My Life After Hate: One Man's Journey To Love

[Recent news of bullying and hate in schools has sparked a debate over how best to teach kindness and respect. Change.org welcomes this guest post from Arno Michaels, a former white supremacist who now teaches peace. --Eds.] 

From my earliest memories, everyone told me how “gifted” I was. Teachers expected straight A's, and I delivered with little effort and even less engagement with the curriculum. By the time I reached high school, I was convinced—as many teenagers are—that school had nothing to offer, so I dropped out after sophomore year.

I became a skinhead because it was the most effective means of lashing out. My parents fought constantly. My schools were mundane to the point of nausea. I wasn't an anti-Semitic racist looking for a home; I was a hurt, angry, unchallenged teenager looking for the most dramatic means of pissing people off.

Once I discovered the shock value of the swastika, I ran with it. Ganging-up with a bunch of like-minded misfits, we formed a skinhead crew that leveraged the Holocaust as a means to pick a fight with society. No regard for the millions who were murdered. Not a thought for the millions left to suffer memories of horror and lost loved ones. Only a desperate need for an outlet. Rage was channeled into hate, which we then cultivated and disseminated.

As our drunken assaults and vandalism caught the attention of police and media, it also caught the attention of bitter old-guard racists, who we had emboldened to slither from their holes and bask in our brashness. Even as we laughed at their cowardice, we took heed of their words, which told us of a Jewish conspiracy to destroy the white race. The writings of George Lincoln Rockwell, William Pierce, and Ben Klassen were added to copies of Mein Kampf stolen from the public library and we began what was at the time seen as a process of enlightenment—a discovery of hidden knowledge.

Everything we had been taught in school, everything on TV and in newspapers, was “Jewish propaganda.” Any information which didn't affirm our assumed ideology of hate and supremacy was cast off as patently false. The “Jew Media” was seen as a single single-minded entity whose sole purpose was to bring about the downfall of our people.

For seven years I refused interaction with anyone but other racist white people. Our skinhead crew grew and seethed till the violence of our proteges brought us to subconsciously reconsider what sort of monsters we had created, and what sort of monsters we had become. But it was sheer exhaustion that caused the initial and ultimately triumphant fissures in the walls of hatred I had so diligently constructed and so ruthlessly guarded.

Ignorance isn't bliss; in fact, it takes a hell of a lot of work. Life teems with a staggering amount of data indicative that diversity is strength. Denying and deflecting such data during each waking moment is a Herculean task akin to trying to sweep the sand off a beach with a whisk-broom. Unconditional smiles freely given to me by people I had convinced myself to hate, and undeniable evidence of their contributions to culture, science, and simple quality-of-life uncovered the sputtering embers of my humanity, encouraging a flame that lit the way from hate to love. Once I took a peek outside the blinders I had voluntarily sheared my perspective with, the truth that we are all human beings in need of compassion and wonderfully capable of giving it resolved in scintillating glory.

A self-serving desire to shed the burden of hate and the lies it demanded, coupled with the stark reality that violent death or prison would take me from my daughter, moved me to take that first step. It wasn't till a year or so later, when I watched my little girl playing with other children who happened to have varying degrees of higher melanin content that I realized how truly wrong I was. They were all children. Not black children, or white children, but the sons and daughters of mothers and fathers.

Discovering the beautifully obvious was a rebirth. A desire to experience wonderful human diversity replaced irrational hatred. I began taking liberal arts classes at a local tech college, where an English professor introduced me to writing and new perspectives as I took in the wisdom of the black women in my critique group. Three years ago a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee encouraged my idea of writing a memoir. That memoir became a monthly online magazine dedicated to peace education called Life After Hate.

Since our launch on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day in 2010, we've published 10 issues with over 20 diverse contributors, as well as engaged in community outreach to help people of all ages, ethnicities, and socioeconomic backgrounds live more peaceful and compassionate lives.

The eleventh issue of Life After Hate will be available online on November 18 at lifeafterhate.org.

Photo credit: Fady Habib via Flickr