Seyward Darby's "Sisters in Hate"

Seyward Darby is the editor in chief of The Atavist Magazine. She previously served as the deputy editor of Foreign Policy and the online editor and assistant managing editor of The New Republic. As a writer, she has contributed to The Atlantic, The Washington Post, Elle, and Vanity Fair, among other publications.

Darby applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Sisters in Hate: American Women on the Front Lines of White Nationalism, and reported the following:

On page 99 of Sisters in Hate, you'll find the following lines.

By the time Unite the Right was on the horizon, Ayla was staging an increasingly exaggerated performance of good white womanhood.... [I]f being vocally nostalgic for the past was a sin, Ayla wasn’t about to repent. Invoking ideals of femininity rooted in whiteness—Beyoncé need not apply—Ayla compared the America she yearned for to the world of Jessica and Elizabeth Wakefield, the twin teenage protagonists created by young-adult author Francine Pascal.

Page 99 is a good representation of the book overall, hitting on the key topics of whiteness and womanhood and on their intersection, which as the text implies is often weaponized in the service of white supremacy. The page also shows what I hope is among the book’s strongest qualities: the interweaving of personal stories with historical and cultural analysis.

Coded language is a hallmark of the hate movement. Today, there’s a veritable dictionary of strange digital lingo, from “cuckservative” to “libtard,” “kangz” to “roastie,” that is used to insult people who don’t support the far right or live up to its racist, misogynistic, and ant-Semitic standards. I’m more interested, however, in words like “heritage” and “the West” and even “American,” which when used by hate’s acolytes contain multitudes far uglier than a surface-level reading suggests. This kind of coding is one way that the hate movement’s supporters and ideas seep into the mainstream, because it allows them to present what they believe and do as palatable, defensible, and familiar.

Page 99 of my book points to the ways in which women are uniquely positioned to use coding as both a shield and a weapon. In performing or invoking “womanhood” and “motherhood,” women in the hate movement seek to deflect criticism and invite sympathy. Simultaneously, they judge and exclude, because the concepts in question are, to their minds, defined by whiteness—a measure of power, normative behavior, and aesthetics at odds with progressive ideals like racial justice.

Visit Seyward Darby's website.

--Marshal Zeringue