White Supremacists

From The Boston Herald : November 7, 2001

WHITE SUPREMACIST LEAFLETS: A TRIVIAL CRIME WITH IMPORTANT CONSEQUENCES

Jack Levin

Last week, several hundred residents of Sharon, Massachusetts came together to participate in a candlelight vigil against hate, inspired by racist and anti-Semitic leaflets which were dumped, days earlier, on lawns across this Boston suburb. Local leaders held a day-long meeting to address the issue of bigotry and to find an appropriate long-term response. Many concerned Sharonites placed candles in their windows.

Why should so many people in a town like Sharon–a middle-class bedroom community--come together to protest such an apparently trivial event? After all, nobody was murdered, raped, or assaulted. There were no rocks thrown through the windows of synagogues; no crosses were burned. In fact, if any crime was committed at all, it was nothing more than littering. The answer is that hate thrives and prospers under conditions of silence and non-response.

The National Alliance, a West Virginia based white supremacist organization counted on its late night distribution of flyers in Sharon to provoke widespread anxiety and division. But the hate group never counted on local residents to respond instead by coming together in a broad-based coalition of Muslims, Christians, and Jews and by acquiring the strong backing of the Board of Selectmen, state representatives, School Committee, District Attorney’s office, local police, recreation department, Sharon Clergy Council, Islamic Center of New England, Office of the Superintendent of Schools, Gay./Straight Student Alliance, Council on Aging, Sharon Community Youth Coalition, ADL, and many Christian clergy and congregations in town. The response of members of the Sharon community could serve as a model for how to respond to hate incidents in general, even those that seem unimportant.

Where residents let the small incidents pass without response, hate can escalate into ever more serious offenses. Interpreting silence as support and encouragement, hatemongers are likely to take their tactics to a more dangerous level, stopping only when they have achieved their intended purpose.

Last month, for example, Donald Butler, a 29 year old black resident of Pemberton Township, Pennsylvania, was targeted by two white supremacists who shouted racial slurs at him as he stood on the front lawn of his home. Perhaps seeing the verbal abuse against their neighbor as an isolated and trivial event, Butler’s white neighbors did absolutely nothing to assure him of their support or indignation. Three weeks later, the same two hatemongers returned with baseball bats, this time invading Butler’s home in the dead of night where they brutally beat him and his wife. The Butlers escaped with stitches and broken bones, but they also felt hurt and alone, as if no one really cared. They have since relocated to another community.

The National Alliance has been associated with more than just littering. In the interest of establishing an all-White society, its members have distributed white power rock music and recruited many racist skinheads to the cause. Moreover, its leader, William Pierce, in his racist book The Turner Diaries, apparently provided the blueprint for Timothy McVeigh’s 1995 murder of 168 innocent people in Oklahoma City.

Hate is more than just an individual offense. It can poison the relations between groups and escalate into large-scale ethnic conflict. When thinking of the consequences of hate, we are likely first to imagine the horrible violence in Bosnia, Israel, or Northern Ireland. Or, we might recall the extraordinary murder of James Byrd, the Black resident of Jasper, Texas who was dragged to his death behind a pickup truck. But we should also never forget where hate begins–in the silence of ordinary people.