Mark Robinson, the controversial Republican candidate for governor in North Carolina, wrote many disturbing things during his time as a poster on the porn forum Nude Africa. But one comment from Robinson stands out as particularly perplexing: “I’m a black NAZI!”

The idea of ​​a black man declaring allegiance to a movement based on his inferiority seems absurd. Chappelle’s Show sketch comes to life. But the absurdity points to something real. Strange as it may seem, there are a disturbing number of blacks and Latinos in America who hold far-right views.

Two of the most prominent anti-Semitic voices in the country, Kanye West and Candace Owens, are black Trump supporters. Nick Fuentes, the white supremacist who dined with Trump at Mar-a-Lago in 2022, is of Mexican descent. Enrique Tarrio, the leader of the Proud Boys who was sentenced to 22 years in prison for his role in the Jan. 6 riots, is Afro-Cuban. Mauricio Garcia, a Hispanic mass murderer who killed eight people at a Dallas-area mall in 2023, had posted neo-Nazi rhetoric on his social media pages before his attack.

Academic research suggests that these are not just a handful of select examples. There are a significant number of right-leaning blacks and Latinos who hold far-right views, even to the point of outright bigotry.

In 2022, two scholars—Eitan Hirsh and Laura Royden—published the results of a large-scale nationwide survey on the prevalence of anti-Semitic views in the United States. Their study found that anti-Semitic attitudes are significantly more widespread on the right than on the left. But it also found clear racial differences among the right: Black and Latino conservatives are about 20 percentage points more likely to express anti-Semitic ideas than their white conservative counterparts.

Recent studies have also found that political conservatism among Latinos leads to higher levels of racial resentment toward blacks and greater skepticism about the role of racism in the progressive social exclusion of blacks. Another recent study found that conservative Latinos show higher levels of hostility toward illegal immigrants than their liberal or moderate peers and are more committed to reducing legal immigration rates.

A separate study of white and black Americans found that in both groups, “prejudiced attitudes toward Latinos … are consistently the most important factor in shaping opinions about the number of immigrants to accept and the consequences of immigration.”

This is not to say that most non-white conservatives are bigoted, or that racial minorities are more likely to hold bigoted attitudes than white Americans. All available research confirms common sense: that whites are far more likely to be white racists.

But this evidence also suggests that certain things that seem to be common sense—that black people like Mark Robinson, by definition, cannot be Nazis—just aren’t the reality. As bizarre as it may seem given traditional far-right attitudes toward racial minorities, there are prominent black and Latino Americans who hold bigoted and extreme views—and a small but notable percentage of the general population in both groups who agree with them. (Although Robinson denies writing the Nazi post, an overwhelming amount of evidence points to him as the author.)

So how can we understand this phenomenon?

One theory is that this is largely rooted in ideas about what it means to be American. Hostility toward other minority groups is a way for some blacks and Latinos to cement their place in the country—to distinguish themselves as good Americans from the bad others.

Journalist Paola Ramos proposes such an explanation in her recently published book Defectors: The Rise of the Latin American Right and Its Significance for AmericaAfter spending a day with Pedro Antonio Aguero, a far-right activist who obsessively patrols the southern border searching for undocumented migrants, Ramos wrote, “I felt that by hunting them down, he was distancing himself from them and from his own foreignness.”

Some academic research has reached similar conclusions. In one experiment, Latino respondents were presented with written materials that downplayed the status of Latinos in America. Some respondents saw a news report suggesting that Latinos in the U.S. perform poorly on metrics such as educational attainment; others saw the same report with an additional line comparing the scores of Latinos and blacks.

People who had seen the comparison story subsequently expressed a significantly higher negative attitude towards black people – with the increase interestingly being liberal Latinos (who were less prejudiced than conservatives before exposure, but equally prejudiced afterward). This, the researchers theorize, is because conservative Latinos already placed great value on their American identity and therefore had already incorporated this sense of status threat into their general worldview.

In her book American and Black, Niambi Carter of the University of Maryland argues that black skepticism about immigration is based on the fear that “whites may favor immigrants over blacks in hiring decisions, housing, and other social interactions.” It is, she writes, a “conflicted nativism” that stems from blacks’ insecurity about their own position and social status as Americans.

But that’s just a theory, and one that doesn’t explain all the facts. Some things, like the unusually high rates of anti-Semitism among black and Latino conservatives, are a little harder to fit into the script.

In their work on race and anti-Semitism, Hersh and Royden conclude that “the roots of anti-Semitic attitudes among minorities are broad rather than narrow, and are not well explained by current theories.” In fact, they say, no one really knows why anti-Semitism seems to be so disturbingly widespread among these groups.

In general, this is a topic that calls for caution. The phenomenon of right-wing extremist politics is relatively new, or at least has only been documented recently. Since we are only just beginning to deal with it, we cannot really say with certainty Why it happens. Social science and journalism are hard work, and there isn’t enough of either on this topic.

The only thing we can say for sure is that Mark Robinson calling himself a “black NAZI” is outlandish – but not as outlandish as it might seem. There are more people like him, and they will play a role in determining the future of the American right.

This story was adapted from the newsletter “On the Right.” New issues appear every Wednesday. Subscribe here.