, only what are referred to as 'mulatto zombies'. Without a
stable racial identity, one can have no human identity in this
discourse. As Butler explains,

the 'coherence' and 'continuity' of 'the person' are not logical or
analytic features of personhood, but, rather, socially instituted and
maintained norms of intelligibility ... the very notion of 'the person'
is called into question by the cultural emergence of those 'incoherent'
... beings who appear to be persons but who fail to conform to the
gendered [and racialised] norms of cultural intelligibility by which
persons are defined. (Butler, 1990, p. 17)

An article in the New Order describes mixed race individuals as:

Malformed pieces of humanity sporting a combination of woolly negroid
hair, white complexion and slanted mongol eyes. They call themselves
'black people', but they are neither black, white or yellow, but all and
none of these races. These are the children of integration. They have no
culture, no common heritage, no identity and no pride. What would you
call them? Half-castes? Hybrids? Monsters? (New Order, September 1979,
p. 7)

They are defined as defective, degenerate, monster-like; once again
their humanity is put in question. Similarly, articles in White Power
refer to them as 'mongrel monstrosities' (White Power, February 1973, p.
3). Interracial sexuality is constructed as a threat to both racial and
human identity, producing instead incoherent beings, 'brown zombies'.

As we saw earlier, racial identity not only is posited as determining
physical characteristics, but personality, behaviour, culture and
national identity. Mixed race people, then, are not only distinguished
by physical characteristics, but are defined as 'negroidal mongrels who
on their own could not build a pyramid or modem city' (Thunderbolt,
August 1979, p. 9). Elsewhere we are told that 'a mulatto or mongrel
race is a shiftless, lazy, mindless, leaderless and slave-like race
which must have a racial superior 'boss-man' to tell them what to do'
(Thunderbolt, no. 297, p. 3). In stark contrast to the repeated
celebrations of the accomplishments of the white race, white supremacist
discourse suggests that mixed race people are inhuman, incapable of
surviving on their own, incapable of creating anything worthwhile.

In order to exist as a culturally intelligible being, one must be
racialised. To have no pure race makes living impossible -- 'mongrels'
occupy the site of impossibility and unlivability. As New Order articles
warn, interracial sexuality will result in a 'race-mixed and totally
dead America' (New Order, March 1979, p. 8), 'a fate worse than death
... is what mongrelisation is all about. It is a living death' (New
Order Spring, 1982, p. 2).

Mixed race individuals are denied subject-status in this discourse, and
they are perceived as a particularly strong threat to the racial
identity of whites. The realm of the abject, to which mixed race people
have been relegated, 'bound[s] the 'human' as its constitutive outside,
and ... haunt[s] those boundaries as the persistent possibility of their
disruption and rearticulation' (Butler, 1993, p. 8). If white identity
is dependent upon racially pure reproduction, and its place on one side
of the binary opposition of white/black, it is essential for white
supremacists to be able to recognise who is white and who is not. Their
own identity depends upon it. While race is constructed through the
reiteration of physical differences which are visible and knowable, the
existence of mixed race individuals is represented as a threat to this
surety. In a National Vanguard article entitled 'Beware the Almost
Whites!' readers are warned that interracial sexuality produces

a continuous range of mongrels between the two racial extremes. Near the
White end of the spectrum there will be some who ... will be almost
indistinguishable from the true Aryans. Drawing the line between what is
Aryan and what is not becomes more and more difficult. (National
Vanguard, August 1979, p. 5)

As a New Order article explains, 'The 'murder by miscegenation' device
works all too well when 'almost Whites' can gain acceptance when a
nigger cannot' (New Order, March 1979, p. 2). The existence of 'almost
whites' poses a threat to the constructed surety of racial identity and
symbolises the insecurity and permeability of racial boundaries,
threatening the possibility of racially pure reproduction and racially
pure identities.

In white supremacist discourse, mongrelisation is depicted as leading to
the genocide of the white race. A typical article describes it as 'the
genocide of the White race by irreversible downbreeding with a
hopelessly inferior race' (White Power, March 1972, p. 4). A National
Socialist White People's Party recruitment flyer warns, 'race-mixing and
integration mean White genocide'. Mongrelisation is equated with
genocide, the extermination of a race of people, because it means the
loss of the illusion of white racial purity. As an article in the
Thunderbolt explains,

Mongrelisation is the worst form of 'genocide'. If you kill 99 per cent
of a race, but leave the other 1 per cent pureblooded, they will in time
restore the race; but when you mongrelise them, you have destroyed that
race eternally. Once mixed with the Black or Yellow Races, the White
Race would be totally and forever destroyed. (Thunderbolt, 25 April
1975, p. 10)

Another article asserts,

any large scale intermarriage ... would mean the ... abolition of the
White Race. We would simply cease to exist in the world of the future
... A race once polluted with the decadent genes of the lower, backward,
and underdeveloped races of the world is lost forever. (Thunderbolt, 30
May 1975, p. 8).

Intermarriage is considered even deadlier than outright war because

even a global war in which the Jews were victorious, would leave a few
Whites to breed back the race. Their final solution is MONGRELISATION. A
mongrel can only breed more mongrels. (Thunderbolt, January 1974, p. 10)


Similarly, a New Order article asserts, 'there is one sure way of
killing a nation -- to destroy or to fatally dilute the blood of its
creators' (New Order March 1979, p. 2).

Mongrelisation becomes synonymous with genocide in this discourse. If
subjects only become living, viable subjects as they become racialised,
mongrelisation, then, is death -- the destruction of life. Interracial
sexuality is depicted as threatening to erase racial differences and
identity and the actual continued existence of the white race and
humanity. Regulations prohibiting interracial sexuality actually serve
to consolidate racial identities, and any transgression of the
boundaries threatens to destroy this identity.

The Jew: Boundary Mediator and Destroyer

White supremacist discourse presents a range of racial enemies: blacks
are constructed as a threat if not thoroughly separated from whites.
Mixed race people, the product of racial intermixture between whites and
non-whites, but blacks especially, are a threat because they symbolise
the breakdown of the borders separating whites from non-whites. Jews,
however, are constructed as the ultimate enemy, the very source of the
breakdown of these racial borders. According to the New Order,

The single serious enemy facing the White man is the Jew. The Jews are
not a religion, they are an Asiatic race, locked in mortal conflict with
Aryan man which has lasted for millennia, and which will continue until
one of the two combat peoples is extinct. (The New Order, March 1979, p.
3)

As the Thunderbolt proclaims, it is a 'WAR OF EXTERMINATION -- God's
seed against Satan's seed. ONLY ONE WILL SURVIVE' (Thunderbolt, January
1974, p. 10).

Jews are racialised in this discourse, and defined as a biologically
distinct race. However, according to Christian Identity theology,
subscribed to by a number of the publications reviewed here, Jews are
not simply different genetically and biologically, but are depicted as
the children of Satan rather than God.

The Identity Church movement was first recognised as a strong presence
within the white supremacist movement in the 1970s and early 1980s. The
racist and anti-semitic Identity doctrine provides the theological
underpinnings for a variety of white supremacist organisations, and
links various groups together.

Identity doctrine has its foundations in British Israelism, with origins
in Great Britain in the mid-1800s (Zeskind, 1986). Based on an
'idiosyncratic reading' of the Bible, British Israelism holds that the
people of Israel settled in Northern Europe before the Christian era.
According to the Bible, ancient Israel was divided into two kingdoms:
the Northern portion consisted of ten of the twelve tribes descended
from Jacob, and when the area was conquered the ten tribes were lost.
The Jews of today are supposedly descendants of the Southern kingdom,
but according to Identity belief:

characteristics of the racial type we recognise as that of the Jews
today were the result of intermarriages in the days of Ezra and
Nehemiah. At that time a mutation of the blood stream occurred ...
(which was) ... a defection from God's will. (Zeskind, 1986, p. 196)

This racialisation of biblical beliefs recasts the ancient Hebrews as a
race, whose descendants today are the Aryans, and recasts Jews as the
product of race-mixing.

Theologians in the US have contributed to Identity doctrine, adding the
'two seed' theory (Ridgeway, 1990, p. 54). US Identity doctrine holds
that there were two creations: the first was the male and female created
in Genesis 1: 26-27, and the second was the creation of Adam and Eve in
Genesis 2: 2-6. These two accounts supposedly produced two separate
races. Adam is the ancestor of the Caucasian race today, and the other
male and female produced the pre-Adamic 'mud people', people without
souls, defined as today's blacks and other non-Jewish non-whites.
According to Identity doctrine, Satan seduced Eve, and then Eve
introduced sexual intercourse to Adam. So Eve was impregnated with two
seeds, Satan's evil seed, producing Cain, and God's, producing Abel.
When Cain, the evil one, was Cast out of Eden, he supposedly married a
pre-Adamic woman, producing the Jewish race. According to this account,
Jews are not only the children of Satan, but once again the product of
racial intermixture (Aho, 1990; Anti-Defamation League, 1988b).

As explained in an article in the Thunderbolt entitled 'Satan's Children
vs God's Children', when Cain was cast out of Eden he married an Asiatic
woman.

His offspring continued mixing with Asiatics, many of whom had
previously mongrelised with Negroes, and they continued this
miscegenation down through the years. This Cainite line had Satan's
spirit, not God's ... The genetic function of their existence is to do
the works of their father (Satan) by destroying the White Adamic Race
... This Cainite race (if you can call mongrels a race) became the
people, who today, are known as JEWS ... over 80 per cent of today's
Jews are descendants of the Khazars, who were ... of Turk-Mongol blood
mixed with White Europeans. (Thunderbolt, January 1974, p. 10)

As these accounts demonstrate, Christian Identity theology defines Jews
not merely as a separate race, but an impure race, the product of
mongrelisation.

Jews, then, occupy the abject site of mongrelisation and symbolise all
that goes along with that designation. The position of Jews is ambiguous
throughout this discourse because while Jews are defined as mongrels,
they are also produced discursively as a distinctive race in a way that
mongrels more generally are not. Mixed race people pose a threat because
they symbolise racelessness and the breakdown of racial identity, and
hence, humanity. Jews, however, are defined as mixed race, and so
raceless. This state of racelessness becomes their racial essence. It is
their essence to attack and destroy pure racial identities.
Additionally, it is often emphasised that Jews today do not allow
intermarriage for themselves. For example, a Thunderbolt article
explains that

they are advocating [interracial sexuality] for White Christians and
members of the colored races but not for members of the Jew race ...
They have long realised that the fusion of all the other races (while
maintaining the purity of the Jew race) will produce a race of mongrels
more subservient to their domination. (Thunderbolt, no. 297, p. 3)

Curiously, then, Jews are defined as simultaneously mongrels and a pure
race. Jews are produced as a race whose central racial identity is
impurity, mongrelisation, mixture. The pure essence or racial core of
the Jew represents all that is antithetical to the meaning of a healthy
race. Racial identity is predicated upon an imagined purity, and the
existence of Jews is a threat because their racial identity represents
impurity, chaos, boundary transgressions. It is for this reason that
geographical segregation is acceptable for all other races, but Jews
must be exterminated. The existence of Jews is a threat, and so every
last Jew must be exterminated to secure white existence.

In Modernity and the Holocaust, Zygmunt Bauman suggests that Jews have
traditionally been assigned the role of transgressors:

The conceptual Jew was a semantically overloaded entity, comprising and
blending meanings which ought to be kept apart, and for this reason a
natural adversary of any force concerned with drawing borderlines and
keeping them watertight. The conceptual Jew was visquex (in Sartrean
terms), slimy (in Mary Douglas's terms) -- an image construed as
compromising and defying the order of things, as the very epitome and
embodiment of such defiance. (Bauman, 1989, p. 39)

While the essence and core of the Jew is constructed as symbolising this
site of impossibility and chaos, the behaviour of Jews is described as
an extension of that position. Race-mixing and interracial sexuality,
the severest threat to the existence of a white racial identity, is
posited as a result of Jews. Almost every discussion of race-mixing,
whether it is school bussing, or intermarriage, attributes it to Jews. A
multitude of articles found throughout all of the various periodicals
attempts to demonstrate that Jews are responsible for integration and
race-mixing. For example, Thunderbolt has published articles with titles
like 'Jewish Leaders Supporting Race-Mixing', 'Jews Finance Race-Mixing
Case', 'Jewish Organisations Back Interracial Marriage', and 'Why Do
Jews Support Race-Mixing?' (Thunderbolt, no. 297, pp. 1, 3). According
to the NSV Report, Aryans are facing 'organised mutiny of biologically
inferior people, led by the Jews against the White race' (NSV Report,
April/June 1983, p. 5).

Mongrels and Jews, then, are constructed differently as threats. While
mongrels represent the possibility of racelessness and inhumanity, it is
the Jews who are depicted as encouraging and speeding along the process
of mongrelisation between whites and blacks. The essence of the Jew is
produced as an inherent threat to racial purity. Separation of the races
is the end goal for the wide range of white supremacist groups.
Geographical apartheid is presented as the only way to guarantee racial
purity and prevent the threat of racial mixing. For example, an
Instauration article warns,

It is not black power that we need to fear. We should fear black
coexistence in the same living space ... once our race is gone because
of integration with blacks, we are done. (Instauration, April 1980, pp.
13-14)

Because Jews come to embody impurity and border crossings, throughout
this discourse the presence of the Jew is defined as the roadblock to
racial segregation. For example, a White Power article demonstrates the
role attributed to Jews consistently throughout this discourse:

Now that the busses are rolling on their genocidal journey of bringing
White and Negro children forcibly together in the schools, our
Jew-dominated government is moving relentlessly on to the next step:
forced mixing of the races in housing ... to carry out the lunatic
program of interbreeding. (White Power, March 1972, p. 3)

While whites fear mixing with blacks, it is assumed that if Jews were
out of the picture, separation of blacks and whites would be assured.
Blacks are frequently depicted as stupid and animal-like, merely
following the lead of the Jews, and without the Jews it is believed that
blacks would no longer demand equality and integration. For example, a
New Order article suggests that without the prodding of Jews and white
liberals,

what happens to the negro? [He] clumsily shuffles off, scratching his
woolly head, to search for shoebrush and mop. In the final debate, an
ape will always be an ape. (New Order, September 1979, p. 14)

Instauration articles explain that the Jew serves as the mediator
between non-Jewish groups. A book entitled The Mediator, by Richard
Swartzbaugh, is published by the press which publishes Instauration, and
Instauration articles frequently discuss this book, referred to as an
'underground classic'. Swartzbaugh

shows how this mediating role becomes a necessity in cases where
mutually antagonistic groups are to be found within the same living
space and where some sort of accommodation is desired. That is why the
Jews have always done their best artificially to create such situations
(i.e., by breaking down American and British immigration bars).
(Instauration April 1979, p. 28)

This work suggests that Jews encourage, benefit from, and thrive on the
breakdown of racial boundaries. Once again, this is seen as rooted in
Jewish nature -- it is part of their racial essence. As an NSV Report
article explains,

It is the Jews who are the purveyors of death! Jews are a very negative
people. They cannot help it. It is their racial personality. They will
destroy your nation, race, culture, civilisation, family and whatever
you value. (NSV Report, January/March 1989, p. 1)

Jews are constructed as a race which by nature disrupts and destroys.

This discourse suggests that racial boundaries and the separation of
races are natural, but the Jew, who symbolises and embodies the
unnatural, the chaotic, disrupts the natural order of separation and
white superiority. As a Thunderbolt article explains, 'When misled
liberals and Jews constantly tell negroes that they are equal to (or
better) than Whites, hatred and violence erupts when they are unable to
compete' (Thunderbolt, August 1979, p. 8).

Jews are depicted as controlling many facets of US society, ranging from
the media to the banking and finance industries, and they are depicted
as using their position to increase interracial sexuality. For example,
a White Power article entitled 'Race-Mixing in the Movies' asserts that
Hollywood and the motion picture industry were created by, and are
controlled by, Jews who

have taken a leading position as a promoter of race-mixing and
miscegenation ... This medium is now being systematically used to
undermine our Aryan values and destroy our White identity. (White Power,
June/July 1969, p. 3)

Another article suggests that the 'Jew controlled media' are
brainwashing children and teenagers into accepting interracial sexuality
and homosexuality so that

White kids see miscegenation and homosexuality portrayed as the 'in'
thing, and anyone who opposes this sort of filth is castigated as a
'racist' or a 'prude'. (White Power, February 1973, p. 3)

The feminist movement is also considered part of the Jewish plan to
divide and mongrelise the white race. Jews are considered the driving
force behind feminism, 'never less than a third of the leadership of
feminist organisations' (National Vanguard, January 1983, p. 17).
Similarly, a White Power article confirms that

the 'Women's Movement' which evolved out of the social turmoil of the
1960s had a distinctly Jewish approach and leadership....they seem to be
less interested in securing equal rights for women than in turning men
and women into unnatural rivals, each struggling against the other for
supremacy instead of working together. (White Power, no. 105, p. 4)

Jews are assumed to be behind all equality movements, whether for racial
or gender equality, because it is defined as inherent in Jewish nature
to disrupt and threaten difference. The Jew represents the destruction
of borders, threatening the very existence of racial identities. As
Bauman suggests,

the conceptual Jew performed a function of prime importance; he
visualised the horrifying consequences of boundary-transgression ... The
conceptual Jew carried a message; alternative to this order here and now
is not another order, but chaos and devastation. (Bauman, 1989, p. 39)

The breakdown of natural racial boundaries is depicted as leading
inevitably to interracial sexuality, part of the Jewish plan to
exterminate the white race. If interracial sexuality is depicted as a
form of genocide, then it must be Jews who are behind it. According to
the NSV Report, 'Jewish parasites ... race-mix our people into oblivion'
(NSV Report, October/December 1988, p. 2). The end goal of what is
constructed as the Jewish plan of promoting interracial sexuality is
white genocide and world domination. A Thunderbolt article proclaims

They hope that our seed will vanish into the Jewish contrived 'melting
pot' with the negroes, Puerto Ricans, Asians and Mexicans in order to
create a brown skinned non-White world of the future. The Jews are
waging a fierce battle to stop intermarriage within their own race. If
the Jews are the last race able to retain their own racial identity they
will be able to use their money power to control any mentally dulled
race of mongrelised zombies that might eventually be the majority.
(Thunderbolt, January 1974, p. 7)

According to a White Power article entitled 'Jews Planning White
Genocide', 'world Jewry's chilling Final Solution [is] the physical and
spiritual genocide of the White race they despise' (White Power,
February 1973, p. 3).

Conclusion

The construction of white racial identity, and the maintenance of white
privilege, is the central project of the contemporary white supremacist
movement. The construction and maintenance of racial boundaries is
essential to the production of white identity in white supremacist
discourse. Purity is central to the definition of racial identity, and
the construction of racially pure identities simultaneously produces the
threat of miscegenation. Within this discourse, mongrels and Jews pose a
threat to the construction of white racial identity because they
symbolise the permeability of racial boundaries and the threat of
boundary transgressions. Mongrels and Jews become the embodiment of this
threat and serve as images of boundary confusion and chaos. The
production of racialised subjects occurs through the maintenance of
racial boundaries, and each of these figures in some way disrupts,
threatens, or transgresses the boundaries which are essential to the
production of the white subject.

The production of intelligible racial subjects simultaneously produces a
range of unintelligible un-subjects. Within contemporary white
supremacist discourse, mongrels and Jews are defined as inhuman
monsters. They form the constitutive outside against which the coherent
subject is constructed. The regulation of interracial sexuality, then,
is a continuous effort at boundary maintenance, producing racialised
subjects as well as improper non-subjects: Mongrels and Jews serve as
figures of racial punishment: the threat of impurity. They are
accordingly denied subject status. As Butler has asserted, it is
essential that we explore not only the construction of human subjects,
but those simultaneously not constructed as human. The racialised
subject is produced in white supremacist discourse over and against the
improperly racialised, the inhuman, the culturally unintelligible.

More than merely a discourse about race relations, this article
demonstrates the active production of racial identity within the
discourse. If, as contemporary theory asserts, race is a social
construction, we cannot take racial classifications for granted in our
analyses. Instead, we must explore the varied processes and sites of its
ongoing construction.

References

Aho, J.A. (1990) The Politics of Righteousness: Idaho Christian
Patriotism, Seattle: University of Washington Press.
The Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith (1988a) Extremism on the
Right: a Handbook, New York.
-- (1988b) Hate Groups in America: a Record of Bigotry and Violence, New
York. Bauman, Z. (1989) Modernity and the Holocaust, Ithaca: Cornell
University Press. Butler, J. (1990) Gender Trouble: Feminism and the
Subversion of Identity, New York: Routledge.
-- (1993) Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex, New York:
Routledge.
Derrida, J. (1974) Of Grammatology, translated by G.C. Spivak,
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
-- (1982) Margins of Philosophy, translated by A. Bass. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Ferber, A.L. (1995a) 'Exploring the Social Construction of Race: Social
Science Research and the Study of Interracial Relationships', in N. Zack
(ed.), American Mixed Race: Exploring 'Microdiversity', Rowman and
Little field Press.
-- (1995b) "Shame of White Men': Interracial Sexuality and the
Construction of White Masculinity in Contemporary White Supremacist
Discourse', Masculinities, Summer.
Fuss, D. (1989) Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature and Difference,
New York: Routledge.
Macdonald, A. (1978) The Turner Diaries, Hillsboro, Virginia: National
Vanguard Books.
Morrison, T. (1992) Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary
Imagination, New York: Vintage Books.
Omi, M. (1991) 'Shifting the Blame: Racial Ideology and Politics in the
Post-Civil Rights Era', Critical Sociology 18 (3): 77- 98
Omi, M. and H. Winant (1986) Racial Formation in the United States: From
the 1960s to the 1980s, New York: Routledge.
Ridgeway, J. (1990) Blood in the Face, New York: Thunder's Mouth Press.
Scott, J. (1988) 'Deconstructing Equality-Versus-Difference: Or, the
Uses of Poststructuralist Theory for Feminism', Feminist Studies, 14
(1,Spring): 33-50.
Young, I.M. (1990) 'The Ideal of Community and the Politics of
Difference', in L. J. Nicholson (ed.), Feminism/Postmodernism, New York:
Routledge.
Zeskind, L. (1986) The 'Christian Identity' Movement, Atlanta: Center
for Democratic Renewal Published by the Division of Church and Society
of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the USA.

Primary Sources

The following periodicals were reviewed for the years listed:

Instauration (1976-83): 'seemingly intellectual', racist and
anti-semitic magazine published by Howard Allen Enterprises, Inc., in
Cape Canaveral, FL. Instauration is edited by Wilmot Robertson but
little is known about this corporation. John Tyndall, leader of Great
Britain's neo-fascist National Front, has called Instauration 'a highly
articulate and stimulating monthly ... enjoying growing popularity among
... the National Front' (Anti-Defamation League, 1988a: 152).
The National Alliance Bulletin (1978-80), and
National Vanguard (1978-84): both periodicals are published by the
National Alliance, in Mill Point, WV, a Neo-Nazi group headed by William
Pierce and founded in 1970. The National Alliance originated from the
Youth for Wallace campaign in 1968, run by Willis A. Carto, but split
from Carto in 1970 and became the National Alliance, run by former
members of George Lincoln Rockwell's American Nazi Party.
The New Order (1979-83): published by Gerhard Lauck, in Lincoln, NE.
Lauck heads the neo-Nazi National Socialist German Workers Party (known
overseas as NSDAP-AO). 'The NSDAP-AO's circulation is so widespread that
it allegedly is recognised by the West German government as the primary
source of propaganda materials to [their] underground' (Klanwatch
Intelligence Report, 1993: 8). The New Order is widely read and
distributed by various white supremacist groups because 'membership and
distribution materials are easy to obtain' (Klanwatch Intelligence
Report, 1993: 9).
N S Bulletin (1974-83), and
White Power (1969-78): both periodicals are published by the National
Socialist White People's Party, which changed its name to the New Order
in 1982. This organisation is headed by Matt Koehl, with headquarters in
Arlington, VA, and later New Berlin, WI. This organisation is the direct
descendant of the original neo-Nazi organisation in the US, the American
Nazi Party.
The NSV Report (1983-93): quarterly newsletter of the National Socialist
Vanguard, started in 1983, and headed by neo-Nazi Rick Cooper and Dan
Stewart, former National Socialist White People's Party member. This
group has closely aligned itself with the Church of Jesus Christ
Christian Aryan Nations, a Christian Identity church, in Coeur d'Alene,
Idaho.
The Thunderbolt (1974-84): published by the National States Rights Party
(NSRP), founded in 1958, and edited by J.B. Stoner and Edward Fields,
'among the most extreme anti-black, anti-semitic hatemongers in the US'
(Anti-Defamation League, 1988a: 29). The ADL describes the NSRP as
'ideologically hybrid ... a bridge between the Ku Klux Klan and the
American Nazi groups. The Thunderbolt had long been the most widely read
publication among the Klans and other hate groups' (Anti-Defamation
League, 1988a: 44).
The Torch (1977-79): published by The White People's Committee to
Restore God's Laws, a division of the Church of Jesus Christ, a
Christian Identity church, and
White Patriot (1979-84): Newsletter of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan,
the second largest Klan group in the US, are both edited by Thomas Robb.
Robb is national KKK 'chaplain' as well as minister of the Church of
Jesus Christ, a Christian Identity church in Arkansas. Robb has close
ties to David Duke's National Association for the Advancement of White
People, as well as with neo-Nazis in the US and West Germany.
The collection contained sporadic issues of the following periodicals
which I chose to include in order to insure that I reviewed as wide a
range of publications as possible:

11. Crusader (no dates): published by the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan,
out of Metairie, LA.
12. The Fiery Cross (1979): published in Swartz, Louisiana, official
organ of The United Klans of America, in Tuscaloosa, AL.
13. The National Socialist (1982-83): published by The World Union of
National Socialists.
14. The Northlander (1978): no information available.
15. NS KAMPFRUF/NS Mobilizer (1974-83): published by the National
Socialist League.
16. The Spotlight (1986): published by the Liberty Lobby.
17. Voice of German Americans (1977-80): no information available.
18. The Western Guardian (1980): Christian Identity periodical published
by Western Guard America.
~~~~~~~~

By ABBY L. FERBER, University of Colorado at Colorado Springs


Abby L. Ferber may be contacted at the Department of Sociology,
University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, 1420 Austin Bluffs Parkway,
Colorado Springs, CO 80933-7150, USA, telephone: work (719)593-3663,
e-mail: aferber at mail.uccs.edu. This research has been supported by
grants from the Center for the Study of Women in Society and the
Humanities Center at the University of Oregon, Eugene, Oregon. I thank
Linda Fuller, Miriam Johnson, Sandra Morgen, Forrest Pyle, Jori Pollack,
David Theo Goldberg and the anonymous reviewers for their insights and
encouragement.