A CONSTELLATION APPROACH TO UNDERSTANDING EXTREMIST WHITE SUPREMACY*
Reflecting on long-term intensive ethnographic fieldwork, we sketch a “constellation” framework for understanding U.S. extremist white supremacy. Rather than tracing fluctuating people and organizations to explain the persistence of white supremacist extremism, we suggest that focusing on a core set of practices, ideas, and emotions offers a more complex, nuanced, and useful interpretation. We contrast our constellation framework with more typical “bucket” approaches that tend to compartmentalize a complex reality into categories that do not sufficiently match extremism’s dynamism.
Contributor Notes
† Kathleen M. Blee is Distinguished Professor of Sociology at University of Pittsburgh, Robert Futrell is Professor of Sociology at University of Nevada Las Vegas, and Pete Simi is Professor of Sociology at Chapman University. All authors are equal contributors. Please cc the correspondence to simi@chapman.edu. robert.futrell@unlv.edu, and kblee@pitt.edu.