The idea that extremists on the political right have created a culture of hate in America will be a focal point of a lecture Tuesday.
Potok is the editor-in-chief of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s quarterly journal, The Intelligence Report, and is one of the leading experts in the United States on extremism. He has testified in front of of the U.S. Senate and the United Nations High Commission on Human Rights.
The lecture, called “The State of Hate in America,” is part of the Journalism Studies program’s “Representations of Race in the Media.” Dale Rice, director of the Journalism Studies Program in the College of Liberal Arts, said the idea for the event stemmed from a series of conversations within the Journalism Studies Program about the way issues involving race are covered in the media.
“We think that [these issues] are critical at this point in time and it’s very important for not only journalism students, but for others to think seriously about these issues and the way they’re portrayed in the media,” Rice said. “And so we invited Mark Potok from the Southern Poverty Law Center because of his past experience as a journalist who covered these sorts of issues and now his work in examining extremism and hate groups.”
Potok said he plans on talking about the rise of radical rights in response to different political issues like non-white immigration in the lecture.
“The bottom line is that this last year may have been the most traumatic year we’ve seen since 1968 in terms of political violence and conflict,” Potok said. “And then of course when you add the Trump phenomenon and all that’s happened with the Republican presidential race and the kinds of things that have been said — we’re seeing a kind of polarization and hatred in the political mainstream that is really quite stunning.”
Potok said it is important for aspiring journalists attending the event to consider issues like these because they are of the most prevalent topics in society right now.
“This topic is at the center of what’s happening to our country and our political life,” Potok said. “To me, this is possibly the biggest story in the world right now — the rise of the radical right.”