Racism as Adolescent Male Rite of Passage

Abstract

In-depth interviews with ex-neo-Nazis in Scandinavia reveal a profile of the extreme right that is both strikingly similar to and significantly different from the profile of their counterparts in the United States. Drawn from clients at EXIT, a state-funded organization based in Sweden, these interviews reveal that the extreme right draws adherents from a declining lower middle class background, small towns, and metropolitan suburbs, and from divorced families. Their mean age is in the mid-teens to late-teens, and their commitment to specific ideological tenets is low. Their entry and exit have less political and more developmental and situational origins than the Americans'. Detailed interviews suggest that participation on the extreme right is, for some Scandinavian adolescents, more a masculine right of passage than evidence of a firm commitment to racialized ideologies.