❝ A new University of Virginia study found that white nationalists are likely to be low-income, divorced, uneducated and unemployed.
❝ One year after the Unite the Right marches in Charlottesville, Virginia that led to the death of 32-year-old Heather Heyer and dozens of serious injuries, scholars at the nearby university analyzed the demographics of potential alt-right members in hopes of discovering what makes certain Americans susceptible to joining white nationalist movements.
❝ Researchers at UVA’s Institute for Family Studies studied responses to 2016 American National Election Survey, and singled out respondents who had a strong sense of white identity, a belief in the importance of white solidarity and a sense of white victimization. The group found that unemployed white Americans without a college degree and with an annual income between $0 and $29,000 were more likely to agree with the principles of the white nationalist movement. These respondents were also much more likely to be divorced than married or never married.
Anyplace I ever worked – where I was just looking for a short-term, less skilled [or no skilled] job, a quick buck for mediocre pay – a significant minority of my fellow-workers fit this description. Not that they migrated towards each other like untrained rodents. These were the leftover jobs after occupations requiring education and somewhat demanding skill-sets were already taken.
I’m not certain of the cause-and-effect relationships; but, I have to wonder if better education was required and available could better pay have been justified? Might their understanding of a better life for all of us have been possible?
“Deradicalizing White People” By Wajahat Ali (New York Review of Books) https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2018/08/16/deradicalizing-white-people/ “On Sunday, a few dozen members of Unite the Right gathered in the nation’s capital for a rally to “protest civil rights abuses in Charlottesville,” the site of their assembly last year, which was marked by deadly violence. Their ranks included neo-Nazis, neo-Confederates, white supremacists, white nationalists, and would-be paramilitaries of the “alt-right,” the innocuous-seeming term these groups have mostly succeeded in getting applied to their old forms of violent hate. What unites this version of the far right is a shared belief that white people are victims, threatened by a growing non-white demographic that threatens to render them powerless.”