Why Are Some People Of Color Drawn To White Supremacy?

One Saturday afternoon in early May, 33-year-old Mauricio Garcia opened fire at an outlet mall near Dallas, killing eight people, including children.

Garcia, who was shot and killed by police, had tattoos of Nazi symbols. He kept a diary in which he professed a white-power ideology, and wrote about becoming a “full-blown white supremacist.” He self-identified as Hispanic.

A couple of weeks later, 19-year-old Sai Varshith Kandula crashed a rented U-Haul truck into a White House security barrier. Kandula, who reportedly is Indian American, was carrying a Nazi flag when he was arrested. He allegedly told authorities that he admired Nazis and Adolf Hitler, and was trying to seize control of the U.S. government.

Experts who study extremism say that as counterintuitive as it sounds, it’s not entirely uncommon to see people of color drawn to far-right extremist or white-nationalist ideologies.

There are some prominent examples: there’s the white-nationalist live-streamer Nick Fuentes, whose dinner with former President Trump made headlines last year. Fuentes is partly of Mexican descent. And there’s Enrique Tarrio, former leader of the far-right extremist Proud Boys, who was recently convicted of sedition charges for his role in the Jan. 6, 2021 U.S. Capitol attack. Tarrio is Cuban American and Afro-Latino.

Among the factors: social media and toxic masculinity

Experts say there are a number of reasons why some people of color are drawn to far-right extremist and white supremacist movements. They’re complicated — fueled by factors as diverse as the Internet, toxic masculinity, colonization, and slavery.

Brian Levin, director of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at Cal State San Bernardino, said it typically starts with some common threads that transcend racial and ethnic groups. “Social isolation, a psychological distress perhaps in many instances, but also misogyny and a sense of fraternity,” he said.

These are universal factors that draw people toward extremism, Levin said. Add in the internet and social media as an equalizer of sorts, he said, which lets anyone participate in hate online, regardless of their background.

“Today, it's not like you're joining a terrestrial group that you would 30 years ago,” Levin said. “If you share enough of the common hatreds, starting with misogyny and a sense of fraternity, you don't have to worry about the bouncer at the front door of the virtual meeting hall.”

Other “common hatreds,” as Levin puts it, include anti-Semitism, anti-Blackness, and anti-government sentiments.

Legacies of colonization and slavery

But there are also deeper cultural reasons for why some people of color embrace white supremacy. Experts say these stem from the painful legacies of colonization and slavery, white hegemony and cultural dominance, and discriminatory policies aimed at people of color and non-white immigrants. Over the centuries, all of those phenomena have broadcast and reinforced a message of white superiority.

When people of color embrace ideologies or leaders who denigrate them, there’s a kind of Stockholm Syndrome at play, which leads the oppressed person to identify with their oppressor, said Marwa Azab, a psychology professor at Cal State Long Beach. For example, she pointed to the large numbers of Latinos who voted for Trump, who openly insulted Latinos and Latin American immigrants.

The thinking goes like this, Azab said: “I admire this person out there who is a leader, who is strong. I don't look like them. I don't have the same package. But maybe if I superficially act, sound, dress, do the same. And of course, you always want to copy the most outrageous actions, right? ‘I will abandon my own people … to show you how much I'm really like the poster child for you.’”

The same can apply to those people of color who embrace white supremacist views, she said.

“I think it is an effort to try to reduce this dissonance of, ‘I don’t want to feel this way, I don't want to feel inferior,’” Azab said.

Hierarchy of color and imported racism

The same legacies of conquest, colonization and slavery have fueled racism outside the United States, for example in Latin America, where an entrenched hierarchy of color puts those with light skin at the top and marginalizes people of Indigenous and African descent.

Immigrants arrive with these racial prejudices, said Tanya Katerí Hernández, a law professor at Fordham University who’s written a book on the subject. Once here, they encounter a different kind of racism, she added.

“You’re already coming in with your body of racial attitudes, right? And then you come into a U.S. society that wants to view you as less-than,” Hernández said. “Even if you look white in a conventional sense … your Spanish surname, your Spanish language makes it sort of not the same kind of white … and so your whiteness doesn’t count in the same kind of way. You come into the United States and you get knocked down a peg.”

For some, she said, this can fuel a desire to prove one’s whiteness: “‘I’m now getting some of that heat myself and I don't like it. How can I, you know, bust out of this box that I’m being placed in?’”

It’s important to note that not everyone who embraces these ideologies goes on to join a hate group.

But Hernández added that when Latinos or other people of color do become high-profile extremists, or join extremist groups — for example, Tarrio of the Proud Boys, a group that has denied what law enforcement officials call its “ties to white nationalism” — these movements are eager to show them off.

“Oh, I think there is a real added value,” Hernández said. “Because what that does is it provides a kind of cover — that you are no longer just simply a white supremacist organization, you are a political interest group, right?”

In other words, even extremists engage in tokenism.