Klan Intimidation TaKtiKs Breed Respect

Bren Kelly
8 min readNov 15, 2023

Codes Words White Media Has to Use for White Terrorist Murder and Bombing

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Many black Americans are now familiar with code-switching. But do they realize it applies to white media as well? Whites in the Gulf Coast states of the old South typically responded with “great gusto” and “zeal” towards foreigners and black Americans when they don’t get their way. That is the type of euphemism — gusto and zeal — of code-switching from the confrontation of the brutal facts that American mainstream media uses, a tactic to describe bombing, burning, and murder, the marks of white organized terrorism against blacks and minorities.

Other typical language ticks describing “racial violence” include phrases that reflected a bracketing of a period and are manifestations indicating that “this” was “an isolated incidence,” in a certain place, and that eventually “things calmed down.” Here’s the example that popped up when I read a story of such an “episode”:

“members of the Ku Klux Klan set fire to several boats near Galveston Bay and burned crosses near the homes of Vietnamese fishermen. Tensions only abated after the Southern Poverty Law Center, together with the Vietnamese Fishermen’s Association, filed a federal lawsuit to stop the Klan’s intimidation tactics.”

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Bren Kelly
Bren Kelly

Written by Bren Kelly

Engaged in Inequalities, dismantling American narratives, born on 50th Women's Lib Day though seeking wider injustices.

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