Kathleen Belew


Kathleen Belew is a research fellow at Stanford University, "an assistant professor of history at the University of Chicago and an international authority on the white-power movement." She has written a book: Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America.

Academic career

Belew graduated with a degree in the "Comparative History of Ideas" from University of Washington in 2005, and both a master's degree in 2008 and doctoral degree in 2011 in "American Studies" from Yale University. She is currently an assistant professor of "U.S. History and the College" at the University of Chicago. Her "teaching centers on the broad themes of race, gender, violence, identity, and the meaning of war." She is currently on research leave studying "gun violence and the history of the 1990s."
Between 2011 and 2019, there were 16 high-profile attacks linked to white nationalism around the world; 175 people were killed in these attacks. According to Belew: "Too many people still think of these attacks as single events, rather than interconnected actions carried out by domestic terrorists. We spend too much ink dividing them into anti-immigrant, racist, anti-Muslim or antisemitic attacks. True, they are these things. But they are also connected with one another through a broader white power ideology."
In September 2019, Belew was a witness at a congressional hearing on confronting white nationalism. In her witness statement, Belew described the "white power movement" as a "threat to our democracy", said that it was "transnational", and "connected neo-Nazis, Klansmen, skinheads, radical tax protestors, militia members, and others." She advocated forming something like the 2005 Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation Commission as a step towards a solution to the problem. Congressman Jim Jordan criticised Belew for refuting fellow witness Candace Owens characterization of congressional testimony on violent right-wing extremism as partisan and "hilarious."

Works