Hana Sun
Staff Writer
The Smith College Sophian
October 5, 2006

Smith Anthropology Department hosts lecture by Dr. C. Richard King

“We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children” read the National Alliance poster on the opening slide of C. Richard King’s presentation last Thursday, Sept. 28th in the Neilson Library. The audience packed into the Neilson Browsing Room at 7 p.m. to hear Dr. King speak for the Annual Department of Anthropology Lecture, titled ‘Fear of a Brown Nation: Invasion, Reconquest, Aztlan and Other White Supremacist Anxieties.’

Dr. King, an anthropologist at Washington State University, addressed the veiled and resurgent racism controlling white radical groups who condemn the growing rate of ethnic diversity in the United States.

“Why are images important?” Dr. King asked as he showed a National Alliance flyer, which claimed that immigration is turning America into a “third world slum” and causing the extermination of the white race since Caucasian women are being “forced” into procreation with nonwhites. National Alliance is a U.S. based organization that requires its members to be of purely White, non-Jewish ancestry.

In his talk, King argued that white supremacy is mainly about managing power. He discussed the white supremacist fears of the “browning of America,” which are supported by thebelief that the United States is changing for the worse because of its increase in multi-racial and non-white populations.

According to white supremacist groups, overpopulation, erasure of identity and history, demise of American tradition and an increase of disease and crime are among the results of this “changing face of America.” Ethnic cleansing and patrolling of the Mexican border are two common proposed solutions in stopping this spread of diversity.

During the first part of his talk, King focused many examples of white supremacist anxieties on the ideologies of Americans for Immigration Control (AIC), an organization that states their goal is to stop “the millions of illegal aliens who sneak across our border from Mexico every year.”

Through AIC propaganda posters and documents, King challenged the validity of the organization’s insistence that the motives behind their campaign are not racist. “Why aren’t they concerned about people coming through the Canadian border?” King asked in response to an AIC headline stating the need to bring U.S. troops home from Iraq to put them on the Mexican border.

“New racism has a tendency to express racism in coded, sanitized language, often appropriated from mainstream media,” said King while discussing public figures such as Sean Hannity, Pat Buchanan and Peter Brimelow, and organizations such as Daughters of the American Revolution.

Dr. King also presented political posters, many of which caricatured specific minority groups as inhuman, animalistic and serial monogamists. While these were mainly focused on race, some also emphasized anti-Semitic and homophobic attitudes in the white supremacist movement.

C. Richard King is an associate professor in the Department of Comparative Ethnic Studies at Washington State University. He is a graduate of University of Illinois with a Ph.D. in Anthropology. King’s interests concentrate on racial politics in a variety of time periods and he has been published in an assortment of journals such as Journal of Sport and Social Issues and Public Historian. His most recent works include Native American Athletes in Sport and Society and The Encyclopedia of Native Americans and Sport. King was born in Kansas and has lived in many different parts of the U.S.