Jason was a committed fighter in a White supremacy group in the United States. He lived in an all-White neighbourhood known as ‘KKK county’ and hardly encountered any non-White people.
Before encountering any organised White supremacist groups, Jason embodied the community’s wider racism (but without any memories of formal indoctrination). He claimed that as a child he had the ability to identify people who were Jewish through smell alone.
Jason’s disturbing revelation suggests an anomaly within what is commonly believed to be the route to developing racist views through a more deliberate, reasoned process of adopting belief. Much of the work on racism considers the more explicit pathway where people become racist because particular racist ideas appeal to them. In contrast, Jason’s case suggests a more intuitive pathway, one that presents a real challenge to deradicalisation efforts which are generally based on changing ideas and behaviours.
To better understand the persistence of racist beliefs and how intuitive beliefs can lead to explicit judgements, we looked at over 8,000 articulations of racist belief shared in lengthy interviews with 47 former White supremacists. Based on our analysis, we suggest that the following three elements influence the formation of intuitive pathways: early influences, informal scenes and spatial dynamics, and emotional pathways.
Jason’s narrative suggests that early childhood experiences play an important role in the formulation of belief. Jason did not recall explicitly hearing racist ideology. Yet based on who he encountered, he had a sense of who ‘belonged’. This intuitive social boundary, shaped by the defined physical parameters of his neighbourhood, informed his sense of racism. Before he could even articulate it, this intuitive form of racism manifested itself in what he described as his sense of smell. There’s no doubt that Jason’s sense of smell was also aligned with the larger context of racist folklore that he must have encountered growing up.
Jonas provides another example. In this case he was exposed to racist jokes during his childhood. Jonas claimed that before he even knew what some of the jokes meant, he started mimicking his brother to get quick laughs or to elicit his approval. This is not unlike how kids mimic adults in various kinds of role play before they learn things intuitively. This early exposure formed a pathway to Jonas’s entry into a neo-Nazi group and had a profound influence on his racist beliefs. He claimed he found the ideology boring; what he gravitated toward was what he describes as ‘instinctual hatred’.
Several people described how music scenes formed their initial exposure to a life of racist belief. While there are explicit racist elements in such scenes, such as frequent usage of racist lyrics, these elements exist within a wider social environment: dancing, mosh pits, loud music and violence-tinged energy. The chaos and volume of these scenes rarely allow individuals to share particular ideas, but instead enable people to emote and share their burgeoning animosity. Here the loud, angry music and the emotions articulated around it serve as a form of social tuning or built affinity among a disparate group of people. Jodie entered this environment because she had trouble at home; the music scene provided an outlet, and there she picked up other racist ideas. As with Jason, her racism didn’t initially manifest in formal beliefs. Gradually it took the form of an intuitive dislike that manifested as perceived aural differences between White and Black people: “I didn’t like…how loud they were, you know, and the way they talked and it was like ghetto slang”, she said. Like Jason, Jodie’s pathway to racism involved an intuitive process of hatred that was perceptible through particular embodied sensations but never explicitly processed.
Not all pathways involved intuitive reasoning. Take Brian for example. He dedicated a lot of time to forming deeply antisemitic views. He says he knew that he had a lot of animus towards Jewish people for no reason, yet it took a while for him to dive into history to find a rationale: “The Jews, it took a little bit longer, just because I didn’t really know much about them”. Brian’s life history points to how deliberate reasoning plays an important role in post-hoc rationalisation or the justification of racism.
Deliberate and emotional pathways often intersect. We may invest in learning about an issue and have strong feelings that cement or detract from those beliefs. Jessica also located her racism in conspiracy theories that were shared by her wider milieu. Unlike some of the purely intuitive pathways that we read about earlier, conspiracy theories are deliberately constructed to play on fears as well as the desire to fit in within a particular social group.
We don’t know how common intuitive pathways are, but they are important to consider when thinking through why racist beliefs persist and when considering the efficacy of deradicalisation programmes. Beliefs such as those introduced through childhood or frequenting a scene where racist rhetoric is common forge intuitive cognitive processes. But, as we’ve shown, these intuitive pathways are linked to recurring, explicit racism. Intuitive beliefs, like embodied processes such as a sense of smell, are encoded in a way that allows for rapid future judgement. These then become difficult to dislodge because they are so closely tied to automatic moral judgements. Acknowledging and better understanding these pathways is critical for deradicalisation programmes since addressing the explicit racism is just part of the process. Intuitive pathways point to the potential for anti-racist beliefs to coexist with previously held racist beliefs that are intuitively coded, a sentiment that is described by a significant number of people that we have interviewed. These contradictory ideas can stall or reverse deradicalisation, underscoring the need to better understand intuitive pathways, allow for longer deradicalisation interventions, as well as programming that contributes to the development of new pathways.
Mehr Latif is an Assistant Professor in the McCormack School of Policy and Global Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. She performs research on White supremacist groups and group culture within the United States.
Pete Simi is a Professor in the Department of Sociology at Chapman University. He has published widely on the issues of political violence, social movements, street gangs and juvenile delinquency.
Kathleen Blee is Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the University of Pittsburgh. She has published widely on US White supremacism.
Matthew DeMichele is a Senior Director at RTI where he is the Director of the Center for Criminal Legal Systems Research and his research includes areas related to corrections, risk assessment, programme evaluation, and terrorism/extremism.
Intuitive pathways into racist beliefs by Mehr Latif, Pete Simi, Kathleen Blee, and Matthew DeMichele. Available on Bristol University Press Digital.
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