Impression Management for the Thinking Racist: A Case Study of Intellectualization as Stigma Transformation in Contemporary White Supremacist Discourse

Contemporary white supremacists have been working to publicly legitimate their movement. This article presents a case study of the magazine Instauration and its editor, Wilmot Robertson. The study indicates how “new racist” white supremacists present a discourse of “stigma transformation.” First, I introduce Instauration and Robertson's books and review his longstanding efforts to present an intellectualized rhetoric of racism and white supremacy. I then analyze other impression-management techniques suggested in these writings. Both Robertson and contributors to Instauration proffer techniques to neutralize and/or transform the stigma of “racism.” I discuss some of the broader implications of racism that is framed as intellectual argumentation.