You will not here them say explicitly "we are racists" because like most institutions or groups, they want to recruit people. So they have to take positions more palatable that can help them dupe ignorant people into thinking their is any logic behind their beliefs.
Today it's beaten in to kids heads "being racist is wrong ok", but our school system basically stops there so they only superficially avoid the term because they know it's a losing battle if they don't.
They know full well they are racist but are more careful with their rhetoric than they have been in the past to attempt to make their hatred seem justified.
Thinking about your post made me think of something that may not be specifically relevant but is a general comment upon the broader scope of this whole thing.
While I think the KKK and the like are evil, from your comment I realized that they may not necessarily believe what they are doing is "right." The more intelligent within their ranks that penetrate the more "power play" type possitions in society like governmemt and law enforcement, might very well believe or know they are evil, but they have a "go for broke" attitude about everything they are doing. What they believe probably is not out of feeling it's "right", but out of desperation.
"We can't lose this position!"
"We need to be in charge."
"Things are better when we are the authority"
To me, that does not sound like a moral argument anyone at a decent intelligence can be convinced by. So it seems to fall inline with a desperate NEED rather than an actual belief in doing the right thing. While the dumber of the bunch of them must rationlize it as a concept of morality to combat cognative dissonance it probably isn't a factor to others.
So I would relate the force behind the evil in the KKK as related more to a feeling of needing to eat when one is starving rather than the feeling "I'm doing the right thing" when feeding or giving to the poor.