Is There a Link Between White Supremacy and Childhood Trauma?

The most significant threat to America may lie within. When COVID is a nightmarish memory of a ghastly cultural plague, I fear the social virus infecting America from white supremacists will continue to haunt, bewilder, and assault us.

It is easy to miss the mark when thinking about white supremacists and homegrown extremists. Amid a raging culture war, people tend to be divided between sympathizers who condone recent racism and violence and opponents who abhor it. When a significant segment of the population is viewed by some as “deplorable,” it is tempting to advocate that we “exterminate the brutes,” the final words from Kurtz in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.

But white supremacy, like madness, has a story to tell. And understanding where people are coming from that identify as white supremacists—which doesn’t preclude holding them morally accountable for racism and violence—is more constructive and important than denunciation. We can’t address malevolence we don’t comprehend.

The best theories we have about the causes of white supremacists don’t get to the source of the problem. The Chicago Project on Security and Threats (CPOST) has studied the demographics of the “377 Americans, from 250 counties in 44 states, arrested or charged in the Capital attack,” as Charles Pierce notes in the April 6, 2021 issue of Esquire. Based on two additional independent surveys in February and March, including a National Opinion Research Council survey, CPOST concluded that fear of the “Great Replacement,” rather than economic insecurity, was at the root of the rage.

The “Great Replacement” theory—the notion that Whites are being displaced and replaced because of mass immigration and low birth rates resulting in rapidly rising, non-White populations—certainly sheds light on some elements of fury among White people. And yet, despite the fact that it has “achieved iconic status,” as Pierce notes, it also hides a deeper source of resentment.

A unifying thread and rallying cry of white supremacists is the belief in “white genocide." It is hard for those who don't share this conviction to understand how neo-Nazis and Ku Klux Klanners, militias and Aryan survivalists came to assume that white people are threatened with extinction by mass immigration, intermarriage, and "forced assimilation." In the case of David Lane, who popularized this belief, fears of extinction seem based on an unconscious fear from the past, instilled by a white father who terrorized and endangered his child.

Lane, a neo-Nazi and convicted felon, was the poster child for 20th-century white nationalism. He was best known on the right for penning “14 Words,” arguably the most renowned white supremacist slogan: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for White children.” “The single greatest issue of our time,” according to Lane, is “racial survival.” “America is the murderer of the white race,” Lane wrote in “Tri-Colored Treason.”

White people living in fear of "extermination" is an old story in American history. “Some seem to see today anti-Christ in Catholicism, and in Jews, international plotters of the Protocol; and in ‘the rising tide of color,’ a threat to all civilization and human culture,” W.E.B. Dubois wrote in Black Reconstructionism, published in 1935. Speaking of Lothrop Stoddard’s 1920 The Rising Tide of Color: The Threat Against White World-Supremacy, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s character Tom Buchanan in The Great Gatsby (1925) favorably embraced Stoddard’s view: “Well, it’s a fine book, everybody ought to read it. The idea is if we don’t look out the white race will be—will be utterly submerged. It’s all scientific stuff; it’s been proved.”

It was David Lane who took these views and brought them to a wider audience.

David Lane was born on November 2, 1938, in Woten, Iowa. “My only memory of my mother is as a tall, severe woman who never smiled,” he writes in his autobiography. His father “seems to have been a drunk, a scoundrel, and a low-life of the worst kind… particularly when drunk, a truly despicable creature. He sold my mother to his buddies and to strangers for booze money. He beat the entire family, often with a razor strap.”

And then there was this heartbreaking recollection: “In 1942, the family was living in a room over a hardware store in Woten, Iowa. With no wood for the stove, which provided the only heat during cold northern Iowa winters, my brother Roger [two years David’s senior] started a fire in the stove with available materials, including the razor strap. For this my father beat him so badly that he broke Roger’s eardrums and he was deaf for the rest of his life. For this reason he was never adopted from the orphanage where we all ended up.”

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After David’s father left his family in 1942, he mistreated another young wife, and “a brother of the new victim smashed his head in with a hammer, and Gerd went to wherever trash goes after death.” In 1943, David was “adopted out of the orphanage” by a “doctrinaire, fundamentalist, Lutheran minister from the old school. He had a personality which practically no one could bear.” His new mother "was an enigma… To this day I cannot fathom how she could abandon her own talents and ego to traipse about the country with someone I considered an obnoxious buffoon.”

Something murderous and unspeakable was done to David Lane and his family—by his father.

When your father beats you and abandons you, you may be made to feel annihilated, erased, worthless, and unlovable. What makes dreadful events traumatic, notes psychoanalyst Robert Stolorow in Trauma and Human Existence, is not the incident alone, but the absence of an emotional home for one’s feelings. Not only did David Lane go through a devastating experience, he had to face it by himself. And that intensified the psychological damage.

The nightmare his father put David through gave him a life mission—save white children from being extinguished. But in some ways, the extinction David feared in the future—“The Death of The White Race is neither imaginary nor far off in the distant future”—already happened, but in his past: the emotional "murder" he had undergone at home. The British psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott found that a fear of breakdown—or death (I’d add soul murder)—was a breakdown that happened in the person’s past but was not remembered and the unremembered memory was preserved in the fear projected into the future.

"The future for White children" David Lane yearned to "secure"—and that has inspired thousands of white supremacists—was one his father annihilated in him. By blaming blacks, immigrants, Jews, and women for the "extermination" he didn't realize he had experienced at the hands of his father and aligning with a community of embittered men who stoked his anger rather than empathized with his pain, David distanced himself from the real source of his agony, scapegoated innocent people, and took his father off the hook. Racializing emotional extinction—attributing fears of obliteration to nameless people of color David Lane never met—warded off the unspeakable and unbearable nightmare that his father had psychologically obliterated him. In so doing, Lane unwittingly insured that his primal wound would never be addressed, and instead he foisted his trauma on the world.

Not everyone who is traumatized becomes an extremist. Some torched souls respond to their agony by becoming therapists, martial artists, or nurses, rather than perpetuators of violence or abuse. It's likely not possible to claim that all white supremacists were once traumatized. But I think we can reasonably speculate that some kind of ghastly unconscious trauma may live in some, and possibly many, people in the white supremacist movement.

Combatting homegrown extremists is a complex problem demanding multi-pronged strategies. Understanding the emotional sources of their fear and alienation, which the example of David Lane suggests, is emotional trauma close to home, as well as being culturally supplanted and marginalized, is crucial. So is countering propaganda, decreasing the cultural and economic conditions that contribute to radicalization, creating laws relating to domestic terrorism, and granting more legal authority to monitor domestic hate speech. Getting in touch with emotional horror, although devastating, even shattering, affords the only hope of lessening the possibility that such traumas are so frequently revisited on innocent people in the world.