Prison administrators will tell you it is because we are “racists,” “hate-mongers,” and “Nazis.” To be fair, there are a few gang members who fit this mold. However, whites start and join prison gangs for none of these reasons. White gangs have very little real structure and engage in very few organized activities inside prison, much less beyond prison walls. They join for survival. I cannot think of a single white gang here in Texas prisons that started on the outside. That is simply not the way the vast majority of our people live. This is not the case with the non-white gangs. The Crips, Bloods, Gangster Disciples, Mexican Mafia, Texas Syndicate, Raza United, and Azteca — just to name a few — are vast criminal empires. Most started outside prison as criminal gangs and simply maintain their structure on both sides of the wall.

In prison, whites learn very quickly that they need a racial consciousness in order to survive. That is just as forbidden here as it is on the outside, so we are the ones who are punished because of racial conflict. I would say 80 percent of blacks and Hispanics are already members of street or prison gangs when they get here. Thus they already have a group to which they can turn for protection. Almost no whites are members of anything when they arrive, but a large majority end up joining.

White gangs are lumped in with criminal gangs of this kind, but even worse, they are the only ones labeled as “racist” or “supremacist.” So the irony is that although most of the blacks and Hispanics come here as full members of racially exclusive street/prison gangs who hate whites, we are the ones who are called “haters.” The administration understands this, of course, but claims it has no control over how they classify us. At the same time, most of the lower-level guards are non-whites who share the same enmity towards us as the other prisoners.