The string of recent attacks by racists and anti-Semites, including the point-blank murder of a Latino man and his nine-year old daughter in Arivaca, Arizona, by members of a Minuteman splinter group from Washington state, has riveted the public eye on the violent wing of the white nationalist movement. Less well noticed, by contrast, has been the "mainstreaming" wing as it seeks to find new adherents. Just this past weekend, for example, the Council of Conservative Citizens met in Jackson, Mississippi for one of its bi-annual conferences. The organization is the lineal descendant of the white Citizens Councils, known in the 1950s and 1960s as the "downtown Klan." And the Council and other white nationalist groups are preparing to use the July 4 weekend Tea Party events coming up as a place to find new recruits.

Let me proffer Blood and Politics: The History of the White Nationalist Movement from the Margins to the Mainstream as the essential background reading necessary to understand the context and meaning of these latest events. One of the lessons of this book is that murders and politicking both have been part of the white-ist movement since it resurfaced after the defeat of old-style segregationists by the black freedom movement in the 1960s.

Blood and Politics is a comprehensive treatment of the white supremacist movement, and how it was transformed into a white nationalist movement after the collapse of the Soviet Bloc. If you are interested in the movement's shooters and bombers, you will find a strong analysis of their organizational methods as well as the particulars of these events. If you are interested in the many different political enterprises involving white nationalists, you will discover those stories also. For instance, this will be the first time that the story has been told of Pat Buchanan's multiple campaigns, and the differing attitudes white nationalists took to his candidacies. If you are interested in the similarities and differences between white nationalism and Christian nationalism, you will come across some of that in this book also. The movement's ideological underpinnings are described and analyzed from the point of view of what actual role these ideas have in the white nationalist cosmology. And a good bit of the movement's dirty laundry is hung out to dry in the process.

While all these parts are important by themselves, it was my intention to describe how the aggregation of personalities, organizations, theologies and ideology is more than the sum of its parts. It is a normative social movement, rooted in history, politics and the warp and woof of American life. National identity, cultural hegemony and other social constructs pop out as the language of this discourse. Terms like "extremism" and "hate groups" have little place in the lexicon of my book. And when white nationalists say they want to live in a whites-only society, I believe them.

I spent considerable energy as a writer so that I could "show" the reader what was going on, rather than simply "tell" them about it. Most of the chapters have at least one "you are there" scene. You will find that for the most part I worked from primary sources: white supremacist publications, audio and video tapes, speeches, lawsuits and depositions, and in many instances the notes and pictures I took first-hand or the raw data that my colleagues gathered. This is an inside look that does not rely on what white supremacists tell people outside their movement. Rather the reader gets to witness what white supremacists tell each other.

A number of the most common prejudices and orthodoxies about this movement fell apart in the process of telling this story. Scapegoating, as it is usually understood, explains less about their behaviors than does direct old-fashioned opposition to "race mixing." No, there were no plans for an "end times" Armageddon-like explosion at the time of the millennial changeover. It is the end of white racial dominance these characters worry about, not any particular birthday of Jesus. While this movement draws heavily from the constitutional understandings common at the time of the Dred Scott decision, they do not seek a return to Jim Crow segregation. Rather they are looking to create in the future a whites-only republic on the North American continent. In the vernacular of the civil rights movement, these white supremacists are not trying to put black people (and other people of color) in their "place," rather in their world there is no place for black people.

Anti-Semitism is part of the core world view for most of this movement. It explains "white dispossession" to them. By concocting a fake ruling class, anti-Semitism turns ordinary conservative racists into revolutionaries. And yes most of this movement shares with the Christian right a belief in the dominance of men over women in a tradition bound nuclear family; but they regard the Christian right's support for Israel as something akin to racial treason. White power skinheads in this treatment are less "street soldiers" for older racists, and more a sub-cultural mini-movement searching for its own political territory. You will watch the anti-immigrant movement grow out of racist and white nationalist concerns, not out of economic hard times for white people.

The book does not discuss the civic, non-governmental, opposition to the white nationalist movement. And I do not predict a future course in the fight to fulfill and protect our promise of a multi-racial democratic society. It is my hope that the discussion in the week ahead will allow us to engage directly on the subject at hand. Since any conversation on of these matters is usually difficult to sustain, let me again thank Talking Points Memo and Versha Sharma for the chance to begin this exchange.