In the 1930s, Nazis distinguished themselves by wearing swastikas, an easily identifiable marker that made their odious politics clear. The only defining look of today’s white nationalists — a movement that seeks to form a whites-only state — is the haircut, so popular that the leader of one nationalist group tweets under the handle “Fashy Haircut,” short for “fascist.”
.. For the past half-decade, the haircut, when worn by hipsters, has been known jokingly as the “Hitler Youth,” at least according to a 2011 New York Times fashion article, because of its resemblance to the style popular during Germany’s Third Reich.
.. Richard Spencer, who wears the haircut along with his three-piece Brooks Brothers suits. It’s Hitler Youth rebranded as Hitler Yuppie — an insidious way to blend in.
.. Phelan thinks it’s useful for white nationalists to sport a costume of sorts, so that they might be recognized by the rest of the population. He knows that being upset about a haircut is really being upset about their insidious infiltration into society.
.. Adolf Hitler had a version of it — with a floppy, greasy forelock — and so did his close associate Heinrich Himmler, and so did any young man in a Hitler Youth recruitment poster. Apparently, soldiers requested it because it eased the wearing and removing of their helmets.
.. “We call them ‘nipsters’ — neo-Nazi hipsters,”
.. Nguyen says he first noticed this trend in Germany about a decade ago, when young white nationalists were dressing as hipsters, but also as metal heads and hip-hop aficionados.
Why are people still racist? What science says about America’s race problem.
The truth is that unless parents actively teach kids not to be racists, they will be,” said Jennifer Richeson, a Yale University social psychologist. “This is not the product of some deep-seated, evil heart that is cultivated. It comes from the environment, the air all around us.”
“When you arrive at a new high school. You are instinctively trying to figure out who’s cool, who’s not, who’s a nerd, who gets beat up? Kids quickly acquire these associations,” she said.
.. even with a TV show on mute displaying scenes with no explicit discrimination, the nonverbal body language of black and white actors interacting was enough to cause watchers to test higher for implicit bias afterward.
.. “An us-them mentality is unfortunately a really basic part of our biology,”
.. “There’s a lot of evidence that people have an ingrained even evolved tendency toward people who are in our so-called ‘in group.’”
.. White supremacist groups promote a “siege mentality” among their followers, Knowles said — rhetoric that aims to lend legitimacy to people’s racial and ethnic fears. He pointed to the slogans shouted by participants in the Charlottesville rally: “You will not replace us” and “White Lives Matter.”
.. one thing that these violent ideologies are communicating to people, and people are receptive to, especially people who are struggling, is that whites are actually the ones who are being discriminated against in society,”
.. But to challenge the deep-seated prejudices that shape our behavior, to unlearn our implicit biases, “we need contact,” he said.
.. “It’s absolutely the opposite of what white nationalists want, which is a segregated society,” he said. “We need an integrated society, and at the same time need to create as much socioeconomic fairness as we can
.. “There’s data that shows young groups like millennials are more progressive and egalitarian. But that’s usually on issues like climate change or gay marriage, usually not in their level of implicit bias,”
.. it’s simply not true that we just need to wait for the few old racist men left in the South to die off and then we’ll be fine.