Erving Goffman's (1963, p. 3) description of a stigmatized person as one who is “reduced in our minds from a whole and usual person to a tainted discounted one” captures the stigma that attaches to those involved in the modern racist movement in the United States, a loosely connected confederation of White supremacist, Ku Klux Klan, White separatist, neo-Nazi, and White-power skinhead groups. Media depictions of racist activists typically portray them in caricature as poorly educated, ignorant, pathological, irrational, gullible, and marginal persons who try to compensate for their social and psychological failings by scapegoating other groups. This representation of racists as exhibiting what Mitch Berbrier (1999, p. 411) summarizes as “hatred, boorish irrationality, and violence or violent intent,” is widely accepted, notwithstanding studies that find that most racist activists have rather average backgrounds, personalities, and ways of thinking before joining racist groups. Moreover, negative characterizations of racists tend to become explanatory. The personality problems and social isolation of racist activists are accepted as the reason for their distorted ideas, although evidence suggests that such characteristics are likely to be the outcome of being in racist groups, rather than a cause (Blee, 2002).

Unlike many other stigmatized groups, racist activists are stigmatized on the basis of a set of beliefs and practices they have chosen to adopt. In this sense, the stigma of racism is voluntary and under the control of the person who is stigmatized (Klandermans & Linden, 2006), rather than assigned on the basis of an ascribed characteristic like disability, age, or race.