The Hate Next Door

This one had a lot of things that I'm an absolute sucker for, mainly an author having good things to say about their spouse, maybe it's because for most of my life it seemed like no one in the movies, TV or books had anything good to say about their spouses that seeing someone having only good things to say about their spouse and appreciating them makes me happy but regardless of the reason I enjoyed the fact that Browning spoke of his wife and family with a lot of love and pride. The autobiography aspect of this book is powerful and very human, Browning is honest about his moments of despair and the toll the path he chose took on him and his mental health.

I enjoyed that Browning was pretty realistic about the law enforcement machine, the drive for it to make money, the way it's too easy for white supremacist to slip through the cracks and become police officers and so on. It's something a lot of people from outside of law enforcement have been saying for a long time but for someone who made their career in that system to outright say it is pretty solid.

He paints an extremely bleak but real picture of how supremacist groups infiltrated and positioned themselves in a variety of positions both elected and non-elected and subtly use the power they thus acquired in ways that allow them to act with near total impunity.

Browning does a pretty good job of explaining concepts, groups and figures so that even someone with little to no knowledge of the topic can understand and not need to do a bunch of side research to figure out who's who and what's what.

Now for what I didn't enjoy as much. The structure of this book was a bit of a struggle for me, we would be deep into something that happened a “long” time ago and suddenly a wild example of recent racially motivated violence appears that gave the book somewhat of a disjointed feeling.

At the end of the book there's a nifty list of symbols and dog whistles to recognize associated with white supremacist people/groups and while Browning included warning that context matters for a lot of them, I was surprised to see that he did not include such a warning for ACAB because the vast majority of the people I've seen using that one are not white supremacists in the least (it might vary depending where you live but yeah ACAB is definitely not a sure sign of white supremacist ideologies/sympathies or of violent ideology in fact a lot of the people who espouse it actually want less violence and hate through the abolition of a deeply flawed system of enforcement of the capitalist status quo and while I can understand why it might feel hateful for the cops who are part of the organization I think the nuance is important here) Just like I was a little taken aback by the handful of times he brought up Antifa because try as I may I have still to see anyone provide evidence of any group organized around the anti-fascist ideology in a similar way to white supremacist groups even exists. I don't think these things should be ground to outright dismiss this book and Browning's work, it its obvious that both him and his family made great sacrifices in order to fight extremism and that they show a very deep level of empathy and humanity, I just think it's worth being aware of them.

I received a digital review copy of this book from Sourcebooks through Netgalley and this is my honest review.