Combating Hate: Domestic Extremism & Terrorism

2010 American Renaissance Conference Will Feature Racist Speakers from U.S. and Abroad

The white supremacist publication American Renaissance (AR) will hold its ninth biennial meeting in Herndon, Virginia from February 19-21, 2010. Like previous conferences, the event is principally led and organized by Jared Taylor the editor of AR and its Web site.

In keeping with previous conferences, this event will feature a range of racist speakers from the United States and abroad. It will focus on “racial differences in IQ” and discuss the “costs of diversity” as well as the “challenges of non-white immigration.”

One of the scheduled speakers, Craig Bodeker, has gained increasing exposure in the racist subculture due to his 2009 movie, “A Conversation About Race.” In the hour-long movie Bodeker interviews a series of random individuals from the Denver area about race and racism. His stated goal is to prove that “racism is not an objective term.” Rather, he claims that it is a “hammer” used as “intimidation against Caucasians.” To that end, he sets out to prove that a host of taboos in discussing race are directed differently at whites and blacks. For example, he argues that it is acceptable to assign “collective racial guilt” to whites over slavery but not to blacks over black on white crime. Similar points are made frequently in the pages of AR and other white supremacist publications. Bodeker has also appeared on The Political Cesspool, a radio show hosted by white supremacist James Edwards, and War of Deception, a radio show hosted by an anti-Semite, Peter Schaenk.

Bodeker’s movie has proven popular with a variety of white supremacist individuals and organizations, including The Council of Conservative Citizens, which has held several screenings. The movie and the response to it have also received some attention in the mainstream media, including the Wall Street Journal. At the AR conference, Bodeker will give a “one year retrospective” on the movie’s release.

Raymond Wolters, a professor at the University of Delaware (where he has been a member of the history department since 1965) is scheduled to speak on “education reform since the 1950s.” Wolters’ relationship with AR dates back at least as far as 2004, when he addressed that year’s conference on the history of the famous Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision. Wolters has written many books on race relations in the 20^th century, several of which have been positively reviewed in AR. He has described one of these books, The Burden of Brown (published in 1984), as the story of the “failure” of desegregation in the decades following the Brown decision. Wolters was interviewed in March 2009 by Kevin Lamb for VDare, a racist Web site. (Lamb is the managing editor of The Social Contract, a xenophobic journal published by John Tanton, and a former editor of The Occidental Quarterly, a well-known racist journal.)

Other scheduled speakers include:

• Nick Griffin, chairman of the far-right British National Party (BNP). In June 2009, Griffin won one of two BNP seats in an election to the European Parliament, part of a wave of far-right political parties across Europe who won seats in that election. Griffin has been a topic of intense media interest in Great Britain since that election, especially in relation to his appearance on Question Time, a major BBC political television that some viewers felt granted him undue legitimacy. He spoke at the 2002 and 2006 AR conferences. 
• Wayne Lutton, editor of The Social Contract. Lutton is also a director on the board of The Occidental Quarterly. He spoke at the 1994 and 1996 AR conferences.
• David Yeagely, operator of the Web site BadEagle.com. Yeagely identifies as a great-great-grandson of the Comanche leader Bad Eagle, and sees himself as a conservative Native American.