Impression Management for the Thinking Racist: A Case Study of Intellectualization as Stigma Transformation in Contemporary White Supremacist Discourse

Abstract

Contemporary white supremacists have been working to publicly legitimate their movement. This article presents a case study of the magazine Instauration and its editor, Wilmot Robertson. The study indicates how “new racist” white supremacists present a discourse of “stigma transformation.” First, I introduce Instauration and Robertson's books and review his longstanding efforts to present an intellectualized rhetoric of racism and white supremacy. I then analyze other impression-management techniques suggested in these writings. Both Robertson and contributors to Instauration proffer techniques to neutralize and/or transform the stigma of “racism.” I discuss some of the broader implications of racism that is framed as intellectual argumentation.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 43 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.