Perspective: ExtremismRacists Are Recruiting. Watch Your White Sons.

Published 14 October 2019

Raising teenagers can be terrifying. Squishy little babies become awkward hormonal creatures who question their parents’ authority at every turn. Joanna Schroeder writes that she expected that. “What I didn’t predict was that my sons’ adolescence would include being drawn to the kind of online content that right-wing extremists use to recruit so many young men,” she writes. “Unfortunately, extremists know how to find new recruits in the very place our sons spend so much of their time: online. And too often, they’re more aware than we are of how vulnerable young white men are to radicalization.”

Raising teenagers can be terrifying. Squishy little babies become awkward hormonal creatures who question their parents’ authority at every turn.

Joanna Schroeder writes in the New York Times that she expected that. “What I didn’t predict was that my sons’ adolescence would include being drawn to the kind of online content that right-wing extremists use to recruit so many young men,” she writes.

The first sign was a seemingly innocuous word, used lightheartedly: “triggered.”

As my 11- and 14-year-old sons and their friends talked and bantered — phones in hand, as always — in the back seat of the car, one of them shouted it in response to a meme,and they all laughed uproariously.

I almost lost control of the car. That’s because I know that word — often used to mock people who are hurt or offended by racism as overly sensitive — is a calling card of the alt-right, which the Anti-Defamation League defines as “a segment of the white supremacist movement consisting of a loose network of racists and anti-Semites who reject mainstream conservatism in favor of politics that embrace implicit or explicit racism, anti-Semitism and white supremacy.” People associated with this group are known for trolling those who disagree with them, and calling critics “triggered” is a favorite tactic.

Schroeder writes:

Unfortunately, extremists know how to find new recruits in the very place our sons spend so much of their time: online. And too often, they’re more aware than we are of how vulnerable young white men are to radicalization.

According to Jackson Katz, author of The Macho Paradox: Why Some Men Hurt Women and How All Men Can Help, it’s not necessarily the ideology behind white nationalism, anti-feminism or the alt-right that initially appeals to young white men and boys as much as it is the sense of being part of a “heroic struggle.”

Participating in the alt-right community online “offers the seductive feeling of being part of a brotherhood, which in turn validates their manhood,” Dr. Katz says. YouTubers and participants in chat forums like 4chan, the defunct 8chan and Discord “regularly denigrate liberal or progressive white men as soft, emasculated ‘soy boys’ and insufficiently aggressive or right-wing white men as ‘cucks.’”

So what can parents do? Schroeder writes:

Perhaps the best tool is prevention. Kids need to understand — before they encounter their first alt-right memes — what white supremacy looks like. It’s not just a person in a K.K.K. hood but also the smooth-talking YouTuber in the suit or the seemingly friendly voice in the video game forum.

If we avoid talking about our values about race and the experiences of marginalized people, strangers on the internet will be happy to share theirs.