Just days after the fatal shooting at a Jewish Community Center in Overland Park, Kansas CNN news reporter Ashley Fantz is asking “can the Ku Klux Klan rebrand?” Can images of white-supremacist men dressed in white robes wearing pointy hats, lynchings, and burning crosses be changed to a gentler image to spread their message?
MS Franz asked marketing and PR experts around the country whether they thought the Klan could successfully rebrand. One marketing agency pro replied that lynchings were not much different than a product. He went on to say that a car brand that has exploding gas tanks which kill its passengers cannot be helped no matter how fantastic the campaign.
Imperial Wizard Frank Ancona, who lives in Missouri says this outburst has set his organization back a bit in their effort to show the Klan as a group bringing the white supremacy message without the violence of former regimes. The new plan is to educate people to their ideas and seeing their point of view to help change things without the violence.
The story subtly answers its own question and is the same answer that had been offered in a recent Time article quoting experts as saying the idea is totally ridiculous. In that article, Heidi Beirich of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Project, says “Some groups do try to position themselves to say they’re just fighting for white rights, that they’re not racist…It’s just racism dressed up in a new language,”