Kathleen Belew
Kathleen Belew is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Chicago and a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford University. She specializes in the recent history of the United States, examining the long aftermath of warfare. Her first book, Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America (Harvard University Press, Spring 2018), explores how white power activists wrought a cohesive social movement through a common story about warfare and its weapons, uniforms, and technologies. By uniting previously disparate Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazi, skinhead, and other groups, the movement carried out escalating acts of violence that reached a crescendo in the 1995 bombing of Oklahoma City.
Books by Kathleen Belew
Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America
by Kathleen Belew
Bring the War Home is a history of a very small subsection of white supremacy called “the white power movement.” Some people might recognize it as “white nationalism.” That phrase gets us into some confusion because when people think about nationalism, they think about patriotism and actions in support of the state. This movement is not interested in supporting the government.
It’s a group of people who declared war on the federal government in 1983 and attempted to overthrow the government in order to establish a transnational “Aryan nation.” The white power movement includes people like Klansmen, skinheads, neo-Nazis, militia men, radical tax resisters, and a bunch of other people who came together after the Vietnam War, using a widely held belief in government betrayal to gain recruits. The movement is fueled by the idea that racial annihilation is imminent and that therefore everyone should take up arms. I follow that story to the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, which despite the fact that it was the largest deliberate mass casualty event on American soil between Pearl Harbor and 9/11 remains a deeply misunderstood event. People still don’t recognize the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing as part of the domestic terror movement. It isn’t included in our common knowledge or our history books.
Interviews with Kathleen Belew
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1
What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America
by Peggy Pascoe -
2
Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race
by Matthew Frye Jacobson -
3
Eugenic Nation: Faults and Frontiers of Better Breeding in Modern America
by Alexandra Minna Stern -
4
From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America
by Elizabeth Hinton -
5
The Injustice Never Leaves You: Anti-Mexican Violence in Texas
by Monica Muñoz Martinez
The best books on White Supremacy, recommended by Kathleen Belew
The best books on White Supremacy, recommended by Kathleen Belew
Defined by University of Chicago historian Kathleen Belew, white supremacy is a “broad system of laws, norms and customs that create a society with unequal opportunities for people based on race”. It persists to this day, and has surprising intersections with issues of labor and women’s reproduction. Here, she recommends books for coming to grips with the history of this complex topic.
