The Atlantic

How White Supremacists Use Victimhood to Recruit

A sociologist explores how racists paint themselves as the innocent ones.
Source: Joshua Roberts / Reuters

As they marched through Charlottesville, Virginia, Saturday, the pack of white supremacists chanted “you will not replace us.” Their rallying cry prompted a viral Twitter thread in which the user Julius Goat asked, “Replaced as ... what?”

“I would so love to see these people get all the oppression they insist they receive, just for a year. Just to see,” he wrote.

It may seem puzzling that the racism of these white men—the most powerful group of people in the world—is motivated by a sense that they’ll be wiped away somehow. But according to research on white supremacists,

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