Combating White Nationalism: The Southern Poverty Law Center

With the number of hate groups increasing rapidly every day, it is necessary for another group to counter the movements of these hate organizations and shed light on the values of equality and social justice within our society. One such group, the Southern Poverty Law Center, "is a nonprofit civil rights organization dedicated to fighting hate and bigotry, and to seeking justice for the most vulnerable members of society" (source).

The SPLC monitors hate groups, like the Aryan Nation, and reports their movements to the federal and local government. The SPLC works to promote tolerance and respect in our schools, unlike the Aryan Nations whose goal is to promote an all-white society and rid their homeland of any less worthy group. The SPLC has "crippled some of the country’s most notorious hate groups by suing them for murders and other violent acts committed by their members" (source). 

"Since 2000, the number of hate groups has increased by 54 percent. This surge has been fueled by fears of Latino immigration and, more recently, by the election of the country’s first African-American president and the economic crisis" (source). Those who "fear" this Latino immigration and the election of President Obama, groups like the Aryan Nation, are taking extreme measures to fight the social injustice (as they see it) happening in our country by these actions. "This growth in extremism has been aided by mainstream media figures and politicians who have used their platforms to legitimize false propaganda about immigrants and other minorities and spread the kind of paranoid conspiracy theories on which militia groups thrive" (source).

In opposition to this, the SPLC works to stop exploitation of immigrants in the workplace by filing court cases and encouraging the federal government to act upon the injustice. Similarly, they falsify the mainstream media figures extreme ideologies against immigration by teaching tolerance to people around America through magazines, multimedia outlets, films and a number of other resources. Again, the boundaries of extreme and mainstream become blurred due to mainstream media taking on extreme ideologies, ideologies in correlation to racist hate groups, like the Aryan Nation. This video is a good example of what the SPLC is working to combat, racial intolerance:

Clearly the SPLC has had an affect on many hate groups. Images from their Teaching Tolerance report have been revamped to fit into white supremacist ideologies. Or images like the one below have been created by hate groups as a way to make fun of the ideas the SPLC promotes.

As stated before, the Southern Poverty Law Center is working to spread the word of racial tolerance and put an end to the increasing numbers of hate groups growing with the United States. The idea that the SPLC "track[s] the activities of hate groups and domestic terrorists across America, and launch[es] innovative lawsuits that seek to destroy networks of radical extremists, provide[s] educators with free resources that teach school children to reject hate, embrace diversity and respect differences and use the courts and other forms of advocacy to win systemic reforms on behalf of victims of bigotry and discrimination" (source) is a refreshing counteraction to all of the ways white nationalism affects society in America today.