Strangers in the New Village
by Samantha Kutner
My trek into working to combat hate, polarization and violent extremism was an unconventional one, at least for an evidence-driven researcher. It came through memoir. First, the personal journals I have maintained religiously since sixth grade and then through reading the memoirs of others. I was taking a theory of terrorism class as an elective when I noticed that for all the case studies and theoretical models charting an individual’s trajectory into an extremist movement there were few models or case studies of people who were able to exit. That observation led me to my first research project, looking at memoirs of former extremists; seeing how they were able to re-enter society and rebuild their lives led me to transform my own path. Today I practice and research countering violent extremism.
As the spread of fascism, white supremacy, conspiracy theories, (and binary thinking that drive them abound), I am returning to a reflection on the observations I recognized in my analysis of memoir. Who has suffered most from the myth of white supremacy? Is it relegated to one group, or does it harm all of us? To answer these questions, I will look at the lives of two Americans who grappled with this issue in distinct periods of our nation’s history.
To the inexperienced eye, these two people might sit on opposite sides of the spectrum. However, their work reveals underlying commonalities that might help understand the psycho social element of ‘White nationalism,’ as distinct from merely a racial issue. These two individuals are James Baldwin, the great African American novelist, playwright, and activist, and Christian Picciolini, the former neo-Nazi and white supremacist who has authored his own memoir and works diligently to confront the white supremacist ideas he once adhered to and promoted.
Both Baldwin and Picciolini’s early upbringing colored their perception of the world and sent them on a quest for meaning, significance, and purpose. Ultimately, their early lives made them prisoners of their own powerlessness and frustration.
James Baldwin was a prolific writer of the civil rights era. He proposed a solution to racism decades before the resurgence of white nationalism, but in an era when many whites fought hard to preserve clear and apparent discrimination. He did it with a level of insight, clarity, and concision (in thought and writing style) that rivals any exhaustive academic research. His writing came from a place of brilliance and lived experience. His writing imparts a better grasp of the other side of racism and the historical and political era in which he lived. The same is true for Picciolini. As a former neo-Nazi, Picciolini writes about racism as a form of atonement. Both authors came from different eras and different sides of the racial divide, but both made crucial and essential discoveries in their efforts of imparting a nuanced grasp life in a country that has yet to shake the vestiges of white supremacy.
Baldwin was right to define white supremacy as a “delusion; one that victimizes all American citizens.” This delusion takes different forms, but one thing is certain: all American citizens must choose between a delusion 250 years in the making and reality. When American citizens are lonely and isolated, the delusion acts as a security blanket. The delusion secures their place in the world. The delusion absolves them of the effort in constructing their identity. I will explore how these tensions are similarly managed in both Baldwin’s Notes of a Native Son and Picciolini’s Romantic Violence: Memoirs of an American Skinhead.
Bitterness
Bitterness thrives in a constant state of tension. There is a tension between (1) who you are and who you want to be, (2) who you were and never want to be again and (3) who you pray to never become.
Picciolini begins his memoir by distancing himself from these three facets of his identity. “I am not my father.” Picciolini asserts, “Not my grandparents. I am neither my brother nor my friends. My life is my own. (…) The actions and decisions of my youth and early adulthood were not determined by anyone who came before me. I am my own invention, shaped by my own imagination and ambition.”
Baldwin’s work also deconstructs and reconstructs his identity through revisiting his past. Both men grew up in neglectful homes, wanting to be accepted. Picciolini dreamt of being the kid others wanted to play with. Baldwin dreamt of being accepted as a black man in America. Each memoir charts the trajectory between these varying states of tension.
In romantic Violence, Picciolini moves through these tensions in a linear fashion. He begins with a muted, optimistic tone that becomes increasingly more nihilistic. Picciolini’s process of radicalization quickly transformed him from a bullied teen to a noble warrior fighting for racial purity. After his recruitment and indoctrination, his wording shifts significantly; begins to reflect the binary “us” versus “them” thinking some common in alt right recruits. Later on, as a new father and business owner, he begins to reflect on how his choices had the potential to harm his children and his brother, someone who idolized him. In his music shop, he begins empathizing with his customers of diverse backgrounds and faiths; customers he was previously conditioned to hate. Picciolinty expanded his narrow grasp on the other to reduce his tension. Baldwin, in contrast, emphasized his tension. He encouraged others to identify with his plight, to not let him shoulder the burden of being a black man in America alone. Baldwin could articulate his anger, trace its origins, and show America a part of themselves they sought to forget. Both writer and alchemist, he transformed his tension an American problem.
On Fathers
As Picciolini recounts never wanting to be like the members of the Hammerskins, Baldwin recounts never wanting to be like his father. Both construct this aspect of their identity out of these parallel fears.
“It seems typical of life in America, where opportunities, real and fancied, are thicker than anywhere else on the globe, that the second generation has no time to talk to the first (p. 86.).
Here, Baldwin mournfully reflects on what it takes to uphold a similar delusion: The Myth of the American dream. Picciolini’s memoir mourned the American dream as well. His parents also worked tirelessly in pursuit of this myth, leaving him lonely, atomized, and susceptible to recruitment.
Baldwin did not seek out his parent’s approval as actively; rather than negligent, Baldwin’s father was prone to being abusive. His identity is largely constructed out of a fear of becoming his father, of inheriting his father’s bitterness. This is exemplified in the following passage. “I saw this has been for my ancestors and now would be for me an awful thing to live with and that the bitterness which had helped kill my father could also kill me” (88–89).
Black men in our society are not “allowed” an identity. They are seen, on an implicit level, as more of a place, a container to hold the inferiority one might feel about themselves. Society has cultivated them as psychological buffers between white men and their own collective self-hatred. Baldwin notes this silent designation, writing, “One would say the Negro does not really exist except in the darkness of our minds.” In Who You Can’t Escape
Many Thousands Gone, Baldwin uses darkness to evoke the psychological function of racism. He uses darkness to show what we are obscuring from ourselves, the reality that race is a sordid work of fiction, with very real repercussions. Baldwin’s status as a black man in America was as inescapable as Picciolini could not escape his family’s working class status, often shuffling between two homes with no solid footing in either. His father worked long hours and he was left playing alone or watching kids on the block, desperately wanting to fit in. He recounts feeling mortified by the thought that his mother could run into the cafeteria and bring him fast food, further conveying to his peers that he did not belong.
Who You Aspire to Be: How One Mentor Can Change Everything
One illuminating figure in Baldwin’s early life was his public-school instructor. She recognized his talent and helped enrich worldview. He paid his respects to her, saying, “[P]artly because of her, who arrived in my terrifying life so soon, that I never really managed to hate white people.”
Picciolini was not so fortunate. When he was fourteen, a man named Clark Martell approached him, knocked the joint he was smoking out of his mouth and said, “Don’t you know that’s what the communists want you to do?!” Picciolini recalled that as a 14 year old, he had never met a communist in his life. He was, however, drawn to Martell’s fatherly concern; a concern largely absent in his upbringing. In that moment, he was able to see a father figure in this charismatic leader. The hatred Martell was espousing as part of a new movement would come later. Martell was an exemplar of “the new white man” America created. Baldwin presaged this kind of man when he wrote, “People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence, long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster.” Picciolini’s need to belong was the same as Baldwin’s, he just had the misfortune of being exploited by one of the monsters who developed the American neo-Nazi movement.
Inheritance and Powerlessness
Baldwin’s themes of inheritance and powerlessness stand out in one excerpt. In Stranger in Paris, Baldwin articulates the futility of moving to another country to escape racism, “And this is so despite everything I may do to feel differently, despite my friendly conversations with the bistro owner’s wife, despite their three-year-old son who has at last become my friend, despite the saluts and bonsoirs which I exchange with people as I walk, despite the fact that I know that no individual can be taken to task for what history is doing, or has done.” His sense of powerlessness is conveyed in the repetition of “despite.” You can feel the weight of the word getting progressively heavier, as his resolve weakens.
Picciolini conveyed his powerlessness in a different manner. Rather than summon a level of emotional intelligence atypical of a teenager (and perhaps come to the realization that his parents have sacrificed their time with him to ensure a better future), he grafts his pain onto black and Jewish bodies. For a brief period of time in his young life, he felt he could escape himself. But whether he wrote lyrics for neo-Nazi bands to platform his views or threw himself into his new mission he could not shake his self-hatred. At some point, he decided to look inward and confront that dark part of himself as the “new white man.” He is not one of the leading anti-hate activists in the country.
Clark Martell did not look inward. Did not confront his own darkness. He had a psychotic breakdown in prison. The man who recruited Picciolini is a case study the following: what happens when the hatred one has stockpiled can no longer be projected onto the mythical ‘other’? What happens when the hatred can no longer be grafted onto brown bodies, can no longer be used to attribute personal failures to secret Jewish organizations? As the Martell case highlights, hate is never a source of real empowerment. It is a corrosive substance that has migrated from the threads of 4chan to our current political landscape. I worry for the men who have taken the redpill, i.e. adopted the belief that their suffering is caused by male subjugation by women under feminism. I wonder what they may have needed in their lives to resist the allure of the redpill. I wonder how many helpers exist to bring them into the light. I wonder how many Clark Martells sit perched in online platforms, waiting to exploit their needs and recruit their footsoldiers.
Human beings will hate each other to death in order to fill something missing in their lives. Baldwin was able to transcend his limitations as a black American male by reframing his experience as the product of American pathology. He refused to accept a society that encouraged him to hate himself. Picciolini transcended his limitations as well, as a man born into the same white supremacist delusion.
We, as a society, need to understand that the roots of extremism thrive in isolation. That radicalization starts with the belief that one is a stranger to others. It starts with the belief that one exists in a world separate from their community. It is this atomization that drives men like Picciolini to men like Clark Martell, Richard Spencer, and Gavin McInnes. It is atomization that drives men to watch hours of conspiratorial content and come to endorse beliefs they would never have endorsed had someone had the patience to help lead them back to their community.
Earlier in my analysis, I asked who white supremacy hurts most. The answer is this: the myth of white supremacy is not relegated to one author, one group, or one community. It is a pathology that harms us all; a delusion that we will always be strangers inhabiting two worlds. A delusion that posits that we cannot confront this darkness together. That we cannot unify and strengthen our resolve as a nation, together. The reality is that we can. Through bringing to light every form of collusion with police and far right organizers. Through understanding that we live in an age of intersecting extremisms. We must understand the nuances between crypto fascism, neo-Nazism, white nationalism, misogyny and fascism and understand how they work in tandem. We must support organizations like Light Upon Light who are tasked with understanding what leads young white men down the path of radicalization. We can all work within our communities to effect positive change. We can confront this darkness together. We only have to introduce ourselves as humans first.
Originally published at https://www.lightuponlight.online.
