A Look Inside Hateful Right-Wing Fringe Groups - Essence.com
Essence mag infiltrates a Council of Conservative Citizens meeting
At first glance this all-White gathering could be for a trade show or the Rotary Club. They’re average folks: retired lawyers and professors, ministers, housewives, business managers. Any of them could be your neighbor, until you take a closer listen.
“USA Today reported more interracial marriages than ever,” laments one audience member.
“It’s ethnic cleansing!” shouts another.
They’ve all come here for the 2010 convention of the Council of Conservative Citizens (CofCC), a White Nationalist nonprofit opposed to race mixing, non-European immigration and hate crime legislation. The organizers kept the conference location fiercely secret from the media, mainly because months earlier keynote speaker Jared Taylor was forced to cancel a program on the “dangers of diversity” after antiracists pressured four D.C.-area hotels. Today, a who’s who of White Pride luminaries mingles among a crowd of Neo-Confederates, Separatists, Patriots, Constitutionalists and even an elderly woman in a sweatshirt that reads, SECEDE. As a White journalist hired by ESSENCE to tell this story, I’m able to mingle with them. I discovered they have widely varying agendas, but two things clearly unite the majority: unyielding loyalty to their race and a hatred for President Obama.