White Men in the Woods
Fast-food, ethno-nationalists, and Trump supporters in a Tennessee county
Dickson County, Tennessee
Chuck Watkins can recognize pretty much everyone in Dickson from his back booth at Burger King. But he can’t put names to the people who just came in for breakfast this Sunday morning. All he knows is, they’re trouble.
The two women are wearing camouflage pants and black boots. The man’s jacket reads “Aryan Nations Black and Silver,” displaying his membership in the Ku Klux Klan's Sadistic Souls motorcycle club.
He carries two guns.
“A handgun and a sawed-off,” Chuck says low to his friend, Bob England – a Korean War POW who punctuates his opinions by pointing a cane with his name wood-burned onto it. A few minutes ago they were arguing about why Bob likes peach soda.
“They aren’t from here,” Chuck says. “I don’t know them. You know them?”
Nobody knows them.
The men - all white - just learned there are about 300 white nationalists visiting their town - just 12 km up the road in Montgomery Bell State Park.
And now this Aryan Nations guy is in their Burger King.
They’re visibly disgusted.
Inside the American Renaissance conference in central Tennessee, media had to sign a waiver to not show the faces of attendees. May 21, 2016. (Victoria Macchi/VOA)
White Separatists in a Changing U.S.
Montgomery Bell State Park
The American Renaissance supporters sitting in the windowless conference room call themselves "race realists."
The Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti-Defamation League label them a hate group.
To hear founder Jared Taylor explain his world vision is so very matter-of-fact. He believes "his" people (white, non-Hispanic, of European origin) should be allowed to have separate areas in the U.S. with their own "institutions, communities, even territorial areas… for them and their children."
![Jared Taylor on May 21, 2016. Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center calls the American Renaissance founder the "cosmopolitan face of white supremacy." (Victoria Macchi\/VOA)](./media/eimg_6649-lr_olxxybu.jpg "Jared Taylor on May 21, 2016. Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center calls the American Renaissance founder the "cosmopolitan face of white supremacy." (Victoria Macchi\/VOA)")
Jared Taylor on May 21, 2016. Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center calls the American Renaissance founder the "cosmopolitan face of white supremacy." (Victoria Macchi/VOA)
Most years since 1994, Taylor’s group - the New Century Foundation - and its supporters, have met for the AmRen conference to talk about their fears. Attendees say they are concerned about Muslims, Latinos - pretty much every non-Anglo, non-Christian race, ethnicity or religion - taking over the country demographically. And while population projections do show ethnic and racial minorities will eclipse the number of people who identify as white, non-Hispanics in several decades, most people do not see the threat that Taylor and his cohort do.
"I want my people and culture to survive," Taylor tells VOA on the sidelines of the May conference at Montgomery Bell State Park in central Tennessee. "That’s a natural, normal healthy thing."
Downtown Dickson, Tenn., May 20, 2016. (Victoria Macchi/VOA)
Racism on the Rise
A growing share of Americans believe racism is a big problem in the U.S., a Pew Research Center report released in January shows.
Marilyn Mayo, a researcher with the Anti-Defamation League Center on Extremism, says some ethno-nationalist groups like AmRen are trying to make their arguments more palatable to more people.
“There’s a way of using language to kind of get away from the real impact of what they’re about," she says, "which is that they’re racist."
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has made repeated statements taking aim at minority groups, primarily Hispanics and Muslims, occasionally women and the disabled. That rhetoric, researchers say, overlaps with what can be heard at conferences like the one in Tennessee.
"The Trump phenomenon is helping to normalize this type of talk about minorities," says Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitors hate-group activity.
"Why go to AmRen in the woods, when you can turn on cable TV and watch the same thing? It’s an incredible process of mainstreaming."
Trump's press office has not replied to a request for comment on this story, though he has denounced white supremacists before.
And not all ethno-nationalists favor Trump. But Jared Taylor does. He lent his voice to a robo-call in Iowa in February that attempted to drum up votes for Trump. He told the The New Yorker in August 2015 he felt Trump "would repudiate any association with people like me, but his support comes from people who are more like me than he might like to admit."
A side street in downtown Dickson, a town in central Tennessee with about 15,000 residents. (Victoria Macchi/VOA)
Lukewarm Support among Trump Voters
Dickson
At the Burger King, Bob and Chuck have time in their retirement years to drink coffee together and watch the world go by. They keep the life of a town in their heads.
When they talk about war, they talk about sons who went to Afghanistan and friends who went to Vietnam. When they talk about the 2016 election, they worry about radical Islam coming to this town that has three Waffle Houses and a Cracker Barrel restaurant. They don’t share all of Donald Trump’s views – but most of them say he’s better than the alternative.
"I’m not voting for either one,” Bob says.
From left, Danny Williams, Bob England, and Chuck Watkins pause for a portrait. Dickson, Tenn., May 22, 2016. (Katherine Gypson/VOA)
“Oh but you’ve got to vote,” Chuck says softly. “I believe you’ve got to vote.” He’s a wiry man who sinks into the chair as he talks. He voted for Bill Clinton twice.
“But Hillary is no Bill,” he says with a knowing smile. He says he knows Trump can’t mean all the crazy things he says. But he’s a “billionaire up in New York. He can build things and we need to build things again.”
So he’ll vote for Trump.
A Confederate flag on a private car outside the conference center at Montgomery Bell State Park. May 21, 2016. (Victoria Macchi/VOA)
A protester talks to media outside the American Renaissance conference, held at the lodge of a public state park. In the 1970s, white supremacist David Duke called on his followers "to get out of the cow pasture and into hotel meeting rooms." (Victoria Macchi/VOA)
But if a group of white nationalists meets in the central Tennessee woods, does anyone hear?
“They have an influence that exceeds their numbers and their political space,” says Leonard Zeskind, president of the Institute for Research & Education of Human Rights.
Author of “Blood and Politics: The History of the White Nationalist Movement from the Margins to the Mainstream,” Zeskind has been researching white nationalist groups since the early 1980s.
He says American Renaissance influences the Tea Party, which in turn influences the Republican Party - and the validation of seeing ideas once considered marginal on the political main stage during the 2016 presidential campaign emboldens groups like AmRen.
Mark Potok, of the Southern Poverty Law Center, gives AmRen less credit, saying they don’t have “real political influence in terms of legislation.”
“The role American Renaissance has is to provide a sort of cleaned up ideology (no slurs, that kind of thing) that provides racists with a justification for their biases,” he wrote in an email.
“That certainly does help spread the ideas and creed of white nationalism, but I don’t think that translates in any direct way to political or, certainly, legislative power.”
For regular AmRen opponent Daryle Lamont Jenkins, who missed the weekend protest due to illness but usually shows up year after year to take a stand against Taylor, the segregationist rhetoric is an attempt to unravel decades of civil rights activism.
"We’ve already lived through the kinds of things he wants to champion," Jenkins says in a phone interview before the event. "We do not want them to come back."
Montgomery Bell State Park
As the AmRen conference winds down that Saturday, attendees wander outside. They smoke and vape in clusters along the sidewalk, a few park rangers standing between them and a small group of protesters - three men on a hill overlooking the hotel and conference hall.
“They try to make it to where it doesn't seem racist,” John Carico says. He drove three hours from his home in south Tennessee to demonstrate against the event. Some of the conference-goers heckle the protesters, and a man in a German World War II uniform watches the protesters, tapping his leg with a riding crop.
Inside the facility, park staff are setting up the conference room for that evening’s closing banquet.
Dickson County High School Graduation, May 20, 2016. (Victoria Macchi/VOA)
Embracing Diversity
When Dickson County High School seniors graduate the same weekend of the AmRen conference, both sides of the football field are packed with thousands of friends and relatives. Among the white families there are also black, Southeast Asian, and Latino families watching their teenagers close out an era of their young lives.
One of the senior girls takes the podium and tells the crowd, "Where there is acceptance, there is growth and discovery." The alternative is "a dystopian society where no one can think."
She pauses then pushes on, her voice defiant, "Diversity is the medium that allows power to shine bright."