Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, a historian and the author of Loaded: A Disarming History of the Second Amendment, spoke with David Hogg, a Parkland High School student who survived the school massacre and is now an activist, just after the mass shooting that took place in a grocery store in Buffalo in May. Because of how energising their discussion was—which covered topics such as history, racial violence, and strategy—Boston Review invited them to invite more academics to continue the discussion with them.
Following is an interview that was conducted by Dunbar-Ortiz and Hogg with Kathleen Belew, who is the author of Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America (2018). In his book “Bring the War Home,” Belew details the troubling history of how Vietnam soldiers increased the ranks of white power organisations, bringing renewed vigour to groups like the KKK. This history is documented in Belew’s account of how Vietnam veterans bloated the ranks of white power organisations.
In today’s interview, which was recorded in the days following the shooting at Highland Park, Belew, Dunbar-Ortiz, and Hogg discuss how white supremacists have propagated the myth of the lone-wolf shooter in order to hide their organising, as well as what it would take for the country as a whole to break the cycle of violence.
