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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   3163 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for April 20, 2025

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The second wave of the klan(the one everyone actually remembers) actually did a lot of things, but there’s lots of actions short of lynching to engage in- from intimidation campaigns to beatings and vandalism.

The Invisible Empire did a lot more bake sales than beatings, and a lot more local parades than lynchings, and a lit a lot more grills than they did crosses. They were much closer on any given day to the Elks than to Al Qaeda, their existence and traditions and activities basically resemble that of any other fraternity, with the occasional addition of violence.

Their existence nevertheless suggested the existence of a vast body of white men willing to engage in racialized violence, but they didn't actually engage in it all that often.

A lot of their violence wasn't racialized. The klan believed it was a guardian of historic American protestant morality(in the process of shifting due to the first sexual revolution) and did a lot of busybodying.

Racialized was also relative: my only personal contact with a KKK victim was a family friend whose house was vandalized after coming to the USA as refugees when his father died fighting the soviets on the eastern front.

I would say the second Klan was more anti-Catholic than anti-Black. By the time the second Klan was founded in 1915 the racial issue had basically been won by the racists, Jim Crow was firmly in place, and there was no need for an extralegal anti-Black organisation similar to the first Klan. The strongest second Klan state organisation was in Indiana, where there were no Blacks to oppress.

Racialized was also relative: my only personal contact with a KKK victim was a family friend whose house was vandalized after coming to the USA as refugees when his father died fighting the soviets on the eastern front.

We're already seeing a much more nuanced Klan than we get in the average portrayal.

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