Guess Who's Coming to Town: White Supremacy, Ethnic Competition, and Social Change

Abstract This paper is an attempt to understand more thoroughly the dynamics of white racist movements by exploring the socioeconomic factors associated with communities targeted by the Ku Klux Klan for their public activities. Ethnic competition theory is utilized to provide clues for understanding which social environments are conducive to formation of racist and white nationalist movements. Locational data on almost 900 incidents of white supremacy activity in the American South that occurred between 1980 and 1990 are used to explore the empirical relationship between competition, social change, and white supremacy. Using data on all counties in the South, it was found that in static models, there was no support for linking ethnic competition to Klan activity, but in dynamic models there was evidence that coupled white supremacy activity to communities where Asians and Hispanics were increasing their relative share of resources.