Let Me Tell You a Story: Nazis in America. Still.

Let Me Tell You A Story: Healing Our Relationships With The Earth, With Others, and With Ourselves

The following is a segment in the multi-part Let Me Tell You A Story series. This series is focused on identifying, describing, and understanding aspects of my culture(s) that are largely invisible, but that are traumatic to the earth, to outgroups, and to ourselves. I am not the only person to have noticed that our society is sick, and I am not the only person to explore this sickness in the hopes of healing. This series is as much a personal exploration as it is a critical examination of our society. This series is a starting point for consideration and conversation. You are invited to come along.

Come in, sit down. Let’s talk.
 

Let Me Tell You a Story: Nazis in America. Still.

Let me tell you a story. When I was 18 years old, my mom and I went to a protest on the steps of the Memphis courthouse. I’m from Memphis, but I was in college at the time. I drove back home for this event with a group of activists I was friends with. My mom went with a group of activists she was friends with. We were two very different groups of activists – college radicals and middle-aged church ladies – but we were there for a common purpose.

It was the weekend of Martin Luther King, Jr. Day and the Ku Klux Klan had decided that that was the perfect opportunity to get a permit to demonstrate on the steps of the Memphis courthouse about white nationalism and the dangers of multiculturalism. This particular sect of the Klan was renowned for inciting violence at their rallies – which, they would then, of course, point to as evidence of how violent the counter-protesters are. And if the counter-demonstrators were Black? Oh man. You see? You see? Case in point. So violent.

I remember that Memphis had been talking about this event for weeks. It was 1998 for God’s sake! WTF were the Klan still doing here? This kind of racism was antiquated. Get with the program, KKK – you’re not supposed to exist anymore. Remember how we sorted this issue out decades ago? I mean, sure, we've still got a long way to go with racism, but as a country we at least had all agreed that the KKK was not who we are.

And so, for us, now, in modern times – Would it be better to show up? To show them and the world that we will not stand for this kind of hate? Or would it be better to ignore them? To show that they have no power anymore? To show that this kind of hate is not even worth our bother?

I mean, jeez, this particular group of Klansmen were regulars on the Jerry Springer Show. They were a joke.

But they were a hate-filled joke shouting their hate on a weekend commemorating one of America’s great heroes on the steps of the courthouse in the city where he was assassinated.

We showed up. A lot of us showed up.

Lay down. Go limp. Any sign of struggle will be taken as violent resistance. Attempting to stay on your feet and shield yourself from blows will be taken as violent resistance.

And Lord, we knew there was going to be violence. Everyone knew there was going to be violence. This group was known for inciting violence. It was their thing. There were cops everywhere. Security checkpoints at every street corner at a two or three block radius. Sniper-looking cops on rooftops and in high-rise windows (unlikely they actually had sniper rifles; I’m sure it was for vantage and reporting to folks on the ground) (but jeez, it was creepy). There was a chain of cops creating a barricade around the Klan, and further levels of cops reinforcing the barricade behind them. And yes, the cops were protecting the Klan. The Klan had a permit. Free speech is protected by the state.

Free speech does not mean that other people can’t shout back at you that you’re a goddamned idiot for what you're saying. That’s what we were there for.

The mood of the protest was actually quite festive. To this day, it is the funnest protest I have ever been to. My mom and her friends found a ledge on the steps of a nearby building where they could hold their signs and chant and sing, with a good view from the periphery of the crowd. My friends and I were in the thick of it – on the ground, right up in the front of everything. 

In the crowd, man, seriously, it was so much fun. Everyone, and I mean everyone who was down there was your friend. We were cracking jokes with strangers, singing songs together, dancing with each other, interspersed with turning around and flipping off the Klan and yelling ‘fuck you’ at their hate speech and giving advice to each other about what to do if the cops started beating protesters.

Lay down. Go limp. Any sign of struggle will be taken as violent resistance. Attempting to stay on your feet and shield yourself from blows will be taken as violent resistance.

And then we’d dance and laugh and sing and yell ‘fuck you’ at the Ku Klux Klan. Funnest protest? Heck, that might even be one of my top ten funnest events ever.

I was right up front, and I debriefed with some protesters from other areas of the crowd later on, including my mom, to figure out the full story of the event. And so here’s what happened.

A lady a few people up from me got into the face of some of the cops, yelling that they should take off their masks and own their shame if they were going to protect the KKK. Yes, some of the cops were wearing masks. In my memory, it was Black cops who were wearing masks. They were performing their duty as cops, but it was not where they wanted to be as human beings.

Some folks behind us heard the yelling and wanted to see what was happening. They pushed forward. The cops saw the push in the crowd, and they pushed forward. The folks behind us saw the cops were doing something. They pushed forward. The cops pushed forward. Etc. 

We were in the middle.

I fell to the ground in a crush of bodies, unable to think, unable to breathe. It was a surprisingly calm experience for me. “Oh,” I thought, “This is how I die.” Like I had always wondered and here it was. Question answered.

People were yelling. The force, the weight bearing down on me, was incredible. And then one, loud, clear, booming voice rose above the rest. “WE’RE TRYING TO PICK THEM UP!” People backed off. The pressure lifted. Air refilled my lungs. I didn’t die. Limbs and bodies got picked up off of me. A yellow-and-black-sleeved arm grabbed me around my middle and lifted me to my feet.

I never saw the person attached to that arm.

But at about that moment, I learned later, some kids were flashing gang signs in the back of the crowd and someone threw an empty coke can. The police thought it was a bomb. They stared firing off pepper spray and tear gas and mace into the crowd.

If you’ve never been pepper sprayed, let me tell you what. It’s like the entire world has become pepper. Every contact you have with the world, every thought and sensory experience, is pepper. Your skin burns, your eyes burn, your nose and mouth and throat and lungs and ears and brain burns. It’s gritty in texture and all-consuming in substance and painful everywhere. And then it burns again later when you take a shower to wash it off. Fuck the Ku Klux Klan and fuck pepper spray.

My mom got maced in her part of the crowd. She describes a different experience with that chemical.

But our reactions were the same, the same as everybody’s – RUN. A scream let up from the crowd. My god, the noise of screaming fear, that many voices ringing together with the burst of tear gas canons and the thunder of footsteps – people running away, police surging in. The noise was incredible. I will never forget it.

I ran.

I ran about a block and turned around to catch my bearings. A Black woman stopped with me, assessed me looking back, concerned.

“Did you lose someone?”

“My mom…” I started to say.

The line of cops was storming in our direction with batons and chemical irritants and heavy boots and gas masks.

“Honey, we need to run now,” she said, and she took my hand.

We ran together, hand in hand, for another four or so blocks until the crowd was suitably dispersed. We parted ways, ducking down different side streets. I still remember her face.

I didn’t know where to go. I wandered around downtown Memphis for a while, and eventually went back to the site of the protest once it was calm again. People were gathering in small groups to talk about what had happened. I heard a voice in one of these groups talking about what had happened when we fell in the crush. He was not among the people who had fallen. I looked over. It was the sleeve.

“Oh my god, it was you who picked me up!”

We talked for some time. I got different pieces of the story. I found my friends. Two of them had been beaten by the cops. One of them, a young woman my age and my size and my inclination toward violence (pacifist, and anyway kind of a chicken) was beside herself, holding her arm with a giant red welt.

“They hit me with a baton. We were running away. I don’t know why they hit me.”

That night at home my mom and I swapped stories with each other, with my dad, and my sisters. We both had so many funny, delightful, endearing, and ultimately heart-warming stories of what it was like in the protest, right up until the minute we got gassed and everyone ran away.

We watched the news that night, hoping to get some final answers about why exactly they had gassed us, and what had happened with the rest of the hate rally after we were dispersed.

Instead, the headline was “Protesters erupt in violence on the steps of the Memphis courthouse!” and the video clips were shaky two-second disjointed clips of people screaming and running away. “Just look at the violence,” the reporters said, shaking their heads. “Look at the violence.”

I’m still enraged when I think of it. And I think of it every time I see a news report about protesters being violent. That was not violence. That was screaming and running away.

...

But I’m not done yet, because let me tell you another story. This one happened maybe 8 or 9 years later, I think in 2006. I tried to google the event to find news about it so I could make sure of the date but… god help us, there are too many similar events in the past few years that I can’t find this one time it happened about a decade ago.

Fuck, fuck, fuck. This is so dismaying. 

Fuck.

And then the Nazis stormed in. I remember it like a feeling of dread pulled my eyes backward, but did the dread actually kick in after I glanced back? I don’t know. 

I did youth outreach in Chicago as a full-time volunteer from 2003-2007. I worked mostly (but not solely) with Mexican and other Hispanic immigrants. We wrote and performed plays, created art and comic books, played basketball and music, had study hall and computer lab and church events and community events and god, too many billions of wonderful instances and activities in these kids’ development into the community leaders they are today… I just can’t even tell you all of the wonderfulness. I’m still facebook friends with a lot of these “kids” (they’re still my kids even though they're grown adults with degrees and careers and kids of their own). They are amazing people and I am so proud to know them.

A group of them, still teenagers at the time, had helped organize a demonstration for the Dream Act, including a rally in downtown Chicago and a Freedom Ride to DC. Michael and I were there serving as peacekeepers with 8^th Day Center for Justice, where Michael worked as a full-time volunteer for those four years. Our role was to help people be calm if anything happened, to de-escalate any tensions or violence, and generally to keep the peace.

There was a barricade and a line of cops along the street on one side of the square, and across that street were the counter-demonstrators. This time, it was us being protected from the racists. We were the ones with the permit.

The counter-protesters had Confederate flags and signs telling us to go back to our country and to speak English and what not. So, two points about this. First, it always amazes me that people assume everyone who is supportive of a minority issue is part of that minority. We’ve all got brains and voices, and lots of people believe that equality doesn’t just mean equality for me. And the second point is that one of the signs about speaking English was spelled wrong! It’s always hysterical when it happens on the internet, but when it happens at your very own rally? Priceless.

The vibe was really different than at the KKK rally previously. And maybe part of that is the difference between being the ralliers and the people protesting the rally – like, we were there for our purpose, not to just dance and crack jokes about their purpose. I don’t know. But while there was certainly passion and rampant friendliness, it was far more subdued.

As a peacekeeper, I was standing near the police line that overlooked the hate speech signs. It was the most likely place for altercation. But really, the majority of folks I remember yelling at the counter-demonstrators were the skinny vegan white boys from Anti-Racist Action (ARA). These guys are anarchists (by which I mean, that is their noted political leaning) (I’m not an anarchist myself, but I actually really respect it as a philosophy), and part of the mission of their organization is to stand up to racism anywhere and everywhere it appears.

So of course they’re yelling at the guys holding up racist signs across the street. It’s their thing.

But like, the other folks from the crowd who would come over to look at the counterdemonstrators? There really wasn’t so much of that joy in disagreeing, that joy in yelling ‘fuck you’ that I’d experienced at the Klan rally almost a decade previously. This crowd was calmer. They’d walk over and read the signs. The younger folks might (or might not) yell back, but the older folks especially would just look… sad.

This again? 

Still?

One Hispanic man standing near me was reading over the signs. He noticed the misspelled sign, and – classic protest faux pas – one guy had his hate sign upside down! We caught each other’s eye and giggled, rolled our eyes, shared a moment. And then he wandered back into the main rally.

It was nice.

And then the Nazis stormed in.

So I want to be very clear about this, because that sounds like hyperbole, but this is what happened. I was on the edge of the crowd by the street that lined one side of the square, by the cops, across from the counter-protesters, and I looked back behind us. I remember it like a feeling of dread pulled my eyes backward, but did the dread actually kick in after I glanced back? I don’t know. All I know is that past the end of the police barricade, back behind the crowd, a group of 20 or 30 Nazis, full-on skinhead, muscly ripped, angry white men with an 8-foot swastika flag turned the corner of the building lining the back of the square, literally appearing from nowhere, and stormed toward us.

The crowd – including my kids, my teens that I worked with, and families with children and elders and strollers – did not see them coming. They were facing the stage to the front while a group of Nazis with hate in their bodies and faces stormed in from behind.

“Oh, fuck no!” shouted one of the ARA guys near me. They all took off to intercept the Nazis. Violence was imminent. The police were actually blocked from interceding by their own barricade. The Nazis were on our side of it. It was a nightmare.

Michael and I rushed in as well, doing our best to de-escalate tensions between Nazis and Anti-Racism Activists. I jumped in the way of swinging fists. I broke up fights. I pulled people off of each other and shoved people back. I later learned that my job as peacekeeper did not actually include breaking up physical violence and I wasn't supposed to lay a hand on anyone – whoops.

But the anarchists stopped the Nazis from storming into a peaceful crowd and we stopped the violence from escalating until the police were able to get around their barriers and escort the Nazis to the appropriate side of the street, where they were greeted like heroes. 

Fuck them. Fuck them for their hate. Fuck them for going after my kids. Fuck them for visiting violence into this world against people who had not perpetrated violence against them or anyone else. 

I get that people have fears and that these fears, through ignorance and lack of exposure, explode into blanket prejudices that tell them that all Mexicans are gang members and all Muslims are terrorists and all Black people are criminals but that is just patently not true. 

These things, these stories from my past, this legacy of violence and hatred in our country that we sorted out decades ago… they are not antiquated. They are not history. They are current. They are present. They are still.

Am I saying fuck all white people? No. I am saying fuck those guys that came in to attack a peaceful protest. And fuck other Nazis who visit violence on others as a way of acting out their social and political impotence. And fuck the Ku Klux Klan that has perpetuated almost two centuries of hatred and violence on this country, and fuck those particular Klan members who got my whole city so riled up that the police pepper-sprayed me because someone threw a coke can.

And fuck them especially today. Especially today. It’s August 12, 20-fucking-17, and Nazis are attacking people in Charlottesville, VA. And you know what I have just had to realize?

Fuck me. These things, these stories from my past, this legacy of violence and hatred in our country that we sorted out decades ago… they are not antiquated. They are not history. They are current. They are present. They are still.

I had to realize today that despite all of my own anti-racism action and education and discussion and arguments and activism and purported understanding of reality, that I was still holding on to my own version of a progress narrative that this kind of violent hatred was dying out in my country. That, sure, it still existed in little pockets of activity, but by and large the Ku Klux Klan and fucking Nazis for Christ’s sake were a thing of the past. This resurgence we've been seeing is a last dying gasp of a fraught history and any time now that gasp would end and thank god we'd finally be done with this.

I was emboldened by my progress narrative because I have been telling the story of that Klan rally for twenty years and by and large, people have had a hard time believing me that the Klan still existed. Half of my story-telling was actually convincing my audience that the Klan still existed.

And I was emboldened by my progress narrative because those counter-demonstrators at the Freedom Rally were actually quite few compared to the people who turned out to support the Dreamers. They were a few dozen. We were many hundreds. And for that matter, at the Klan rally in January 1998, there were six Klansmen and zero people rallying in support. We were many hundreds, dancing and laughing and saying “fuck you, no!” to their hatred.

But in the past two years, my narrative has changed. No one looks at me with surprise when I tell them the Klan was still alive and well in 1998. The Klan, and Nazi groups, the alt-right, white supremacists, and others have come out of the woodwork over the past two years, showing me and everybody that they are not just some dying, antiquated fringe. Or at least, if they are, they are a loud and violent and persistent fringe.

The events in Charlottesville made me remember my own violent altercations against them. And I had to recognize within myself that pit of disappointment that it wasn’t over yet. That we weren’t going back to “normal” – a space where this isn’t a thing. It made me wonder if this was indeed what normal is now. If we weren’t indeed here again.

Or more precisely, still.

I’ve been thinking about videos and photos I’ve seen of the violent altercations of the Civil Rights Movement and wondering it’s not that the arc of history is long, bending toward justice, but that it’s a sine wave that curves back toward hatred if we get too complacent. And has it again become time for us to put our bodies between people filled with violent blanket hatred and those myriad diverse individuals whose lives they want to end.

I’m not 18 anymore. I am solidly middle-aged, much closer in age to my mom's church lady activist friends than my radical college activist friends, and I am very comfortable and confident in my pacifism and kind-of-a-chicken-ism. I do not relish the idea that we have let Nazis and the Klan back into relevance and power in our country. I’m kind of terrified of it. I’m terrified of speaking up. I’m terrified of putting my body in the way of it.

But what’s my fear when measured against someone else’s right to stay alive?

One more thing, because I want to be absolutely clear. Some of you – people I know and people I don’t – will read yourselves into this when I am not talking about you. Any post decrying white nationalism will ping into the identity threat fears of all sorts of white people who don’t want to be called a racist. I get it. Believe me. I get it. I’ve heard you, again and again and again. You don’t have to explain it to me anymore. I get it.

So. Let's be clear. Are you (or have you ever been) part of a violent faction of Nazis, neo-Nazis, white supremacists, alt-right, KKK, or any other literally terrorist hate group actively seeking to end the lives of basic American freedoms of people who have a different skin color than you? Have you ever participated in violence against peaceful protesters or other peaceful citizens just because you disagreed with them on something and/or their skin color was different than yours? Because this post is about those guys. Those guys are stepping up their terrorism of our nation. This is now and this is present and this is real.

Are you uncomfortable reading this because you’ve said or thought hate speech, or agreed with some of their things but not their methods, or you agree with some of the principles but really only if you water them down to a very moderate level of nuance but not outright hate, and so you’re worried that I’m talking about you because I mentioned something that is somehow similar to something about you? I’m not talking about you. But please have a good long think about why my talking about white supremacy terrorists makes you think I'm talking about you. Because I'm not talking about you. If you see yourself in this post, that's something within you. That's not coming from me.

And finally, if you have held up signs with hate speech, or clapped when those guys spoke up, or cheered them, or laughed at their antics, or welcomed them to your side of the protest like you were welcoming heroes, of have otherwise galvanized those violent racists who are currently terrorizing our country… I’m still not talking about you here. But I would encourage you to take a very long and serious look at your words and actions. Because you may not be them exactly, you may not exactly fall into the same class of white Christian terrorist that have wrought violence in our country again and again, and who are currently moving back into power and relevance in our country...

But you are helping them happen.