BACKSTAGE DISCOURSE AND THE REPRODUCTION OF WHITE MASCULINITIES Matthew W. Hughey* Mississippi State University This article documents the shared patterns of private white male discourse. Drawing from com- parative ethnographic research in a white nationalist and a white antiracist organization, I analyze how white men engage in private discourse to reproduce coherent and valorized understandings of white masculinity. These private speech acts reinforce prevailing narratives about race and gender, reproduce understandings of segregation and paternalism as natural, and rationalize the expression of overt racism. This analysis illustrates how antagonistic forms of “frontstage” white male activism may distract from white male identity management in the “backstage.” “Sticks and stones may break bones, but words—words that evoke structures of oppres- sion, exploitation, and brute physical threat—can break souls.”—Anthony A. Appiah INTRODUCTION On August 28, 2008—45 years to the day after Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his renowned “I Have a Dream” speech—Barack Obama accepted the Democratic Party’s nomination for President of the United States. Exactly 100 days later the nation awoke to headlines, such as that of the New York Times, that read: “OBAMA. Racial Barrier Falls in Heavy Turnout.”Seizing upon this watershed moment, many proclaimed the United States was “postracial” and that “racists” were no more than a few bad apples. Adam Geller (2008) of USA Today wrote, “The principle that all men are created equal has never been more than a remote eventuality in the quest for the presidency . . . that ideal is no longer relegated to someday. Someday is now.”Even Jared Taylor, editor of the White Nationalist journal American Renaissance, stated, “Electing him [Obama] will prove America is not ‘racist’ and many whites believe that rising above ‘racism’ is America’s sacred calling” (in Beirich and Potok 2008:17). From mainstream journalists to white nationalist activists, the election of Obama apparently signaled the realization that people are judged not, to cite Dr. King,“. . . by the color of their skin but by the content of their character” (1963). Increasing numbers of people—especially white males—vociferously defend that claim that the United States is now a “postracial” nation (Bonilla-Silva 2003; Gallagher 2003). In concert with this discourse, racial segregation, inequality, and distrust prevails, as documented by a litany of social scientific research (Tilly 1998; Bonilla-Silva 2003; Collins 2005). By and large, the beneficiaries of our de facto racialized system are white men. Yet within a milieu objectively marked by white privileges, Charles Gallagher *Direct all correspondence to Matthew W. Hughey, Department of Sociology, Mississippi State University, P. O. Box C, 207 Bowen Hall, Mississippi State, MS 39762; e-mail: mhughey@soc.msstate.edu The Sociological Quarterly ISSN 0038-0253 The Sociological Quarterly 52 (2011) 132–153 © 2011 Midwest Sociological Society 132