I'll never forget the moment, ten years ago this weekend, when I first heard the news. I was winding down after a long week of work, my thoughts drifting to Independence Day holiday festivities, when my cell phone rang with word that a young white man driving a blue Ford Taurus shot up a crowd of Orthodox Jews as they were leaving Sabbath services. Six people lay seriously injured on the sidewalk outside Congregation Adas Yeshurun, not far from my Chicago apartment.

After years of researching white nationalist groups, my instincts told me that this wasn't some random shooting. Minutes later, I received a call alerting me to another shooting just north in Evanston. Those blasts left Ricky Byrdsong, an African-American family man and basketball coach, lying dead in front of his children.

As I raced back across town through rush hour traffic in the sweltering summer heat, I got another call that more shots were fired in another suburb. Thankfully, this time the perpetrator missed the young Asian-American couple. The identity of the shooter was still a mystery, and he was still at large.

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In recent weeks, Americans struggled to make sense of tragic shootings that seemed disconnected at first glance. Anti-Semite James Von Brunn killed Stephen T. Johns, a black security guard at the Holocaust Museum. George Tiller's murder a few days earlier seemed to be about abortion, yet his shooter, Scott Roeder, also had roots in the racial purity movement. Two weeks ago, it was reported that the murders of Raul Flores and his daughter in Arizona were charged to three people with white supremacist ambitions.

There's been lots of discussion about why hate crimes are rising and how to prevent future tragedies, yet we've largely missed the relationship between extremist racism and the less obvious version that plays out in our political debates. These shooters all felt that people of color (along with women and Jews) have stolen the birthright of white men. In his book "Kill the Best Gentiles," Von Brunn rails against "the calculated destruction of the White Race." Roeder was a member of the Montana Freemen; commenters on white supremacist websites praised him for ensuring that Tiller would never "kill another White baby." Flores' alleged murderers appear to have been preparing for a white uprising.

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Adding my thanks to Leonard for producing this timely and thorough book. I think mostly about how explicit, violent white supremacy relates to the more subtle ways in which racism works, as seemingly race-neutral policies like deregulation of the mortgage industry or immigration raids produce never-ending racial disparities. Those disparities segregate Americans and create the conditions for a racial divide into which white supremacists easily step.

In a piece called The White Supremacist in Us, which I wrote after the shootings of Dr. George Tiller and Stephen T. Johns, I note that our solutions to racist violence tend to focus on the individual - either punishment or education depending on how far gone the person is. But the policies that aren't obviously about hate crimes have the greatest potential to stop the perpetuation of racist ideas. Racial hierarchies show up in our policy debates every time we ask the question who deserves education/healthcare/legal status/prison. These are the policies that the Obama Administration will work to change, drawing even more ire from the white supremacist crowd.

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First of all, I want to thank Leonard Zeskind not just for Blood and Politics, but for all the work he's done over the years tracking the White Nationalist movement. While writing my first book, Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism, I learned how psychologically grueling - not to mention tedious - it can be to spend lots of time in milieus whose values are radically opposed to one's own. Leonard, you've persisted in this crucial work much longer than I ever could have, and I'd be curious to know how you manage it.

Though of course, that's not the most pertinent question here. For me, the one looming issue raised by your book is what Obama means for this movement. I suspect the election of any Democratic president would have resulted in an increase in right-wing terrorism; as I've written many times before, it was no accident that right-wing domestic violence peaked amid all the febrile conspiracy-theorizing of the Clinton years and then fell off under Bush. But obviously Obama takes it to a whole new level - he's pretty much the embodiment of the white nationalist movement's nightmares. There are plenty of disturbing signs out there suggesting growing activity among violent, far-right groups. What are you seeing? And what do you predict?

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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.

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