Yesterday’s New York Times included a story, “At Gateway to Hamptons, Ku Klux Klan Advertises for New Members,” by Al Baker. Here’s a link to Baker’s story, which rightly focuses on the undeniably anti-immigrant impetus behind contemporary flyers and pamphlets produced by the Klan:
I want to draw attention to one of the images that accompanied Baker’s story: Times photographer Nicole Bengiveno’s photo poignantly captures a pair of brown-skinned hands holding the Klan recruitment letter and hate-mongering caricatures. What’s striking is the Klan’s reliance on undying, racist iconography, which communicates the group’s belief that it’s still legible and viable in the twenty-first century:
That visual strategies–exaggerations and distortions of ethno-cultural physiognomies and the marshaling of symbols attached to class and national types–still work in nativist discourse makes clear that racialization is always dependent on representation.
ACRAH 