By Brian Resnick@[email protected] Updated Aug 10, 2018, 11:42am EDT

The white supremacists marching at the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, last year were not ashamed when they shouted, “Jews will not replace us.” They were not ashamed to wear Nazi symbols, to carry torches, to harass and beat counterprotesters. They wanted their beliefs on display.

It’s easy to treat people like them as straw men: one-dimensional, backward beings fueled by hatred and ignorance. But if we want to prevent the spread of extremist, supremacist views, we need to understand how these views form and why they stick in the minds of some people.

It’s important because they’re not going away. This weekend in Washington, DC, a second Unite the Right rally will convene. No one is really sure how many white nationalists will attend, or if the counterprotesters will greatly outnumber them. But they plan to meet in front of the White House to once again put their beliefs on proud display.

Last year, psychologists Patrick Forscher and Nour Kteily recruited members of the alt-right (a.k.a. the “alternative right,” the catchall political identity of white nationalists) to participate in a study to build the first psychological profile of their movement. The results, which were released in August 2017, are just in working paper form and have yet to be peer-reviewed or published in an academic journal.

That said, the study uses well-established psychological measures and is clear about its limitations. All the researchers’ raw data and materials have been posted online for others to review. Meanwhile, Forscher and Kteily are working on an extended, more rigorous version of the survey, which will pull from a nationally representative sample of Trump voters. (Read more about their plans here.)

So while last year’s survey is a preliminary assessment, it validates some common perceptions of the alt-right with data. It helps us understand this group not just as straw men but as people with knowable motivations.

https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2017/8/15/16144070/psychology-alt-right-unite-the-right

By John Blake, CNN
Updated 8:05 AM ET, Fri August 10, 2018

(CNN) It's getting hard to keep up with the latest hashtags devoted to 911 calls on black people.

There's #SittingInStarbucksWhileBlack, #BarbecuingWhileBlack, #GolfingWhileBlack, #EatingSubwayWhileBlack, and even #WearingSocksWhileBlack. Those are just some of the infractions committed by black people that caused white callers to dial 911.

As stories of these encounters ricochet across the media, it looks at times as if some mysterious new contagion -- a quickly mutating form of racial profiling -- is taking hold of the collective psyche of White America.

But this behavior isn't a symptom of anything new. It's a modern twist on something old, say some historians and those who've lived through it. This aggressive patrolling of public space bears an eerie resemblance to another race-induced contagion in America decades ago.
When the courts outlawed overt segregation in the 1950s and '60s, many whites reacted by trying to "privatize" public spaces. They wanted to carve out melanin-free zones in parks, pools and sidewalks to avoid what some folks called "interracial intimacy."

That battle led to "white flight," a mass migration to the suburbs of whites who no longer wanted to share their public schools and sidewalks with people of color. What's happening now is White Flight 2.0. Whites are standing their ground. Consciously or unconsciously, they are reasserting their belief that public spaces belong to them alone, says Kevin M. Kruse, a history professor at Princeton University.

"What we see now is the same underlying dynamic -- the feeling that these public spaces cannot be shared," says Kruse, author of "White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism." "But rather than white flight, it's fight.

"In the generation before, whites angry that these spaces are being shared or taken over by African-Americans packed up and left. Now they're digging in and fighting."

https://www.cnn.com/2018/08/10/us/white-flight-911-calls/index.html