Last fall I missed a talk by the Southern Poverty Law Center’s outreach director Lecia Brooks in Sahuarita. But recently at a Theology Uncorked meeting on migrants at the border, I found a SPLC brochure on Active Hate Groups in the U.S. Here’s the link, stating that there were 1020 such groups in the U.S. in 2018, with an interactive map of each state:
Click on the Arizona map and it shows 20 hate groups, several statewide, two in Tucson — Act for America and Nation of Islam.
Check out the map if you’re curious about the other 49 states. There were no hate groups listed for the neighboring state of New Mexico. California seems to have the most at 83.
The SPLC’s mission is three fold: Seeking Justice, Teaching Tolerance, Fighting Hate.
The SPLC is “the nation’s leading source for reliable analysis of the radical right. Hate and antigovernment extremist groups continue to operate at alarming levels in the U.S. – fomenting racist violence, seeking to poison our democracy, and, in some cases, plotting domestic terrorist attacks.” (from the brochure)
Info: https://www.splcenter.org/
Discover more from Blog for Arizona
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Yes, the heads of the SPLC have recently been fired or quit, and many articles have been written about them and especially their “hate map” (e.g. NYT, Harpers, the New Yorker). One of the better summaries (IMO) is this one. A few quotes:
” But the organization has long been dysfunctional in even deeper ways, and the story of Dees and the SPLC is useful for illustrating some of the worst and most hypocritical tendencies in American liberalism. If we understand the full extent of what went wrong in this organization, we’ll better understand the ways in which a shallow “politics of spectacle” can take hold, and see the kinds of practices that need to be categorically rejected in the pursuit of progressive change.”
“The biggest problem with the hate map, though, is that it’s an outright fraud. I don’t use that term casually. I mean, the whole thing is a willful deception designed to scare older liberals into writing checks to the SPLC.”
“In fact, when you actually look at the hate map, you find something interesting: Many of these “groups” barely seem to exist at all. A “Holocaust denial” group in Kerrville, Texas called “carolynyeager.net” appears to just be a woman called Carolyn Yeager. A “male supremacy” group called Return of Kings is apparently just a blog published by pick-up artist Roosh V and a couple of his friends, and the most recent post is an announcement from six months ago that the project was on indefinite hiatus.”
Shouldn’t the SPLC include themselves on the map because of the charges made by their own employees about their racist and sexist internal behaviors?
So you are not disputing any of the actual information, all you’re saying is “I’m not a racist you’re a racist”.
Sad, John.