The morning news carries a story, the essence of which, is a sadly recurring piece of American life. A summer day camp in Philadelphia paid almost $2,000 so that its black and Latino children could go swimming one day a week at a privately-owned (white) pool club in the suburbs. After one visit, the children were met with a hostile reception by the pool's white patrons, the day camp's money was quickly refunded and the children told not to come back.

Incredibly, the pool club president told the Associated Press that the members of the club were not motivated by race when denying the children entrance after their camp had paid the requisite fee, but that "a lot of kids would change the complexion--and the atmosphere of the club."

Huntington Valley is an upper-middle class overwhelmingly white community with a total population of 20,917. Of those numbers, 158 are black, another 242 are Hispanic and 804 are Asian-American. There are many such residential enclaves in the United States of America. And they form the hard pit of reality inside the white nationalist phantasmagoria. At the end of my book, Blood and Politics: The History of the White Nationalist Movement from the Margins to the Mainstream, you will read the words of one of the recurring characters: white people will "pay $300,000 for a $75,000 home, just so they can live with other white people."

You do not have to worry about David Duke becoming president to understand that the "mainstream" character of the white nationalist movement today is rooted in actually existing social relations. There is a difference, however, between the white nationalists who populate my book and the president of the swim club. The latter denies that he is motivated by racism, while the former asserts that racism is a natural and positive value. The latter lives in a world with Latino gardeners and roofers and black garbage collectors and subway drivers. The former wants to live in a society where everyone meets his definition of whiteness.

The white nationalists would tell pool club members that they have a racial claim on that concrete tub of water. That they "earned" the right to that pool. The white-ist would further argue that the presence of black children at that pool is an act which dispossesses white people---turns them into victims. And so emerges from the heart of white nationalism the notion of the white "victim," just one of the many ways that this movement is rearticulating the ideas and practices of racism in the 21st century.