Earlier this year Arno Michaels, an ex-skinhead, founder of the website Lifeafterhate.org, and author of the book “My Life After Hate”, explained how he abandoned his old life and talked about how skinheads justified targeting homosexuals, Jews, blacks, and anyone else . Originally published in the Wisconsin Gazette, parts of it where excerpted on the website Queerty. Needless to say, it got a response.
My experience with ex-skinheads has
been limited to watching American History X, and a brief conversation a
long time ago, at a house party in Florida, with one who after getting a
SS tattoo decided it was stupid and time to get out. Reading the
responses to Arno Michaels’ interview bought up all types of issues of
forgiveness, gay skinheads,
skepticism, etc. So many issues were bought up that I struggle writing
this, cause I don’t even know where to begin. The best place to start I
figure would be with Arno Michaels, the catalyst and cause of
conversation.
After reading his autobiography “My Life After Hate”, to
describe Arno Michaels when he was a young skinhead as a feral drunk
would not be adequate enough. For someone whose descent into hate is a
harrowing experience, he comes across a bit like the Lord Byron of Skinheads: mad, bad, and dangerous to know.
Quite a few passages describe violent encounters, from
facing off against angry protesters at a rally where he knocks out some
one’s teeth with a metal shield, to an encounter at a party where he
brutally beats a hippie partygoer unconscious after a unsuccessful
attempt to stand up to his crew of skinheads.
The subsequent visit to the hospital to obtain stitches for a head
injury that left his skull exposed is also detailed. But what makes this
more than a record of gladiatorial combat in the name of saving the white race is the many unexpected aspects of his life.
No one expects a tattooed racist thug to also be a big Dungeons and
Dragon fans, or that somebody who used to be a break-dancer and big-time
Beastie Boys
fan would eventually become a member of Centurion, one of the biggest
racist bands of the 1990′s. Having to think about a hostile, violent
menace in a very human way is not something new to anyone who is a
minority. It’s a reminder that people who you struggle with are human
too. This fact of humanity haunts Arno Michaels in certain encounters,
such as when skinhead compatriots of his sliced up the face of a
homeless black man, and eventually helps change his racist ways, like
when he watched his young daughter playing with classmates of different
races.
Not highlighted, but most likely self-evident to the author in
retrospect, and very apparent to readers, is some of the ridiculous
behavior that was expected of him and his fellow skinheads.
Swearing off watching Seinfeld, because of the shows many notable
Jewish characters and actors was one of them. This and many other
behaviors separated him and other skinheads into an insular close-minded society.
A important part of this environment was the rampant encouraged drinking, which aided Arno Michaels’ alcohol abuse.
Violence and alcoholism kept him and others in as frenzied, drunk, and violent a state as possible, in the name of keeping white folks pure and prepared for a grand race war that Arno and other skinheads, imagined themselves the frontline for.
I’ve never known any environment like this (even minus the racist
ideologies and motivations) to not have tragic consequences, and Arno’s
story isn’t an exception. One of his tragedies was a young friend of his
who he introduced to the skinhead life style being shoot and killed in a
streetfight.
Arno Michaels has a clear eye in retrospect in describing many
aspects of his former life. One aspect he describes is the motivation of
racial superiority, how despite his low social status, poverty, and
alcohol abuse he was able to hold on to the “better than thou” attitude
towards non-whites:
“If you’re going on a premise that the white race is something special and that it needs to be saved from ‘non-whites’,
you need to be able to justify the hows and whys of that—namely the
whys. Why your people are superior to their people. Never mind that your
way of life is almost indistinguishable from theirs. Never mind that
you’re a raging alcoholic and that you work a shitty minimum-wage job
and that you go around and start fights with honest people on the
street. That’s all really beside the point, because you are ‘fighting
for your race’, and your race is something worth saving because pretty
much anything worth anything was, according to us, invented by white people.”
Now there is no such thing as a unchallenged premise and “My
Life after Hate.” is no exception. There were quite a few contentious
commenters on Queerty who were skeptical of Arno Michaels’
transformation and refutation of his old life, and I doubt his former
compatriots from the white power movement
would be happy with his decisions. Being morbidly curious, I checked
out the reaction on Stormfront.org, the most popular white supremacy site on the Internet, for their enlightened reaction.
Some of the Folks you would encounter on Stormfront:
Being the enlightened and tolerant types, some of their reactions to
Arno Michael’s rejection of a shared racist ideal with them include:
Accusations of being a “Secret Jew”:
This guy probably found out he had Jewish heritage, because I
have observed quite a number of Jews with the surname ‘Michaels’ or
‘Michael.’
And false equivalence:
You know what’s funny, even if his story is true and he saw his kid playing with a non-white in pre school, how come we never hear stories about how the black kid now thinks differently about skinheads after playing with one of their kids?
It’s always the same, “Blah blah blah I got trapped in an
elevator with a black guy for 10 minutes and realized I didn’t want to
kill him anymore…”
If meeting a nice, well educated black person is supposed to
“change my thinking” about all black people, how come meeting a nice,
well educated racist doesn’t change black peoples’ thinking about us? (Where to even begin to reply to this one…….)
I first encountered this post on was on Queerty, a news site
dedicated to gay news, as Arno was was discussing the skinhead attitude
towards gays. The reaction to his article was interesting to say the
least. But one of the most interesting things I encountered was finding
out in the very first comment about Nicky Crane, a figure in Britain’s White Power movement who also happened to be gay…
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