Racism and fascism do not track ignorance or stupidity

Evidence

This joke conjures up the image of a brainless skinhead for whom the only use for a computer is in its ability to inflict physical harm. It is the quintessential stereotype of what a racist looks like - male, maniacal, the uncivilized “white-faced” minstrel of the antiracist imagination. But such lampoonery masks a deadly serious reality. The success of the white power music scene today is in large part the product of the information age. The key exponents and distributors of white power rock have utilized computer technologies to advertise, network, and market their products in unprecedented ways. In this sense the neo-Nazi moguls of the music scene are certainly the children of a digital era. Such current realities undermine any crude correspondence between ignorance or stupidity and racism or fascism. Technological advances such as the Internet have provided a means for contemporary fascists within Europe and the white diasporas of the New World to garner a digitally enhanced translocal culture in cyberspace and a truly international market. The Internet provides much more than just another publishing tool for propaganda, for it has offered an immediate and direct form of access to people with networked personal computers and a means to participate interactively in racist movements without face-to-face contact. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 2529

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to work on how digital platforms enable decentralized organizing and radicalization without face-to-face contact; parallels current algorithmic radicalization debates. — connects to: Classification and symbolization alone do not cause genocide — Gregory H. Stanton, Ten Stages of Genocide, 11
• SEED: An article angle: the white power music scene as an early adopter of internet marketing shows which groups master new media first, subverting the ‘tech-savvy = progressive’ assumption.