PELHAM, N.C.: In today’s racially charged environment, there’s a label that even the KKK disavows: white supremacy.
Standing on a muddy dirt road in the dead of night near the North Carolina-Virginia border, masked Ku Klux Klan members claimed Donald Trump’s election as president proves whites are taking back America from blacks, immigrants, Jews and other groups they describe as criminals and freeloaders. America was founded by and for whites, they say and only whites can run a peaceful, productive society.
But still, the KKK members insisted in an interview with the Associated Press, they’re not white supremacists, a label that is gaining traction in the country since Trump won with the public backing of the KKK, neo-Nazis and other white racists.
“We’re not white supremacists. We believe in our race,” said a man just hours before a pro-Trump Klan parade in a nearby town. He wore a robe and hood and wouldn’t give his full name, in accordance with Klan rules.
Claiming the Ku Klux Klan isn’t white supremacist flies in the face of its very nature. The Klan’s official rule book, the Kloran — published in 1915 and still followed by many groups — says the organization “shall ever be true in the faithful maintenance of White Supremacy.” Watchdog groups also consider the Klan a white supremacist organization, and experts say the groups’ denials are probably linked to efforts to make their racism more palatable.
Still, KKK groups today typically renounce the term.
“We are white separatists, just as Yahweh in the Bible told us to be. Separate yourself from other nations. Do not intermix and mongrelize your seed,” said one of the Klansmen.
The KKK formed 150 years ago, months after the end of the Civil War, and began terrorizing freed blacks. Hundreds of people were assaulted or killed. During the civil rights movement, Klan members were convicted of using murder as a weapon against equality.
Leaders from several Klan groups have told AP they have rules against violence aside from self-defense, and opponents agree the KKK has toned itself down after a string of members went to prison years after the fact for deadly attacks.
The Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti-Defamation League, which monitor white extremist organizations and are tracking an increase in reports of racist incidents since the election, often use the “white supremacist” label when describing groups like the KKK; white nationalism and white separatism are parts of the ideology. But what exactly is involved?
The ADL issued a report last year describing white supremacists as “ideologically motivated by a series of racist beliefs, including the notion that whites should be dominant over people of other backgrounds, that whites should live by themselves in a whites-only society, and that white people have their own culture and are genetically superior to other cultures.”
That sounds a lot like ideas espoused by today’s white radicals, yet they reject the label. That’s likely because they learned the lessons of onetime KKK leader David Duke, who unsuccessfully ran for the U.S. Senate this year, said Penn State associate professor Josh Inwood.
“[There was] this peddling of kinder, softer white supremacy. He tried to pioneer a more respectable vision of the Klan,” Inwood said.
Whatever you call them, the muddy-road Klansmen said their beliefs have gained a foothold. The popularity of Trump’s proposal to build a wall on Mexico’s border — an idea long espoused by the KKK — is part of the proof, they said.
“White Americans are finally, most of them, opening their eyes,” said a man in a green Klan robe.