It is no secret that Americans are watchful and quite vigilant of Islamic extremism, both at home and abroad. What’s more, American researchers and the American government have invested considerable money and time into examining the methods of radicalization used to draw people into extremist lies.
They have parsed myriad reasons that someone might become vulnerable to radicalization, and have been able to extract concrete factors that increase one’s vulnerability to buying into these schemes. A large part of America’s defense budget has been allocated to understanding why young Muslim men, in particular, are so drawn in by internet-based radicalization.
Right now, many Americans are able to differentiate between radical and moderate Islam. Even so, they hold the entire community accountable to reporting signs of radicalization. Yet the potential for radicalization does not map onto a particular religion. Researchers have come to understand that young men, in particular, who suffer from decreased economic opportunity and are raised in various traditions valuing patriarchal hierarchy may well be receptive to any external call that promises meaning to largely meaningless lives.
The sites and results of this scholarship are by no means limited to a Muslim or Middle Eastern cultural context; scholars largely agree that young men are more vulnerable to radicalization when socially isolated, economically disempowered and receptive to violently masculine social norms. In particular, toxic masculinity plays an integral role in this phenomenon in all populations.
We can pinpoint the social conditions that aggravate a young Muslim man’s predisposition to radicalization. Why not turn this same lens on young white men exploring the dark corners of white supremacy? This mystery can be solved. Tools exist that can conceptually identify potentially antisocial young men without condemning the traditions or religions they are raised in.
When news commentators discuss the so-called "alt-right" as some kind of mystical enigma, we should reject this. We should also reject blanket condemnation of any group for individual behavior, whites and Christians included. Instead, let’s apply the lessons that we have learned about the factors of radicalization in other contexts. After all, if most of us believe that white supremacists should not represent the religion they may espouse or the ethnicity they are from, can we not do the same for radicalized Muslim youth?
We should never accommodate the anger or discriminatory impulses of violent young men. But we must realize that we are our brothers’ keepers; as such, our job is twofold. We should work to alleviate the reasons that young men may become susceptible to violent radicalization, white supremacist or otherwise. But we should also hold ourselves to the same standard that we even hold the Muslim-American community: to call out signs of radicalization in those around us.
There has been no shortage of circumstances that, whatever their hegemonic ideology, dispose of young men both ideologically and economically before, and materially after, sinister programs are cranked to life. Too large a swath of history can be largely read as the tragedy that ensues when the lives and bodies of otherwise idle but able young men are yoked to nightmarish seizings of the present, tempted by the siren call of a future where men of a certain kind are restored to past glory.
Regarding radicalization, Americans love to gaze at the speck in the eye of Islam. It is undeniable that a problematic but proportionally small population of young men are mobilized by a politicized and warped vision of religion; they are promised glory as wages for terror.
