“How far in the back of the closet
are the hoods hanging?”
The Ku Klux Klan was directly responsible for many tens of thousands of murders since their founding in December, 1865, following the defeat of the Confederacy in the Civil War, the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863, and the Reconstruction Amendments (13th, 14th, and 15th), all designed to bring equality to a nation ostensibly dedicated to liberty and yet founded with the enslavement of African Americans and the genocide of Native Americans. The KKK was dedicated to enforcing White Supremacy, America’s defining, world-building bias, through domestic terror and violence.
They were glorified by D.W. Griffith in his film Birth of a Nation, which was the first motion picture to be shown in the White House, in 1915, for then-President Woodrow Wilson, who was greatly impressed by it. Wilson had, by then, directed the most significant step backward for civil rights in the nation since the end of the Reconstruction Era, re-segregating the Federal workforce and demoting and dismissing the advancement of African Americans. The KKK was directly violent, and Wilson initiated structural biases that enforced racial hierarchy. Both gave substance to the mentality of the country’s biased racialized caste system that granted total and ultimate power to White men, while striving to keep Blacks, in particular, powerless and at heightened risk.
In 1915, the president himself was clearly and openly a White Supremacist, and the hoods were on shameless, open display.
On June 1, 2026, the New York Times reported that Secretary of Defense/War Pete Hegseth had struck Black and female Navy officers from a list of promotions. In doing so, he violated a “system that is supposed to be apolitical and merit-based,” and hearkened back to President Wilson’s actions a century ago.[1 This is an ominous sign of the Trump administration’s noted bias against pluralism and diversity, advantaging White male leadership in the Federal profession of militarized violence. It’s not a far reach to say that Hegseth’s move is consciously or unconsciously connected to White Nationalist fantasies of RaHoWa, or Racial Holy War, in which non-white people are exterminated in a final genocide of violence. At the very least, he is clearly enforcing his view that Blacks and women are inferior and undeserving of promotion – and by extension, targeting them for professional and psychological, if not yet corporeal, devaluation and elimination.
In November, 2020, Captain Julia Quinn of the U.S. Marine Corps wrote in the Proceedings of the US Naval Institute:
“White nationalist recruitment campaigns have had increasing success within the military…Less than 50 years ago, Camp Pendleton, California, hosted Ku Klux Klan meetings, and less than 40 years ago, Marines were photographed in Klan uniforms at a white supremacist rally. History has not been kind to those who chose to ignore those shameful episodes, and it will not be kind to current military leaders if they choose to remain silent about today’s greatest domestic terrorist threat. We must seize the opportunity to fight this enemy. Many options exist to begin the battle, and the only wrong choice is a failure to confront this issue with every resource at the military’s disposal. White nationalism cannot be allowed to further infiltrate the ranks if military leaders seek to uphold the same values as the men and women who sacrificed their lives to fight against it in World War II.”2
But Hegseth countered WWII’s triumph against Nazi Germany by renewing the hold of psychological forces which led to its rise. On June 6, 2026, he “used a D-Day speech in France on Saturday to criticize Europe over its migration policies, saying that “dangerous ideologies” were storming the continent’s shores, in what he compared to an “invasion.”3 He reinforced similarly xenophobic and anti-immigration stances of Vice President J.D. Vance, presidential advisor Stephen Miller, and President Trump himself, who all place a martial, contemptuous, othering lens on non-Whites, recalling the language hailing White Western “purity” and dehumanizing Jews that preceded the Holocaust. Scholar Lynn Tirrell notes that dehumanizing and vilifying language precedes genocidal intent and actions.4
Benjamin Valentino, professor and Chair of the Department of Government and coordinator of the War and Peace Studies Program at Dartmouth, focuses on causes and consequences of violent conflict. He “co-founded the Early Warning Project, which assesses the risk of mass atrocities around the world.” “[T]he dehumanizing language of the sort used by the Trump administration is, he said, “a pretty standard indicator” of risk, a necessary if insufficient condition of mass violence directed at a particular group.” The goal is re-creating a malignant normality in the mindset of the Klansman’s hood, bringing it out from the closet to open and fashionable street wear. “They want a majority of the population to turn their backs,” he said. “That’s all that’s necessary.”5
Secretary Hegseth sports tattoos linked to the Crusades and Islamophobia, though he maintains that they are simply linked to his “Christian faith.” However, religious scholar Matthew Taylor said to NPR that Hegseth belongs to “the very militant end of the Christian nationalist spectrum…the Christian Reconstructionist movement,” which seeks to re-establish Old Testament Biblical law, including the repeal of the 19th Amendment of 1920 granting women the right to vote.6
Minoritized communities and women have reason to dread a military and an administration tilted towards White Power in Whiteness, maleness, and unaccountability. A less representative democracy enacts bias, and ultimately, violence.
But we are living in an era in which all branches of government controlled by conservative Whites, as well as significant forces in the popular culture, wish to deny even the existence of racist and other biases. Instead, they claim “reverse racism” or that racism, if it ever existed, has in fact been overcome. This was a significant part of the reasoning that led to Supreme Court decisions striking down Affirmative Action in 2023, and the essence of the Voting Rights Act in 2026.
But how could conservative White arbiters even be completely trustworthy observers of Black and other minority standing, and thus issue judgments by fiat? According to the Pew Research Center, dismissing the concerns of Black people is one of the three unifying features of contemporary Republican voters.7 The foundational bias of White Supremacy has pushed many White Americans in a distinctly undemocratic direction, magnifying their collective power and authority in an attempt to minimize the influence of minorities, and deny their critiques, which might bring loss of preeminent and dominant status, accountability, and perhaps produce shame and guilt for past harms recognized, instead of pride in reconciliation and transcendence of cruel historical bias. The White power grab has arguably not enhanced benefits to the broader White population, other than in perception of status in a polity racialized by design. But their status is visibly reflected in a government tilted towards conservative White biases and dismissal of minority concerns.
For minorities, it can feel like struggling with a killer while your White neighbors claim they are primarily concerned about the cost of eggs, wool firmly pulled over their eyes. This wool is, of course, another manner of hood, one with the same plausible deniability of those Germans who exclaimed after the Holocaust, “we didn’t know!” Conservative White Americans claim they don’t believe in racism and other biases, or now, proudly proclaim they don’t care. They say that finally, in Trump, they have a leader who says what they were afraid to, when he makes his racist and xenophobic attacks.8 The hoods have not been hanging far back in the closets at all, as it turns out.
A triumphant and exclusive conservative White male (and Christian in name) status arises out of a wish for ultimate power, to flee the complexity and vulnerability of relationship with diversity, and the accountability that egalitarian relationship requires. A flight to the rigidity of monolithic mob power is a flight from conscience, and a flight from the possibility of shame. Instead, this self-centered collective structurally “disses” (disrespects) all it deems “other,” the “out-groups.” It gains status by devaluing others, betraying a contingent self-worth that depends on one-downing and heaping contempt on Blacks, women and other minoritized and subordinated communities. This dissing is psychological and cultural, as well as economic, and leaves a bracing toll of mortality and morbidity. Minorities are left feeling like they are “walking on eggshells” of easily bruised, offended, fragile, and defensive egos of those in the dominant culture, who seem viscerally predisposed to taking actions – including violent action – against minorities whenever challenged to grow past biases. And this fragility is only the edge of a hidden defensive structure of a society tilted to meet the needs of the dominant caste.
Psychiatrist James Gilligan writes,
“Throughout history and around the world, in every society in which wealth and income have been unequally distributed, the poor have suffered deaths and disabilities at higher rates than the wealthy have… All the wars, murders, suicides and genocides throughout history have not even begun to kill as many people as have been killed by the economic deprivations to which the poor are subjected. Gandhi was correct, then, when he observed that the deadliest form of violence is poverty… [And] Structural violence is the main social cause of behavioral violence. As Plato put it, poverty is the mother of crime (though that relationship is complicated by the mediation of an intervening psychological cause -- the feeling of shame, humiliation and inferiority -- which is itself stimulated by being in a humble and inferior social and economic class or caste).”9
The most malevolent hood in society is the veil hiding the structural violence caused by biases creating racial, gender, and class hierarchy. This hood attempts to preserve “face,” exalting the wearer of the hood. The hooded structure of society repels shame and pushes it into outgroups who either metabolize and transcend it, or react to being “dissed.”
Violence comes out in a tangle of emotions, biases, predilections, and precursors. Gilligan notes that feeling shamed, dishonored, and disrespected are the prominent emotions of interpersonal violence.
“The person who is overwhelmed by feelings of shame is by definition experiencing a psychically life-threatening lack of love, and someone in that condition has no love left over for anyone else.”10
Shame, the idea that one is viewed as inherently bad and unworthy of respect, is an extreme threat to the survival of the social self, and a profound disconnection and split from mutual relationship. The structural “diss” cuts deep. Indeed, mutual relationship in society has been deeply scarred by persistent historical biases and traumas. The awareness of harm is hardly submerged, but regularly declares itself, triggering defenses, flight, and assertions of power in the dominating culture, and agony, frustration, and pervasive powerlessness in those dominated. Eggshells are inherently linked to the hood and the grandiose, inflated societal ego it hides, always pitched at enacting erasure.
All volitional violence is an assertion of power, however temporary, coming out of entitlement (“I deserve to be in power and have the right to harm or kill others”) or vulnerability (“I feel or have been made to feel dishonored, powerless, and insecure, and thus must act violently to gain power”).
Any program to limit violence must work towards truth, reconciliation, repair, equality of power and status, deflation of grandiosity, resolved fear and paranoia of intimacy with diversity, and consequential love and compassion for all. We must acknowledge and mend the disconnection created by biases that empower some at the expense of the whole, with resultant ricocheting shame, guilt, deprivation, longing, agony, and relational confusion.
The Klansman’s hood hid identity, and attempted to preserve “face” and avoid shame, while also projecting its ominous potential on all White faces.
Our danger, now, is that our most prominent leaders wear their biased, ignorant convictions like a crown, in language and deed. They seem proud of their faces proclaiming bias and hate. Their flight from hidden shame into “White Pride,” political domination, and supposed telegenic (and eugenic) glory will only feed violence that they may claim as triumph, but can only be ultimate and total tragedy, for all humanity.
Jaffe G, Kelly K. Hegseth Strikes Female and Black Navy Officers From Promotion List. New York Times, June 1, 2026 (Gift article)
Quinn J. Confronting the U.S. Military’s White Nationalist Problem. Proceedings, U.S. Naval Institute, November 2020 Vol. 146/11/1,413
Moses C. Hegseth Criticizes Europe Over Migration ‘Invasion’ in D-Day Speech. New York Times, June 7, 2026 (Gift article)
Tirrell L. Genocidal Language Games. In Ishani Maitra & Mary Kate McGowan (eds.), Speech and Harm: Controversies Over Free Speech. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 174–221 (2012). Accessed at Academia.edu.
Gessen M. The White House’s Latest Provocation Is ‘Grotesque and Terrifying and Juvenile’. New York Times, June 5, 2026 (Gift article)
Yousef O. Peter Hegseth’s tattoos are raising some eyebrows. NPR, November 14, 2024
Beyond Red vs. Blue: The Political Typology. Pew Research Center, November 9, 2021
Chandra R. MOSF 19.5: Dangerous Charisma: Unpacking Trump’s Leadership and His Followers’ Mentality. East Wind eZine, July 1, 2024
Gilligan J. Structural Violence. In Violence in America: An Encyclopedia. Ronald Gottesman, Editor in Chief. James Gilligan, Consulting Editor. New York: Charles Scribners Sons, 1999. Vol. 3, pp. 229-233
Gilligan J. Chapter 5: Shame: The Emotions and Morality of Violence. In Violence: Reflections on a National Epidemic. London, Jessica Kingsley Publishers. pp 103-137
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Ravi Chandra is a psychiatrist, writer, compassion educator, and civilizational health shaman in San Francisco, and a Distinguished Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association. He is the recipient of the 2025 Kun-Po Soo Award for Achievement in Asian American Psychiatry from the APA and APA Foundation. Here’s his linktree. Please sign up for updates via Substack where you can also support his educational and creative mission by becoming a free, paid or founding subscriber. For fourteen years, he was lucky to have his MOSF posts published by the Center for Asian American Media, and is now at work broadening and building a diverse creative community and coalition through reflecting on culture and psychology for East Wind eZine.See all the East Wind posts here. He writes from the metaphorical intersection of The Fillmore and Japantown in San Francisco, where Black and Asian communities have mingled since the end of the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II. He literally works there, between two Indian restaurants, go figure. His debut documentary was named Best Film (Festival Director’s Award) at the 2021 Cannes Independent Film Festival. The Bandaged Place: From AIDS to COVID and Racial Justice is available on-demand. His nonfiction debut, Facebuddha: Transcendence in the Age of Social Networks, won the 2017 Nautilus Silver Award for Religion/Spirituality of Eastern Thought. You can find him on Psychology Today, Medium, Twitter, Threads, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, SoundCloud, or better yet, in the IRL.
I’m imagining people taking Pete Hegseth additionally serious because he wants to repeal women’s right to vote. How can anyone just do that. I’m shaking at the nightmare this genocidal man gets everything he wants in this country after murdering muslims. who’s there to stop him from taking away women’s right to vote based on popular opinion!! surely the people’s hearts have to already be toxic beyond change and too far gone.
Excellent expose of the evil threat behind the hood, be it actual or metaphorical. I would add & apologize if my rapid skimming missed it), the Trump immigration policies are another blatant expression of White supremacy. The suspension of all those seekers asylum EXCEPT for Whites from South Africa would be a bizarre guffaw-inducing joke if it weren’t actual policy.