Rendering white nationalism defeasible in interaction

Journal article

People work to present themselves as moral, reasonable, or justified even when making racist or hateful comments. In this project, we identify interactional practices that accomplish support for White nationalism as part of a reasonable (or even positive) identity held by reasonable or positive actors. Using membership categorisation analysis and conversation analysis, we analysed a corpus of 24 publicly-available video recordings for explicit mentions of (or challenges to) White nationalism/supremacy. Looking for how people explain, justify, and rationalise White nationalism and, especially, White nationalist violence, we identified 16 cases of what we call White nationalist remediation. Our findings demonstrate how not only self-avowed White nationalists but also those who do not publicly identify as such can work to protect and potentially normalise White nationalist views and actions, including violence, using the same practices. They thus (1) signal their followers, (2) present their beliefs as reasonable and defensible, and (3) ultimately normalise White nationalism.

Authors: Sterphone, J; Robles, J; Joyce, JB; Flint, N; Hill, MJ

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: Wiley
• Journal: British Journal of Social Psychology
• Volume: 65
• Issue: 2
• Article number: e70074
• Publication date: 2026-04-24
• Acceptance date: 2026-03-10
• DOI: 10.1111/bjso.70074
• EISSN: 2044-8309
• ISSN: 0144-6665
• Language: English
• Keywords: white nationalism; media interaction; dog whistles; (in)sincerity; racism; membership categorisation analysis; remediation