White power recruitment now targets affluent suburban teens, not working-class thugs

Evidence

Burdi’s story is interesting precisely because he is an example of a middle-class and highly media-literate youth being drawn into the white power scene. He grew up in an upper-middle-class family in a suburb of Toronto, the son of an insurance broker who was not known for espousing racist views. A bright child, he received his first computer at the age of 10. Mark Potok, of Klanwatch, comments: “The music scene is important because - along with the Internet - it has helped The Movement reach people it has never reached before, specifically, middle-class and upper-middle-class teenagers. Kids who live in their parents’ two and three and four hundred thousand dollar homes.” Currently, in America, racist recruitment is more focused on the suburbs than the working-class trailer parks. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 2551

Categorization

• SEED: Essay angle: the class shift in radicalization channels — how music and internet media recruited the privileged, overturning the stereotype of racist movements as impoverished fringe.
• XREF: Connects to Brooking’s Radicalization/Charlie Hebdo analysis and to media-effects scholarship on how cultural products (not ideology) are recruitment vectors.