I Will Not Be an Enemy of Anything
The moment I first witnessed racism and why I remembered it today
On the morning of July 16, 1993, federal agents and LAPD officers conducted a series of coordinated raids throughout LA, Long Beach and Orange County. They arrested eight suspected white supremacists, some of whom were members of the Fourth Reich Skinheads, a militant wing of the White Aryan resistance. Authorities accused the skinheads of plotting a race war in Southern California, with specific designs to murder Rodney King, blow-up the First African Methodist Episcopal Church, and attack prominent African-American and Jewish leaders in the area. Several of those arrested were ordered held without bail.
As part of their court-mandated rehabilitation, those arrested were ordered to spend a day at the Museum of Tolerance in Beverly Hills. I was working as a docent manager at MOT at that time, and I was tasked with leading the skinheads' parents and guardians through the museum. As you might imagine, the skinhead doesn't fall far from the hate tree. I’d encountered my share of intolerance before but that day in the museum exposed me to the psychological aspect of racism and anti-Semitism.
At the time, the Museum of Tolerance was a brand new, $50 million sacred space. Visitors witnessed exhibits exposing acts of intolerance, genocide, racial and religious hatred, the Civil Rights Movement and the holocaust. An entire wall of black and white TV screens projected video clips of African-Americans being beaten by clubs on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, being blown down the street by powerful fire hoses, and white politicians proclaiming black people were lesser human beings and didn't belong in "white places." Museum visitors routinely broke down in tears in front of this wall. Body-shaking sobbing. Supportive embraces from friends and family members who understood the reason for the breakdown. For many visitors this was a first, overdue exposure to man's inhumanity to man, and the impact was often concussive. As it should be.
The skinheads' parents behaved as though the abject hatred being displayed on those screens was funny. They giggled, as if they were watching Beavis and Butthead rather than actual human beings experiencing state-sponsored violence. They cheered on the men with the fire hoses. The people I was leading through the museum were the very reason it was constructed. I was at once gobsmacked by their callousness and furiously angry at their flippant, cavalier attitudes toward the suffering of others. I’d never seen anything like it and I have tried to no avail for thirty years to understand it. I swallowed a lot of strong words and feelings that day, and even now I still fantasize about having handled it primally rather than professionally.
I’m a big fan of taking good music lyrics and interpreting them to support my own needs, and I’m doing that today with an old Counting Crows song called “Angels of the Silences.” I think it’s a breakup song but there’s a line I’ve kept in my mind about tolerance: “Well I will not be an enemy of anything. I’ll only stand here, waiting for you.” Some say it’s not enough merely to be tolerant; one must fight intolerance and root it out wherever it lives. I see it differently. I think those of us who model tolerance and acceptance are showing the next generation how it’s done. We can fight intolerance by demonstrating tolerance.
I’m bringing this up today because I heard a politician call Kamala Harris “the DEI candidate” and I was deeply offended. In my opinion, that is a fundamentally racist comment. It’s an attempt to invalidate someone’s demonstrable legitimacy because she’s black, and I reject that behavior with everything inside me. As with the skinhead parents, there’s a sense that the suffering of others is a viable source of entertainment, that disrespecting and delegitimizing anyone who isn’t white is well within the bounds of acceptable behavior. It is the opposite of tolerance.
The culmination of the Museum of Tolerance tour was a fifteen-minute walk through a holocaust exhibit. At the entrance to this section of the museum, each visitor was handed a white, credit-card-sized piece of plastic with a black-and-white photo of a child on the front. At checkpoints throughout the holocaust exhibit, visitors could slide the card into a reader and be shown a progress report on the child as he/she endured the war. Many visitors (I think we were supposed to call them “guests”) ultimately learn the children on their cards were killed in Nazi gas chambers. Finally, in the last stop before the end of the tour, visitors entered a massive, true-to-life replica of those gas chambers. Concrete. Steel. Darkness. Harsh reality. The first time I saw it I sat in silence for what felt like an hour, dumbfounded by the emotions, the scale of the Nazi extermination activities and the sheer number of people killed this way. One-point-one million at Auschwitz alone.
As part of the research for the other book I'm writing, I read testimony from a former Nazi guard whose job it was to operate a gas chamber at one concentration camp or another. He articulated what it sounded like from right outside the door as dozens of Jews were murdered inside and what they did with the bodies when they’d been rendered lifeless. I'll spare you the details but you can imagine them. And in this modern replica of that horror at MOT, the parents of the skinheads really enjoyed themselves. More laughter. More witty banter. Not a whiff of empathy. People being who they were, who their kids watched and learned from, who today are probably big Trump fans because he simply will not condemn intolerance or violence.
This museum story flooded back to me when I heard the term “DEI candidate.” I don’t know which politician used the term, and I guess it doesn’t really matter. And I’m not naive enough to believe there aren’t also intolerant folks on the other side of the aisle. But holy crap, guys. What are we doing? Are we suggesting that only white men are capable of running the country? Are we actually trying to defeat a candidate for president on the basis of her skin color, as if this were the sixties and we don’t want “her kind” using our bathroom? This is ignorant, knuckle-scraping Neanderthal shit. I’m personally devastated that we’re not better than this by now.
Quick history nugget. On the night of March 7, 1965, “The ABC Sunday Night Movie” was Judgement at Nuremberg, the Best Picture-nominated 1961 film featuring Spencer Tracy and Burt Lancaster. The film is based on the Nuremberg Trials, during which Nazi leadership who perpetrated the holocaust were tried for their crimes against humanity. In many American households, it was the first exposure to the horrors of the holocaust (the film contained actual footage of mass graves and other gruesome findings). One imagines many of the forty-eight million viewers that night were aghast, as any well-adjusted person would be—but just imagine how they felt at 9:30 that night when ABC interrupted the movie with a special breaking news report about “Bloody Sunday”, the beating of African-American marchers (including John Lewis) on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, AL earlier that day. Boom. A one-two punch of anti-Semitism and racism broadcast into living rooms nationwide. Suddenly the option of just not paying attention to what was happening was gone and the country was forced to look at itself.
I believe this moment in American history is a pivot point, just as March 7, 1965 was. The overt racism is right here in our faces, unmistakable, just as it was that night on ABC. Our social and cultural progress has not merely been halted; it’s in reverse. And now there’s this fledgling notion that overt racism is once again a viable, winnable tactic in political discourse. The DEI candidate. In reading those words I learn so much more about the person who said it than I do about the target of his/her ignorant hatred. It was funny to the skinheads’ parents that black innocents were suffering unimaginable pain (Lewis had his skull fractured). It is funny to some of our leaders that they have the convenient vice of hatred in their back pockets and they sprinkle it around in the media (dressed as humor, always) and are lauded for it by their spineless colleagues.
I don’t find it funny at all. I find it disqualifying. I find it repulsive. Worst of all, I find it very familiar.