A White Supremacist Makes His Pitch to Skeptical Peers on Campus

Max Whittaker, The New York Times, REDUX

When students in an ethnic-studies class at California State University-Stanislaus saw fliers on the campus warning them that a white supremacist with ties to national fascist groups was enrolled there, many were worried.

Their instructor, whose father is black and Native American and whose mother is Asian, saw a teaching opportunity. He invited the student, Nathan Damigo, to speak to his class about his utopian dream of an all-white homeland.

“I was like, You know, if we want transparency, let’s talk to the guy,” said the instructor, Fela Uhuru, who also goes by Bobby Seals.

He emailed Mr. Damigo, a 30-year-old junior majoring in social sciences, and invited him to speak to his students in an open forum, held last month. About 60 people, mostly black and Hispanic, showed up.

The students, who had been reading a textbook about white supremacy, peppered Mr. Damigo with questions about whether there was really a difference between being an “identitarian,” as he called himself, and a white supremacist, which they saw.

And how could he call for a “return” to an all-white America when that never existed?

Mr. Damigo described the goals of Identity Evropa, a group he founded in March, to give “a generation of awakened Europeans” an opportunity to save their heritage from threats posed by the nation’s growing multiculturalism.

The ideal, he said, was for the United States to designate certain states as white states and leave others multicultural for people who prefer to live in diverse communities.

“We had a peaceful, intellectual conversation,” Mr. Uhuru said. “He’s a smart guy and he’s serious about his politics and creating this utopian space for white guys.”

The instructor’s hope, he said, is that “now that people know his face and where he comes from, they might see him on campus and have a conversation with him and hopefully change his heart. I feel kind of sorry for someone with that kind of hate.”

Mr. Damigo, who has taken several ethnic-studies classes at Stanislaus, agrees that the discussion was productive.

But others are disturbed by the idea of white separatists, nationalists, or supremacists — the hodgepodge of groups that make up the so-called alt-right — being part of mainstream campus conversations.

“The fact that white nationalists are playing at a campus near you is an extraordinarily troubling development,” says Brian Levin, director of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism, at California State University at San Bernardino.

They’re showing up, mostly, through fliers and posters from groups like American Vanguard with photos of white people and ominous warnings about extinction.

Identity Evropa generally favors images of sculptures of classical figures, which seem less threatening on a college campus, with sayings like “Our Future Belongs to Us” or “Our Destiny is Ours.”

We are back at @SDSU discussing race and identity with students! pic.twitter.com/UPBzYI6DDb

— IDENTITY EVROPA (@IdentityEvropa) December 3, 2016

The messages are part of a flurry of racist and anti-Semitic incidents that have been reported on college campuses in recent months, many mentioning Donald J. Trump’s election.

Even if the president-elect doesn’t follow through on his anti-immigrant, pro-white rhetoric, Mr. Trump’s pronouncements about border walls and Muslim bans have emboldened many extremist groups to speak up.

College campuses are Identity Evropa’s main recruiting target in what it calls #ProjectSiege.

One of its goals is to pressure faculty members to incorporate literature about white nationalism and controversial topics such as the supposed biological and genetic determinants of intellect and crime into their courses.

Getting students onboard can be a challenge, Mr. Damigo conceded.

“There’s a lot of pushback,” he said during a recent interview via Skype. “Students have to deal with social ostracism as well as trying to get a job in the future.”

Rather than setting up chapters, the group is trying to make inroads through Republican student groups.

“A lot of our guys are involved in the Students for Trump groups,” Mr. Damigo said. “It gives them a little bit of cover. Most people think the Republican Party is racist anyway, so we might as well give them some confirmation bias.”

He said his group is appealing to the frustration he sees over the “cultlike mantra” students are hearing about the importance of diversity, the “false hysteria” about campus rapes, and the pressure to be politically correct.

The goal, as he and his fellow members travel to campuses, is to win over converts and debunk stereotypes about white nationalists they assumed were all “buck-toothed and inbred,” Mr. Damigo said.

Mr. Levin, the Cal State-San Bernadino scholar, said that if someone showed up on campus in traditional Ku Klux Klan garb, he’d be shunned immediately.

“If you shroud a bigoted message in terms of embracing Western civilization, national security, and the cultural norms that made America great, it’s a lot better than wearing a robe and a hood for selling a message,” he said.

A Prison Awakening

Mr. Damigo attended a private school in San Jose, Calif., where, as a white student, he was in the minority. Although he didn’t have any major run-ins with minority classmates, he resented feeling like he couldn’t talk about race. “I was told that only people of color could have an opinion on race,” he said.

After two tours of duty as a Marine in Iraq, he said he was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder when he robbed a taxi driver who he thought was Iraqi at gunpoint in 2007.

During the five years he spent incarcerated, he said was influenced by a former Klan leader, David Duke, whose book My Awakening describes why he believes that blacks are inferior to whites and that Jewish people are a threat.

After his release, Mr. Damigo led the National Youth Front, the since-disbanded youth wing of the white nationalist American Freedom Party.

He declined to say how many members his current group, Identity Evropa, has, but he contends that it has members in “every major metropolitan area” in the United States.

The activists, who have traveled to more than two dozen campuses so far, do their best to blend in. Among the requirements for membership are no face or neck tattoos. Members are encouraged to dress nicely, avoid arguing or sounding intimidating. “Get in there. Be cool. Be hip,” one training video suggests. “Dress like they do. Talk like they do, but have a little edge to it.”

Mr. Damigo’s Twitter handle is “Fashy Haircut,” a reference to fascism as well as the hair style, long on top and buzzed on the sides, that is popular with young white nationalists and their Hitler-era predecessors. In a video, another Identity Evropa member, William Clark, describes how he headed to Temple University in September after a sign saying “White People, Do Something” appeared there. The sign was part of a student art installation presumably intended to prod white students to fight racism.

Mr. Clark took it as an opportunity to push his agenda. “Students from 18 to 25 are naturally rebellious,” he said. “Even if they call you a racist, they’re going to go home and look it up. If we can just have a constant presence on these campuses, we’re going to screw their agenda up, even if it’s just having to pour millions of dollars into these insane diversity programs.”

In May, a few members of the group, accompanied by Richard B. Spencer, a white supremacist who coined the term “alt-right,” showed up unannounced at the University of California at Berkeley. They appeared at Sproul Plaza, saying they wanted to create a “safe space” to talk about how race affects people of European heritage.

Alarmed by such recruiting efforts, a group called the Northern California Anti-Racist Action posted its own fliers on the Stanislaus campus with photographs of Mr. Damigo, describing him as a “known white supremacist and violent offender.”

The posters listed university administrators whom people should complain to about his presence on the campus and mentioned where Mr. Damigo usually parks his car.

In October, the Stanislaus campus’s president, Ellen N. Junn, responded with a statement saying she would continue to stand for a “warm, welcoming and respectful” learning environment and reaffirming the university’s commitment to free speech, even when that speech may be offensive.

More than two dozen members of Identity Evropa turned out at a gathering of Mr. Spencer’s National Policy Institute last month, where Mr. Spencer’s cry of “Hail Trump” was met with Nazi-style salutes.

Despite their recent flurry of fliers and campus visits, “I don’t think they’re getting much traction yet,” Mr. Levin said. “My concern is that they’re on the field at all.”

Katherine Mangan writes about community colleges, completion efforts, and job training, as well as other topics in daily news. Follow her on Twitter @KatherineMangan, or email her at katherine.mangan@chronicle.com.