What Taylor Swift Tells Us About the Fragility of Men: Welcome to the Backlash

February 1, 2024February 8, 2024 ~ Randy Blazak ~ 1 Comment

February 1, 2024

I don’t remember what Beatlemania was like. I was born in February 1964 as the mop tops from Britain invaded the U.S.. The footage of them on Ed Sullivan and the girls screaming is exhilarating. We now look at that month as the moment the 1960s started; when the black and white era of the Kennedy assassination became a technicolor explosion of youth counterculture. But not everyone loved the Beatles in 1964. Conservative columnist William F. Buckley, wrote in the Boston Globe, “The Beatles are not merely awful; I would consider it sacrilegious to say anything less than that they are god awful. They are so unbelievably horribly, so appallingly unmusical, so dogmatically insensitive to the magic of the art that they qualify as crowned heads of anti-music, even as the imposter popes went down in history as ‘anti-popes.’”

Buckley wasn’t alone. A chorus on the right proclaimed the Beatles as “communists” and encouragers of “race mixing.” They were framed as untalented puppets, designed to upset the American moral order with sex, drugs, and rock and roll. John Lennon, in a lengthy interview with a British columnist in 1966, briefly commented on the sad state of contemporary religion. “We’re more popular than Jesus now; I don’t know which will go first—rock ’n’ roll or Christianity,” he said. The comments were reported out of context in the United States and the backlash was fierce. Right-wing stalwarts, the Ku Klux Klan, organized boycotts of Beatles concerts and claimed Ringo was “a Jew.” Conservative southern radio stations held Beatle bonfires and there were numerous death threats against the band. The Beatles quit touring and retreated to the studio to find other ways to speak to the youth of the world.

I was just a baby for all that. I didn’t experience Beatlemania first hand. But I am experiencing Swiftmania and if feels like basically the same thing. If the Ku Klux Klan could burn Taylor Swift music streams, there would be bonfires across the nation.

First things first. This is not about Taylor Swift’s music. Old people always hate young people’s music. My dad thought AC/DC was not music and there a million people my age who think Taylor Swift’s music is also noise. I recently posted on a classic rock page that Swift will be my daughter’s Joni Mitchell, and some of the Boomers shit bricks. And then I posted the Buckley quote about the Beatles, and they just grunted. The word “crap music” was use repeatedly. OK, boomer. I did an episode on my YouTube channel about Swift’s 2023 Midnights album and how it as essential LP for any vinyl collectors collection. There is little doubt that Swift is immensely talented. This is not about that.

This is about gender and what happens when a woman is in control of her own life. Especially on Super Bowl Sunday. Taylor Swift has sold over 200 million records but I hear more about the existential threat she poses to America itself than the countless people to whom she brings joy. She’s got seven albums on the top 40 of Billboard’s album chart at the moment, but, apparently, she’s ruining football and America as we know it.

Susan Faludi, in her seminal 1991 book, Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women, gave us the roadmap for the conservative freakout about the girl from West Reading, Pennsylvania. Faludi argued that anytime in American history women gain power there is a patriarchal “backlash” to put them “back in their place.” One hundred years ago, women gained political power by winning the right to vote. The 1920s then generated flappers and housewives as the new feminine ideals, to push women away from using their collective voice at the ballot box. During WW II, women gained economic power as an army of Rosie the Riveters traded their dish rags in for blowtorches to build the weapons of war. And they had their own money to spend since their men were off on the battlefield. The end of the war brought back the demand that women return to the kitchen, or focus on the glamour like the new phalanx of blonde bombshells on the silver screen. Backlash #2. In the 1960s, women gained social power as the second wave feminist movement, again, worked to liberate them from domestic drudgery, as Mrs. John Doe flowered into Ms. Cindy Nobra. Faludi argued, in 1991, that the third backlash came in the form of the supermodel and the media message that women’s primary value is in their ability to attract men.

Faludi’s work was seen as helping to launch the third wave feminist movement of the 1990s and 2000s that culminated with the #MeToo movement in 2017. But by 2017, the fourth backlash was in full swing. There was never a greater movement to put women “back in their place” (and back into back alleys) than the rise of Donald J. Trump. I’ve reported here about my 2018 conversation with Gloria Steinem. When I asked Ms. Steinem how she explains the rise of Trump, she told me, “You know when a women is at most risk of being killed by her abuser is the moment she tries to escape him. When the battered wife tries to leave, that’s when he is his most violent. That’s where we are.” The way the MAGA movement has characterized the obese elderly Trump as a virile, chiseled, hyper-masculine macho man has become patriarchy’s ultimate weapon against women and their basic rights of self-determination.

Enter Taylor Swift.

Swift’s storied career, from her 2006 debut album to now (“Cruel Summer” is STILL on my radio in this cruel winter) has been a tale of wrestling control from men. Whether it’s songs dishing on ex-boyfriends who have done her wrong or fighting to reclaim her back catalog from Scooter Braun’s Big Machine record label, this has never been a woman who is going to shut up and just be pretty. She has, throughout for her career, stood up for the underserved. In 2015, when Apple was going to premier its new streaming music service with a three month free offer, they announced that artists would not receive any payment for their music being streamed during those three months. Taylor, who could afford the dip in income, saw how smaller artists were being ripped off and pulled all her music off the platform until Apple changed its policy. It did. Swift has donated millions to a wide variety of needs, including libraries, schools, flood, tornado, and hurricane relief, police departments, and victims of sexual assault. She’s paid off fans medical bills and student loans. Her philanthropy makes the “Christian charity” of her accusers look like pennies tossed in the church collection plate.

More than endorsing Joe Biden, it’s this persona of a woman in control of her life that triggers fragile conservative men most. Trump has said, defending his “Make America Great Again” slogan, America was last great in the 1950s, in the era of Father Knows Best, when women (and especially trans women) did not challenge the “natural” authority of men. (Make America Backlash 2 Again) Swift is not interested in going backwards in time to make men happy. In the most simplest of terms, Taylor Swift does not give a fuck. So American men are putting their wife beaters on and popping open a can of Bud Light (whoops, triggered by that beer) and getting ready to teach Taylor and all women like her a lesson. And they are manning up for Super Bowl Sunday, ready flex their atrophied muscles.

Let’s try to first extend a wee bit of empathy to these fragile men. The world has changed a lot since Trump says America was last great. Men are no longer the kings of their castles. Unlike in 1964, women can now have their own credit cards and punish sexual harassers. More women are going to college now than men (I see this in my classroom) and the workforce is now dominated by female labor. Unlike the days of Father Knows Best, now three fourths of women 25 to 54 are full time employees. Young women no longer marry the first man that asks them as a means to move out of their fathers’ houses. They do they same thing men do. They play the field and ditch the guys that don’t meet their needs (and sometimes write songs about them). In the 1950s, the average age for women’s first marriage was 20 (that’s average, so that means for every “spinster” that finally married at 30, two 15-year-old girls got married.) Now the average age for women’s first marriage is over 28. Swift is 34 and don’t expect her to “settle down” anytime soon. Her life is just getting started. (And let’s be 100% honest; Some of those young women in 1964 who bowed to social pressures to get married, weren’t interested men as romantic partners. Being out and gay now is another trigger for men who feel they are entitled to women and their bodies.)

So you can imagine manly men are feeling a little threatened. Their manly man world is fading in the rear view mirror of the the Kia Forte. Taylor Swift represents everything that wrong with their picture of how the world should look. And now she’s a fixture in the very last arena of the manosphere, the NFL. What’s a boy to do?

Fortunately for these fellas, the real manosphere, aka “society,” is dug in and fighting back, especially in a backlash. You don’t have to wade into the dark web as it vomits out deep fake nudes of Swift and endless discussions of the best methods to sexually assault her. It’s right there in the mainstream media, including among some women, like former Fox News host Megyn Kelly, who carry the water for the fragile men. (Kelly tried to organize a boycott of Swift for her support of relief work for children in Gaza. It failed miserably.) The conservative bashing of Swift has been, well, swift, including a bizarro conspiracy theory that Swift is a George Soros-funded Pentagon psyop operation to hand the Kansas City Chiefs the Super Bowl win (Isn’t San Fransisco the bastion of liberal politics?) and put Joe Biden back in the White House. Seriously.

The freak-out men are having about the “feminizing” of society is shaping the electorate as well. Recent research from Stanford University found that, while Gen Z women around the world are moving toward liberal positions, their male counterparts are moving to the right. Among the younger generation, there are really two cohorts, Gen Z women who are voting to regain their abortion rights and flocking to Taylor Swift concerts so big they can be seen from space, and Gen Z males who are tracking down fake nudes of Swift and trying rebuild their grandfather’s vision of gender roles, where the men where men and the women were REALLY good at making sandwiches. The fact that Swift has actively been registering these young women to vote must terrify these men, who are convinced this is the fall of the Roman Empire.

The Republican Party could embrace these young women, but as usual their party is the old man screaming at the kids to get off his lawn. Their fantasy of themselves as manly warriors will translate as more misogyny towards Swift, and towards women and girls in general. And there will be violence. Violence towards women who stand up for themselves and violence against other men as men signal that they are the volatile sex, so beware. But women, like Taylor, will shake it off and work to fix men’s mistakes, just like they always have.

As the father of a daughter who is growing up with the music Taylor Swift on the radio (Hearing Cozy riff the lyrics to “Cruel Summer” in the back of the car is pure bliss), I’m glad this pop singer is driving a massive wedge into the fading world of manly men. My daughter’s world will embrace her in a way my mother’s world never could. Like Madonna 40 years earlier, Swift will lead the charge against this generation’s backlash. “I’m so sick of running as fast as I can, wondering if I’d get there quicker if I was a man,” as she sings in “The Man.” My daughter’s future will have more space for her as a human being because of Taylor Swift, Beyoncé, Lady Gaga, Kesha, Lizzo, Cardi B, and all the other women on the charts who are doing this pop music thing by their own rules. But there are a lot of terrified boys and men to win over. Don’t fight this, boys. Mother is telling you it’s going to be OK. Enjoy the game.

Postscript: For all the women who don’t have the wealth or white privilege of Taylor Swift, but are in the trenches day in and day out working for gender equity without a subculture of fans to protect them, let’s lift them up in our songs, too.

With God on Our Side – Conversations with People Who Speak for God

December 27, 2023 ~ Randy Blazak ~ 1 Comment

“And you never ask questions, when God’s on your side.” – Bob Dylan

December 27, 2023

The current bloody conflict in the Holy Land, also known as Israel and Palestine, has me reflecting on the challenges of breaking through religious dogmatism to find anything that looks like common ground. I’m sure there are currently Jews and Muslims alike who feel God is on their side of the conflict. I’m mindful of the 1431 trail of Joan of Arc in which the English were desperate to prove the teenaged “Maiden of Orleans” was a heretic and not carrying out God’s mission to drive the English from France in the Hundred Years War.

When I was working on my dissertation research on white supremacists, I spent a lot of time with members of the Ku Klux Klan and members of a religious sect called Christian Identity. They were all quite sure the Christian Bible mandated their racism. In fact, the doctrine of Christian Identity states that a white God created white Adam and Eve in his image and the Jewish race are the descendants of Cain and the Serpent (Satan) and are inherently evil. And what about non-white and non-Jewish people? Oh, they are all the offspring of the soulless beasts of Eden. “It’s right here in Genesis!” They would tell me, quoting chapter and verse.

When I would bring up the concept of liberation theology and how Martin Luther King, Jr. found a very different message in their sacred texts, they would tell me that all that was “the devil’s work.”

We are in a similar moment where chapter and verse are quoted around the world to legitimize political positions, whether it’s opposition to LGBTQ rights or in support of Hindu nationalism. While many, and I hope most, people of faith are open to conversations about how their faith frames their political views while honoring that there are alternative faith-based interpretations, there is a significant phalanx in all religious traditions who are quite convinced that they have the one true interpretation of scripture. To those of us on the outside, that dogmatism seems pathological.

While toxic dogmatism can come in all ideological and theological disguises, it can be particularly tricky for us folks on the outside to have productive conversations with those who don’t share our foundational beliefs. When we don’t agree on foundational premises, like in the authority of scripture, or if we use vastly different interpretive lenses to make sense of the same passage, common ground can seem impossible to find.

So how do you talk to someone who has God on their side?

In most settings this might be a situation where a person backs away slowly, so as to not get stuck in the tarpit of religious debate. There’s a great spot in London called Speaker’s Corner where people have those debates/shouting matches as a form of entertainment. The rest of us have more productive things to do, like doom scroll through our social media feeds. However, some of that dogmatism becomes violence very quickly. And we don’t have to go back to Joan of Arc and the Hundred Year’s War to see it. Just turn on CNN.

This project I’ve been working on for the past two years, called Cure-PDX, is charged with reducing political violence and some of that violence has a religious element. For example, there is an evangelical church in the region that has preached that God does not punish violence against gays and lesbians. There is a church right down the street from them that preaches a more inclusive message from the same Bible, and they have experienced vandalism from the anti-gay church. Here is an opportunity for us to bring in the de-escalation work before somebody gets hurt.

One of things that makes our team so well positioned to do the work is that we represent a wide variety of political and social positions; we are liberal and conservative, Buddhist, Christian, and wandering agnostic. We have pastors on our team that help facilitate outreach to various faith based communities and I thought I’d rely on their lived experience and vital insight into this matter. Here’s the question:

Americans often rely on their faith traditions to inform their political opinions. However, there are those who are so wedded to a narrow interpretation of their sacred texts that it often leads to the vilification of those who don’t follow the same interpretation, as well as others, who may all fall under some label of “infidels,” and may become targets for violence. For example, we’ve seen a spike in religiously motivated hate crimes across the country, as well as attacks targeting the transgender community. Given this dynamic, is there a way to talk to the more dogmatic members of faith communities that encourages them to accept more nuanced interpretations of text that allows them to take a step back from more hostile rhetoric?

I asked this question to Pastor Jeff Hoover, who founded and pastored a church in Longview, Washington for 31 years, when he got a new “assignment.” Today, he leads an organization called CitiServe of Cowlitz County, where he walks with pastors and leaders, encouraging, equipping, and uniting the church in the local area and is a new member of our Cure-PDX team.

“I feel the key to having a conversation with someone you may disagree with is curiosity. Instead of going into a potentially difficult conversation wanting to prove or discover who is right or wrong, go in with authentic curiosity about just how the other person arrived at their particular viewpoint. It is astounding just how much we can learn from and about each other if we would simply be open to see things through someone else’s eyes.”

Pastor Jeff hit on a key tool that has been so useful in this project, the power of curiosity; the power of asking instead of telling. Between people’s strongly held beliefs and their relationship with the world is a whole backstory worth investigating. Spending time getting to know a person will likely create more openings in that dogmatic wall than going at it with a sledgehammer of counter arguments.

Sociologists use the term “religiosity,” to describe how committed people are towards their faith traditions. Some completely define themselves by their beliefs and practices, bordering on fanaticism. Others have no engagement with any religious beliefs or practices. Most folks are comfortably somewhere between those two poles. (You will find me at mass most Christmas Eves, on my knees praying for peace, and the other 364 days of the year offering lectures on the problems of religions rooted in Bronze Age thinking.) But, unless there is a mental health issue involved, even people on the “fanatical” end of the religiosity spectrum have a very human story about how they arrived at their conclusions.

We are looking for ways to interrupt violence. Much of this work has to do with finding ways to identify common values with people who may be escalating towards violence. I’m guessing matters of faith provide a perfect place to find those values.

Note: Thank you to team member Ryan Nakade for some of the framing in this piece.

The Lynching of Transgender Americans (or What’s Wrong with Kid Rock’s Brain?)

April 24, 2023April 24, 2023 ~ Randy Blazak ~ 2 Comments

April 24, 2023

Another day, another story about how much Republicans hate trans people. Opportunistic MAGA bigot Kid Rock aside, how did transgender Americans become the primary target of hate mongers? Did the Ku Klux Klan run out of objects of derision? “It ain’t ‘cool’ to hate black people no more. Let’s go after them non-binary kids!”

We have seen a dramatic spike in hate crimes against transgender people. The numbers of anti-trans attacks jumped 29 percent in 2021 over the numbers in 2020. There has been a corresponding increase in anti-trans murders, with black trans women being the primary target. Fueling this wave of hate is a bizarre obsession from many Republican politicians who delight in finding ways to make the lives of transgender Americans hell, especially if they are kids. According to translegislation.com, 2023 has already seen 499 anti-trans bills in 49 states (thank you, Delaware), and 43 that have passed.

How did transgender people suddenly become the demographic that it was politically expedient to hate?

If I’ve leaned anything in my 30+ years of studying hate groups, hate mongers never miss a passing bandwagon. In the 1920s, the “America First” Ku Klux Klan pivoted from anti-black hate to anti-immigrant hate as immigration patterns shifted to bring waves of Catholics and Jews to our shores. In the 1980’s, the KKK got in on the anti-gay hysteria as the AIDS epidemic gripped the country. A few years ago, hate groups leveled up their anti-Semitism as a means of going after Anthony Fauci and any Jewish doctor who thought it might be a good idea to wear a mask. Now that COVID has subsided, it seems to be transgender folks who are in the crosshairs of those that are perpetually angry about something that doesn’t actually affect them.

Let me put an underline on that point. If you are not transgender, another person being transgender has absolutely no impact on you one way or another. There are probably about 1.6 million trans people in the United States (according to a recent UCLA study). You don’t have to do anything or not do anything. Just let them exist. Just like we do with left-handed people (who right-handed people used to think were evil). Fox News would have you believe there is an army of transgender backstrokers competing on girls swim teams. These are the same people who previously wouldn’t shut up about “black rapists” and “Jewish pedophiles.” There’s not. And if there is one or two trans athletes raising the bar, it doesn’t effect you or Travis Tritt.

So why are rednecks across America pouring Bud Light down the drain and trying to find a “less gay” shitty beer? (Good luck on that one, Cleatus.)

Here’s two explanations.

First is the obvious one. Right-wing politicians, like Florida Nazi-wannabe Ron DeSantis, are using transphobia to gin up their white evangelical base. Let’s not forget the previously mentioned white-evangelical outfit known as the Ku Klux Klan. There’s a grip of white Christians that don’t know that Jesus was a brown-skinned socialist and think the Lord approved on shitting on marginalized people instead of gifting them loaves and fishes. This group is easier to manipulate than a prom full of horny teenagers. All you have to do is mention “sex” and “children” and the pitchfork and torch-carrying villagers are officially triggered.

Let’s be clear. Kids are more at risk from child molesting preachers than drag queens or anybody in the entire LGBTQ community. The religious right thinks transgender people are “sexualizing” kids. Not anymore than sex crazed cis-gender heterosexual people are. Everywhere I look I see those folks sucking face. I’ve already written about how not-kid friendly TV shows like Family Feud are. Trying to protect my 8-year-old from the nonstop sexuality coming from the non-queer folks is a losing battle. Someone expressing their gender is not “sexuality,” it’s life. And trans kids are dying by not being allowed to do it by an opportunistic political movement that sacrifices them at the alter of MAGA votes.

Second is a cognitive reason and has to do with our less-evolved friends who are firing on their knee jerk lizard brains. Research shows that these limbic brain creatures cannot handle complexity. Everything has to be in a very black or white binary. These are the same folks who feared “mulattos” and “quadroons” a hundred and fifty years ago. You had to fit into a nice racial category so they knew where to put you. Now that over 9 million Americans (including my daughter) are biracial they’ve moved onto to another anal retentive need to put people in a box.

To be fair, the last few decades America has been on a public education project to learn that sex and gender are two completely different concepts. We’ve spent so long conflating biological sex with sociological expressions of gender, you can’t fault folks for having trouble disentangling them. (“Gender reveal parties” are not. Genital reveal but not gender.) But we’re fully past that point now. Anyone who has a brain developed enough to understand the complexity of reality (“One person’s terrorist is another person’s freedom fighter”) gets that gender can be extremely fluid and doesn’t exist in a neat either/or binary. So we’re left with troglodytes, like Kid Rock, who flip out when “dude looks like a lady.” Their brains just cannot manage boundary bending. Take the Bud Light banning morons back to 1883 and they would have coming for biracial people with ropes. Have you ever seen Birth of a Nation (1915)? “Those mulattoes are sexualizing our children!!”

The saddest part of this political fad is that there is already a body count. Trans kids who can’t get gender affirming care have an elevated suicided rate. Trans people suffer from all kinds of health problems because of inequities in our health care system (just ask a trans man with ovarian cancer). Physical attacks on trans people has now taken on a sport-like aspect. There was a brutal murder here in suburban Portland in 2001. The killing of a trans woman named Lani Kai became a focal point of my early hate crime work here in Oregon. The good news is her murder would now be classified as a bias crime in Oregon, but the bad news is her murder is still unsolved 22 years later and joins the increasing number of case files that end up with trans women of color (and other queer folks) chilling in the morgue.

There is a historical parallel the maps the current anti-trans hysteria to the hundred and sixteen years of lynching African-Americans after slavery ended in 1865. The thousands of racial lynchings were driven by an irrational fear, that somehow black people were an existential (and sexual) threat to white people. The modern irrational fear, bubbling over in bastions of hate like Texas, Tennessee, and Florida, is that transgender people are a threat to cisgender people. They’re not. They are human beings. The rest is convenient hysteria and it’s fueling the Republican death cult. Where southern Democrats championed the dehumanization of black people a hundred years ago, MAGA Republicans are now dehumanizing transgender people and it has to stop.

Now, I’m all for donating Kid Rock’s brain to science or sending thoughts and prayers into the void that one of Ron DeSantis’s three kids comes out as non-binary, but what I want to do is just beg the MAGA base to chill the fuck out and find a social problem that actually impacts them, like full access to healthcare or full access to lite beer. Whatever. Just leave trans kids alone.

White People: If you aren’t actively anti-racism, you are pro-racism

October 23, 2019October 23, 2019 ~ Randy Blazak ~ 1 Comment

October 23, 2019

One of my weirdest media moments was one of my live CNN interviews. It was August 12, 2017 after the mayhem of the alt right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia that left one anti-racist activist dead. President Trump had said there were “fine people on both sides of the conflict,” equating the Neo-Nazis, who had organized the “Unite the Right” rally, with the counter protestors. I was brought on to do the usual “state of hate” analysis. I must have been too concise in my answers, leaving space in the interview. There was a pause and host Ana Cabrera then asked, “Dr. Blazak, so if you were President Trump’s speech writer today, what would be the very first line, the first words out of the president’s mouth regarding the situation in Charlottesville if you were to advise that?”

My friends watching said I looked like I wanted to laugh out loud at the thought of being cast as Trump’s speech writer. I didn’t say what I wanted to say. I squelched the devil on my shoulder and decided to remain the professional academic. I replied:

I think it’s acknowledging the importance of diversity in this country, the fact that we are stronger together. And then we do want to come together, it’s going to take people acknowledging the history of oppression and racism that we have before we even take the next step. Sort of acknowledging that truth is key to the whole thing.

Here’s what I should have said:

Donald Trump is an idiot. At least on the issue of race, he’s a complete idiot. Not only does he not understand the very basic elements of race relations in America, he has shown no intellectual interest in understanding them. He’s not the president of all Americans, just of the ones who think like him.

This matter resurfaces on a regular basis. From his regular proclamation that he’s the “least racist person there is,” (the least racist person would never say that) to this week’s proclamation that the ongoing impeachment inquiry is the equivalent of a “lynching.” This guy is clueless and hasn’t learned anything while being “our” president.

But this isn’t about Trump. It’s all about the white people like him who don’t understand how racism works. They think that being a racist is joining the Klan and burning crosses. They don’t understand the insidious persistence of racism in our institutions and in our psyches in the form of implicit bias. Racists are bad people so how can they be racists? They’re good!

Sevier County Commission member Warren Hurst (an old white guy in Tennessee) is a perfect of example. At a public meeting this week, after complaining that there was a “queer” running for president, said, “I’m not prejudiced, a white male in this country has very few rights and they’re getting took more every day,” and then a bunch of other white people applauded.

This also isn’t about being “racist.” I would argue everyone is racist to some degree. We’ve all internalized ugly messages about white supremacy. Whether it’s white ladies clutching their purse when they see a black man, or black people placing a greater value on lighter skin, racism is the fabric of our lives. It’s there in Muslim bans, the gentrification of black and brown neighborhoods, police profiling, and the daily micro-aggressions that white people dismiss as “not meaning anything.” Racism wasn’t erased by the end of the Civil War, the civil rights movement, the election of a black president, or white kids listening to Travis Scott. This is about what you’re doing about that racism.

I never say I’m not a racist. I’ve internalized white supremacist values since my childhood, but I’m working hard to purge them. I’m getting better at identifying my white privilege and recognizing when I’m practicing white fragility. It’s hard and it sucks and I can see why a lot of white people don’t want to be bothered with the disentangling that requires a constant mirror reflecting some pretty ugly shit right back at you. I never say I’m not a racist, but I do say I am actively anti-racist.

If your core orientation, as a white person, is not actively anti-racist, you are practicing racism. Like the “good Germans” who stood on the sidelines and allowed the Holocaust to happen, you are enabling the white supremacy that exists in every corner of society. Being actively anti-racist requires that there are times when you need to shut the fuck up and listen to and honor the real lived experiences of oppression that people of color endure. Don’t speak for them, whitey. Listen with an empathetic heart.

But being actively anti-racist also means speaking up when you encounter racism in systems or people. I was inspired to write this because a good friend referred to Lindsey Graham as her “spirit animal” when he defended Trump’s claim that he was being lynched. An anti-racist person would not do that. An anti-racist white person would hear the anguish of black people with regard to the vicious history of lynching and defer to their pain. An anti-racist person wouldn’t say shit, like “Well, Clarence Thomas used that word.” An anti-racist white person would know how to hear the truth and know that they can be become a better person by hearing that truth.

I never want to hear another person say they are “not a racist.” I want to hear white people say they are actively dismantling white supremacy whenever they encounter it, including in themselves.

But part of white privilege is being lazy and feeling like you don’t have to do any work on yourself. White people, you better work.

I have found what I was looking for, Bono.

April 14, 2019April 16, 2019 ~ Randy Blazak ~ 4 Comments

April 14, 2019

I have climbed the highest mountains

Whenever friends or family would come to my little Georgia town, we’d force them to climb its namesake, Stone Mountain. It’s the largest exposed piece of granite in the world and offers a pretty spectacular view of countless pine trees from its nearly 1700 foot summit. On a clear day, you can see Atlanta, which calls itself the “city too busy to hate” in an effort to claim a full agenda gets white people off the hook. We took everyone up that mountain, even my grandparents. There was something spiritual about rising above the tree line, while seeing the graffiti of lovers from the 18th century etched into the rock.

As a kid I didn’t understand the historical significance of the mountain, which features the largest Confederate memorial carved right into its face. On Thanksgiving night, 1915, a group of hooded white men, including two elderly members of the original Ku Klux Klan, climbed the mountain, raised the Confederate flag, opened a Bible, and, for the first time, burned a 16-foot cross. The modern KKK was born on my mountain. The century of murder and terror it waged against Americans had its inglorious beginning on Stone Mountain. The land beneath it was owned by a Klansman and they still return to its summit, like a white supremacist Mecca.

Walking in the footsteps of those first Klansmen would lead the way towards a lifetime of studying hate and trying to understand organized racism. This included time spent undercover in the white supremacist movement. I’ve seen crosses set alight by men in robes and it made the blood freeze in my veins. This long career has been dedicated to trying to undue what those men started on my mountain in 1915. It’s taken me around the world and brought me to what I had been looking for all along, the antidote to hate.

I have kissed honey lips

Most of my life I have been untethered. I felt like I was floating from one 4 minute music video to another. Even when I was “in love,” I had a few toes out the door, ready for the next song cycle to carry me where it might. There were some epic romances, followed by a divine right to the blues and red red wine. My passport was full but I wasn’t going anywhere, locked in a Möbius strip.

For much of that life fully lived, the music of U2 provided a soundtrack of freedom. The summer of 1986 I ended up back in Dublin (after working in Copenhagen for a few weeks). U2 was recording their soon-to-be revered Joshua Tree album. I was meeting with Bono as he wanted me to help him compile a release of unsigned American rock bands for their vanity label, Mother Records. (The compilation never was finished but he loved the tape of my roommate’s band, drivin’ ’n’ cryin’ and they were soon signed to U2’s label, Island Records. “Randy, I am a drivin’ ’n’ cryin’ fan,” he said, grabbing my shoulders.) The summer of ’86, I told him way too much about my challenging love life. Part of that summer had been spent with Sinead O’Connor in London, watching her shave her head for the first time. Part of my heart was back in the states with my girlfriend who was leaving me for a life in Paris. I was 22 and had no idea how love was supposed to work.

He told me the new album would have more love songs and be less political in its themes. The band was exploring more colors from its sonic palette. The following spring, I was driving in Los Angeles when I first heard the final product on KNAC radio; “Where the Streets Have No Name,” soaring as I drove across Mulholland Drive on top of the Hollywood Hills. The world opened up below me. The definitive musical statement of the 1980s had been made and it reflected everything I was at that moment, searching, running to stand still.

You broke the bonds, you loosened chains

My work studying racism and finding an audience in the ancient world of the university earned me the top rank as a tenured full professor at Hogwarts. I had leveraged my position, pushing the faculty to strike against the swollen trolls of the administration to build a university the cared more about easing student debt than the ever-expanding supply of overpaid deans. (If you didn’t know, Hogwarts has more troll deans than you can shake a wand at.)

All that fell silent when she walked into the room. All the colors bled into one. Angel or devil, I couldn’t tell. I tried to put her out of my mind and went back to my lectures about how romantic love was a “social construction of reality,” a lie that we believe because we’ve been brainwashed by sappy songs and rom coms. I was still in my Möbius loop. “Maybe I should try online dating,” I thought. I tried to avoid looking at her. I worried it would be like B’rer Rabbit and the tar baby. One look and I would be stuck.

After the class was over, I ran into her in a bar. She bought me a shot of tequila and asked if I’d like to go out sometime. “I don’t date students,” I said, feeling the floor slipping out from under me. She bought me another shot. I heard Bono singing, “I can’t live with or without you.” Our friendship became more than that. I saw in her the end of the loop. She knew everything about me. All my flaws and the way out. Why had I been paying a therapist all those years? I saw in her the future mother of my children. We would not be only two people for very long. I saw in her the person who’s dreams I wanted to spend the rest of my life supporting. “I’m with her!” Soon we were married and the parents of a miraculous child who was conceived in a moment of brilliant foresight. “Let’s make a baby!”

The trolls at Hogwarts used this love of loves as a cudgel to silence a trouble maker. (It seems on-line wizard training is much cheaper than tenured full professors, leaving more money to hire more troll deans.) I was dragged in before the council of witches, their mouths dripping with the anticipation of scoring points for the queen troll. They treated our love as some grand violation. They wanted to destroy my lifetime of work against hate. Perhaps I should have fought harder, but I was in love with my wife and new baby and seeing the monsters that profited behind the hallowed halls of Hogwarts disgusted me. I was forced resign my position and left to create something new, away from their sickness. I let go of the hand if the devil and was free.

Felt the healing in the fingertips

I should have felt like a freefall, loosing the security of a salaried tenured position and the benefits that came with it. (It was easy to not go to the dentist when you have full dental.) Thanks, Obamacare! I became a hustler, selling assets, picking up random gigs here and there. She carried the cross as I stayed home with the baby. I’d hold my little girl and chant, “Everything’s gonna be alright. Everything’s gonna be alright,” hoping the words would be a magical incantation, bringing the answer in a mighty flash of financial stability. “Vengeance is mine!” I would say, as I put some money, any money into my savings account.

Instead, a strange healing happened as my world, once so big, was shrunk down to three people. It was a bizarre love triangle, like we were our own holy trinity. Not really us versus them, because we’ve had so many amazing people on our side. Us and them (and we think about the trolls less every day). There is a burning sun in our home that has melted us like glass into one perfectly clear entity. It might look like a blob to the outside world, but we are three voices in harmony, and, too each of us, it sounds like it’s coming the tongues of angels.

Being bounced out of my university security gave me back the hunger of my youth. I published a novel and proposed a reality TV show and found my way into cable news commentary. Each experiment was latched to hope that this would open a door that I could take my family through. My wife had her own ascendency, through her art and academic paths. She now grades her students’ exams as I write about our seemingly endless war on racism, from Stone Mountain to Trump. We are recreating the world in our image.

In the middle of all that I found what I was looking for. Hearing our daughter sing in the bathtub. Watching my wife see how her presence can help heal the great divide. Being asked to bring my experience to table after table. I had to lose it all to gain it all. I was of the world and now I am of we three, in this world. All the pieces fit. Like a teenage rock band that’s ready to take the world by storm (as U2 was in its infancy), our vision is unclouded.

When Bono wrote the words to “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” he was still childless. He didn’t become a parent until 1989. I’m guessing he would have written a different song if he had been a dad the summer of 1986. Maybe I’ll ask him someday. (He’s about as accessible as the Pope these days.) That song seemed woven into my cellular membrane in those days. Now that I’ve found it, nurturing it is what drives my bass drum beat. Only to be with you. Only to be with you.

Postscript: A lot of us have lived that song. Have you finally found it? Or are you still running? In this unhappy time, let’s share our answers. Post it, tweet it, Instagram it, shout it from the top of the Hollywood Hills. #Ihavefoundwhatimlookingfor

Stone Mountain is a rock with a lot of racial baggage: Finding solutions

November 22, 2018November 22, 2018 ~ Randy Blazak ~ 8 Comments

November 22, 2018

Should Germany erect statues of Adolf Hitler because it’s their “history”? Is their banning of the swastika “erasing history”?

When I was in third grade at Atherton Elementary in Stone Mountain, Georgia, if I couldn’t immediately name the three Confederate heroes carved into the face of the mountain, I would get punched. Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, and Stonewall Jackson. We moved to Stone Mountain in 1972, after a year living in Boca Raton, Florida. But before that, my family lived in Cleveland, Ohio. I quickly learned that the Civil War didn’t end in 1865, and if there was one thing worse than a “yankee” it was a “damn yankee.” The refugees of the rust belt were the new carpetbaggers.

I loved growing up in Stone Mountain. In the 1970s, it was just starting to transition from a rural southern town to a suburb of Atlanta. We got our milk from a dairy, fished in a pond, road horses, and played in endless tracks of woods that were quickly being cutdown to make way for new subdivisions. We had brand new schools (Woodridge Elementary and Redan High for me) and new grocery stores and even a new Hardee’s hamburger joint. But there were some old demons that caught a few of us damn yankees off guard.

Let freedom ring?

I didn’t hear Martin Luther King’s 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech in school for probably the same reason that (unlike other students across the country) we weren’t encouraged the watch the groundbreaking 1977 miniseries Roots. There was a subtle message that black lives didn’t really matter and neither did their experiences in white America. I saw the speech on PBS one day (a habit I picked up during the Watergate hearings) and was dumbstruck. Amid the rightness and righteousness to King’s call for a “symphony of brotherhood,” was a shout out to my podunk town. “Let freedom ring from the curvaceous slopes of California. But not only that; let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia!” Woo!

There was a reason MLK mentioned my town. Stone Mountain is the birthplace of the modern Ku Klux Klan. A methodist preacher named William J. Simmons saw the film The Birth of a Nation in 1915, an insanely racist epic that glorifies the Reconstruction-era Klan, and thought, “That looks like a good idea.” He assembled a group of like-minded white men, including a local quarry operator named Samual Venable, whose son, James Venable, would become the Imperial Wizard of the national KKK in the 1960s. Simmons, Venable, and 13 others, including 2 elderly members of the original Klan, climbed the mountain and lit a 16-foot cross and a new Klan (and a new Klan tradition) was born.

As a kid in Stone Mountain, it was well known that the Klan was still a presence. A good friend of mine in sixth grade’s father was in the Klan and would “delight” us with tales of nightriders who would keep the town white. There was no counter narrative about the horrors of lynchings, rapings, and sheer terror inflicted on black Americans under the Klan’s warped reign. Every Labor Day, the Klan marched through our little town before their annual rally on the Venables’ property. There was no Antifa to oppose them. The fall of 1980, my senior year in high school, as our student body experienced an increase in African-American kids, Klan flyers popped up on lockers. There was no response from the white administrators. The following fall a 23-year-old black army private named Lynn Jackson was found hanging from a tree in nearby Social Circle, Georgia. There were no marches. Everyone knew that we lived in Klan territory.

I carry great shame that as a young person I never spoke out against this insanity. The truth is I was told the Klan had my back against the “invasion” (that word should sound familiar) of black residents moving out from Atlanta, looking for a better life in the burbs. We were told they were bringing crime and lower property values. My northern-born parents would never use the N word, but I heard “jigaboo” more than once. I was conflicted but acquiescing to the Klan-view of the world was easier. I now wonder how hard it was for the black kids in my class to operate in the face of this normalized white supremacy. When one white kid did something positive, another would say, “Mighty white of you!” If you tried to reach out to a black student for friendship, you were called a “nigger-lover” (so you didn’t). I had a great black friend in my guitar class named Cheryl who turned me on to dub reggae and the very first rap records. I want to find her and beg her forgiveness for not being a clear voice against the daily micro aggressions she must have endured as a black kid in white Stone Mountain.

Stone Mountain has changed dramatically. White flight accelerated in the 1980s and when I go back now it feels like aliens just rounded up all the Caucasians. They fled farther into the hills and complain about “what happened” to “their” town. (The truth is my old neighborhood is now a nice middle-class black neighborhood. Cars on blocks have been replaced by Mercedes and landscaped lawns.) My nearly all-white high school is nearly now all-black. My brother and I recently visited our elementary school to take some pictures and the black principle came out to confront us, probably worried that we were Aryan soldiers planting a bomb.

“Get over it!”

But Stone Mountain still has a race problem. It’s the mountain itself. Or at least the carving on it. When the Trump-hat wearing alt right was rallying in Charlottesville, Virginia last year, chanting, “You will not replace us! Jews will not replace us!” they were defending a statue of Robert E. Lee. We were moving forward in our national history and putting these vestiges of our dark past in museums where they belonged. I remember thinking, “Um, we’ve got a Confederate memorial the size of a mountain to deal with. What do we do about that?”

It doesn’t make much sense to blast Lee, Davis, and Jackson’s faces off the giant hunk of granite that is our mountain. There’s some hysteria coming from white folks who think that’s even possible. These are the same white folks who, in 2008, worried that a newly elected President Obama would ban the N word and force white people to pick cotton. But those three faces loom over an increasingly black part of the country, watching over black families who picnic where the Klan burned crosses.

Many southern whites say, “Get over it. It’s history! Stop looking to be offended!” I’m guessing that German Christians don’t say that to German Jews. These southern whites must be willfully ignorant of the centuries of rape, torture, mutilation, murder, family separation, and endless bondage that was a historical fact of the regime Lee, Davis, and Jackson fought to preserve. “The Civil War wasn’t about slavery!” these whites claim. This is the biggest lie of all. The leaders of the Confederacy made it quite clear that they were quitting the United States of America over the issue of slavery. Georgia’s proclamation of secession, signed January 29, 1861, referenced slavery 35 times. Confederate president Jefferson Davis routinely cited Lincoln’s attempt to abolish slavery as the reason for the war (as did Lincoln himself). It’s an Orwellian rewrite by whites wishing to diminish the savage and divisive nature of slavery to try to claim the war was about “state’s rights” (to preserve slavery) or the “southern way of life” (built on slavery). This what you get when people think Gone With the Wind was a documentary.

But I go back to the trauma. The experience of that black family having their picnic under the gaze of the Confederate “heroes” who defended lifetimes of torture for their ancestors. As Dr. Joy DeGruy writes about in her brilliant book, Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome: America’s Legacy of Enduring Injury and Healing, it is unrealistic to expect African-Americans to just “get over” the traumatizing effects of generational slavery when the reminders of that campaign of dehumanization are all around, from Confederate flags, to increasing hate crimes, to police brutality, to the simple micro-aggression by whites who deny that racism is still a problem. Black lives don’t matter. The fact that we are even having this conversation is proof.

I had a white student once tell me, “Racism ended in the 1960s. Black people are just complaining now.” I responded, “What day? There must have been a day that racism ended, so what day? I mean we should make that day a holiday! The day racism ended in America and black people just started complaining. What day was that so I can mark it on the calendar?” He didn’t say anything after that. If these white people (and they aren’t just in the South), bothered to ask an actual black person about the persistence of racism, their fragile picture of a “post-racial” America would crash.

Transforming a mountain

So what to do about Stone Mountain? Nobody’s going to blast off any faces. Half of the guys up on Mt. Rushmore owned slaves (Washington and Jefferson). Do they get blasted, too? These whites who worry that any of this is “erasing” history obviously don’t know what the fuck a book is. There are thousands of books on the Confederacy. But don’t worry, those three ghosts will be on that mountain long after we’re all gone.

My solution has always been to add to the carving. Leave Lee, Davis, and Jackson up there, but add Martin Luther King, Jr. to the mountain. He’s from Georgia and it was his “I Have a Dream” speech that put my little town on the map in a way the KKK only dreamed about. Maybe a larger MLK wagging is finger at LD&J or just looking down on them with pity. Racist rednecks can have their carving and African-American families can be reminded that progress happens. This country is not stuck in the past.

I’ve been hanging out on a Facebook page called I Remember Stone Mountain When… It’s populated by those of us who grew up there and it’s mainly reminiscing about cruising the K-Mart parking lot or eating fried catfish at Rio Vista Restaurant. But bring up the issue of race and suddenly we’re back on James Veneble’s property with crosses burning. I’ve been called a “stupid liberal” more times than I care to count, just for asking people to acknowledge the truth about the carving and the pain it causes.

Amid all the yeehawing about “preserving our heritage” and my failed attempt to raise the issue of white privilege came the most sane rational post from a guy named Tom Malone;

May I invite you, gentlemen, to join me in an idea I’ve been developing over the past few years? To enhance Stone Mountain Park by making one of its missions to serve as a center for racial reconciliation. How? Not by removing anything, but rather by adding statues, historical markers, and a museum, etc. honoring and remembering the contributions, sacrifice, and suffering of the slaves who were also an integral part of the Confederacy. This way, the WHOLE story would be getting told, and we could all go there for honoring, reflecting, and reconciling.

Bam. There it is. Problem solved. The carving stays as a recognition of the horrific sins of the past and our dedication to right those wrongs. We desperately need a real national conversation on race and Stone Mountain, Georgia could be where this could happen. It’s not beyond the pale that Johnny Reb embraces the depth of his implicit bias in the shadow of Jefferson Davis. And it’s entirely possible that little black boys and little black girls may be able to transcend the trauma of racism from a mountaintop in Dekalb County where the KKK burned its first cross. That would be the realization of Dr. King’s dream. There have been incredible racial reconciliation projects in South Africa, Rawanda, and the former Yugoslavia that have brought real healing. We need this in America and we could start it in Stone Mountain.

It’s so funny when I hear white people blather about “heritage.” If you are a European-American, your heritage includes everything from Neanderthals to the Renaissance. The fact that you fixate on the disgusting eras of slavery and Jim Crow says an awful lot about your values. You know what is a part of your “southern heritage”? The civil rights movement! Where Americans put their bodies on the line to fight for justice and equality. Preserve that history. Be proud of that history.

In 1997, Stone Mountain elected its first black mayor. Mayor Chuck Burris ended up moving into the house once owned by KKK wizard James Venable. To bring the point home, Burris put a freedom bell in the town square to celebrate the progress of MLK’s dream. That’s the Stone Mountain I love. I don’t have to wax nostalgically about fried catfish in the good old days. Stone Mountain’s good old days are straight ahead and I’m proud of where it could go. I have a dream, too.

Our White Supremacist President

January 16, 2018January 16, 2018 ~ Randy Blazak ~ 7 Comments

January 16, 2018

President Trump enjoyed his Martin Luther King Day off like he enjoys most of his days on, playing golf. Meanwhile, the rest of the country, those working and those not, were left wondering, just how racist is our president?

It’s not a matter of “if” anymore. And it’s not one comment here or there about African shitholes or Haitians all having AIDS. It’s his entire life. In 1973, Trump was sued by the Nixon administration for refusing to rent his properties to black tenants. His very public campaign for the execution of the black and brown teenagers, known as the “Central Park 5,” who were later exonerated through DNA evidence, wasn’t met with an apology by Trump. Instead he doubled down on his belief in their guilt. And of course there was the bizarre “birtherism” campaign he led to “prove” America’s first black president wasn’t actually American.

There are numerous examples of this even before his 2015 campaign declaration in which he proclaimed that Mexicans were “criminals, drug dealers, and rapists.” That was the the moment, from my little room in Mexico, I wrote the piece “Donald Trump is the New Face of White Supremacy” that helped put this little blog on the map. It might be inappropriate to say the world has given Trump enough rope to lynch himself, but, good God, how much evidence is enough? His caricatures of Chinese businessmen? No? His Muslim ban? No? His demanding that those black “sons of bitches” in the NFL stop protesting and get back to performing? No? His proclamation that there were “fine people on both sides” of the Nazi/Anti-Nazi clashes in Charlottesville? No? How many examples do you need of him devaluing non-white people and their lived experiences with racial injustice?

I’ve been asked numerous times, including by the media, if I think Donald Trump is a racist. I always try to side-step the question. Honestly, I don’t know what in the man’s heart, other than Big Mac residue. I try to make the point that he’s just ignorant of the reality of racism in this day in age. He’s lived his life in a bourgeois bubble and the only brown noses he knows have been firmly placed in his ass. He hasn’t had to know about the persistence of racism and, like many white people, probably thinks the problem was solved at some point in the 1960s by nice negroes and the benevolent white people who took pity on them.

But screw it. No more pussyfooting around. I’ve been doing this work long enough to know it when I see it and Trump’s obviousness about this is as big as the Stay Puft Man in Ghostbusters. He’s not only a racist, he’s a Stay Puft white supremacist. And the people that still defend him are his racist enablers. This isn’t just a sad statement of the president’s bigotry. This man has power over people’s lives. Just witness how he threatened to deport the brown children and young people in the DACA program while he threw a tantrum over his racist comments being leaked to the press. I don’t doubt that he thinks lobbing a few nukes at North Korea will help him bounce back in the “ratings.”

The revival of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s saw upwards of six million members across the nation (including here in Oregon). Their main rallying point was not the “negro problem,” but immigration. They promoted “100% Americanism” and opposed immigrants “flooding” in from non-white countries as well as Jews and Catholics arriving from Eastern and Southern Europe and Ireland. The Klan was a powerful political force in America, electing congressmen, senators, and governors (including here in Oregon). Their great victory was the Johnson-Reed Act, also known as the Immigration Act of 1924. Johnson-Reed put strict quotas on immigration from Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East, while encouraging immigration from Northern European countries like Norway and was on the books until it’s repeal in 1965. In a 2015 interview with Steve Bannon in Brietbart, future Trump Attorney General Jeff Sessions praised the 1924 law as an effective immigration plan. So, to be clear, the 1920s Klan wanted less immigrants coming from “these shithole countries” and more coming from Norway. Does that sound the least bit familiar?

This isn’t just me jumping on the shithole bandwagon. Trump is a textbook racist in so many ways that future textbooks on racism will be dedicated to him. But I’d like to focus on just a few, what I call Triple D racism; denial, defensiveness, and denigration.

“I’m the least racist person there is.”

Usually, when someone says, repeatedly, that they are not something, they are. But this is more than that. People who are actually anti-racist do not say they are not racist. We grow up in a racist society and we internalize that racism. I never say I’m not racist. I oppose racism but I still have racism in me and I am actively working to purge it. Like a recovering alcoholic who never says they are not an alcoholic, I will always be a racist.

The least racist person there is would never say they are the least racist person there is. They would say they are racist but they are working every single day to rid themselves and their world of racism. Have you ever heard Trump discuss his white privilege or his implicit biases? No, of course not. What has he done to dismantle institutional racism or even his own internalized racism? I mean besides eat a Taco Bowl on Cinco de Mayo. Anyone who believes Trump’s claim to be the least racist person is as ignorant as he is about how racism actually works.

He should spend sometime with real white allies in the struggle against white supremacy if he wants to know how to sound less racist. He’s not even a good con artist.

“So much Fake News is being reported.”

Trump is a big baby. An orange snowflake. Instead of doing the people’s work, he spends his time on Twitter whining. This is a common reaction when white people get called out on their racism. They (we) reactively go into defensive mode. “I did not say that!” “I’m a good person!” “You’re lucky to have me!” This guy doesn’t see the opportunity he has. He’s too busy circling the wagons so he can kill some injuns.

Racism is a deeply rooted facet of our society. Each time it appears in front of us there is a learning opportunity. Remember when President Obama hosted the “beer summit” after a white cop thought black Harvard professor was breaking into his own house? That’s how you do it. Trump could have made serious points here but instead he read through some staff-written script to honor MLK and then split for the golf course.

White people, listen to me! When you are accused of being racist don’t get all defensive and shut down the dialogue. Repeat after me. I’m sorry. Please help me to see this issue the way you see it. I want to understand this complex and traumatizing issue through your eyes. Thank you for helping me to grow and be a better person.

Can you imagine Trump saying that this week? There’s a better chance he’ll release his taxes.

On the attack

Of course what Trump does best is go on the attack and hit back “ten times harder.” A year a go he was attacking civil rights icon John Lewis for failing his “crime infested” congressional district in Atlanta (which we Atlantans know is one of the nicest, most livable parts of the entire South). Now he’s going after “Dicky” Durbin for spilling the beans on his latest locker room talk. Remember when, during the debates, Hillary Clinton accused Trump of being a Russian puppet. His response was, “No, you’re the puppet.” That’s the third-grade level of thinking going on here. Na na ni boo boo, stick your head in doo doo.

Trump and his troll army at Fox News are deft at attacking their critics. Unleash the MAGA drones and make all opponents’ lives hell. (It’s the main reason I declined to appear on the Tucker Carlson show last month.) It serves to silence dissent and protect his authoritarian approach to governing. Trump is already pushing to revise federal libel laws so he can go after tell-all authors like Michael Wolf, whose best-selling book, Fire and Fury, paints a more than unflattering picture of Trump and his dysfunctional White House. Hell hath no fury like a small-handed rich guy scorned.

Getting it

It’s crystal clear that, when it comes to race, Trump just doesn’t get it and doesn’t want to get it. This a guy who in 2014 tweeted, “How is ABC Television allowed to have a show entitled “Blackish”? Can you imagine the furor of a show, “Whiteish”! Racism at highest level?” Um, you could totally have a show called Whiteish. How awesome would it be to have a sitcom that confronted issues of white privilege? (ABC, I’m available to write it.) But Trump’s brain farts are a great example of dichotomous lower-revel thinking. Nuance must just sound “French” to him. As a rich white guy, he doesn’t get the race problem because he’s never had to and as president he could, but he’s got a tee time at 1 pm and then there’s all his “executive time” he needs to catch up on Fox & Friends. Courting his racist base makes him feel more secure in his own racism. Merry Christmas!

Both Bill Clinton and Barak Obama promised more dialogues on racial reconciliation under their administrations and both failed miserably. But just the idea that white people need to take part in exploring how they benefit from racism, even if they are the “least racist person you ever met,” was a start. The white people who don’t want to be bothered with such silliness are now driving the nation. An NPR/Harvard poll last fall found that 55 percent of white Americans now feel whites are discriminated against. This is Trump’s base and they want to make America 1924 again.

If we hope to move forward, we’re going to have to talk our way out of this shithole. The sad part is that our president is an obstacle not an ally in our struggle against racism.

Fascists Fall for Trump, their Nazi Dream Date

August 4, 2017October 16, 2017 ~ Randy Blazak ~ 5 Comments

August 4, 2017

The Metroplex was a beautiful abandoned building turned into a thriving punk rock club and the de facto Island of Misfit Toys in the 1980s. I saw shows there by the Dead Kennedys, the Circle Jerks and a million others (including, oddly, Mick Taylor of the Rolling Stones). I did my first interview with a racist skinhead there 31 years ago this summer. There had been a skinhead brawl at the competing 688 Club that had sent the doorman to the hospital. You can hear the skinhead version of events in the Anti-Heroes’ song, “Disco Riot.”

I had first encountered skinheads when I was student in London in 1982. I hopped on a train in Victoria Station to my internship in a clinic out in suburban Thamesmead. There were three skinheads in the car and me. They were drawing swastikas and National Front logos on the wall. One looked at me and then scrawled, “Kill a mod.” I got off at the next stop. By 1986, racist skinheads were popping up all over America, including the Old Glory Skins in Atlanta. I was 22 and this kid, in boots and braces, was probably 18. I wanted to know what was going on.

“What do you guys really want?” I asked him as we sat on the curb of Marietta Street, the heat too unbearable inside the Metroplex.

“We just want a strong leader who will kick all the fucking mud races out of the county.”

I wonder where that kid is now. I bet he’s happy. He finally got his “strong leader.”

Much has been written (including by me) about how Donald Trump has used white supremacist tactics, dog whistles, and code words to generate support from the extreme right and white supremacist counter-culture. Remember when he pretended not to know who David Duke was? When he was elected, white nationalist, oh, excuse me, “alt-right” leaders like Richard Spencer raced to Washington to exalt “Hail Trump!” with a stiff-armed salute.

His campaign to take America back to 1950 (in an interview with CNN he said that was the “again” in his “Make America Great Again” slogan), has only gained momentum. His fascistic rule by tweet undermines the fabric our democracy, including his recent pronouncement that all transgendered people will be kicked out of the U.S. military. His unquestioning flock believe that accusations of racism are just a liberal (Jewish?) plot, spread by the fake (Jewish?) media.

Certainly the people I have been studying for over thirty years have been watching. I don’t go to Klan rallies anymore or bring beer to skinhead parties to get them to talk, but I still hang out with them in their virtual worlds and eavesdrop on their conversations in neo-Nazi discussion groups and the hang-outs in the darkest corners of the web (i.e., Reddit). And boy howdy, do racists love Trump.

The latests clarion call from their fake blonde führer is his plan to limit legal immigration to English-speaking only applicants. Everyone knows this is not about keeping German-only speaking immigrants out of the country. It’s about brown and black people, especially brown people from Latin America. It’s not even a veiled attempt at racism. It’s clear as a bell, and the radical right (and some of the Trump trolls who post on my Facebook page) are loving it. Just try to keep up with this thread on Stormfront, the leading discussion site for white supremacists: STORMFRONT

Trump’s “merit based” plan (you know, because the people who pick our food have no merit) would only offer visas to immigrants who have high-paying job offers and speak English better than our Drunk Uncle president. It would end the diversity that comes from the visa lottery and that was making America great long before Trump’s made in China MAGA dunce caps sat on the empty noggins of Bocephus and Betty Lou. It would also drastically restrict the number of refugees allowed in the country, because, you know, screw that whole America is a “beacon of freedom” thing. If only we had more Nazi rocket scientists who needed sanctuary. The Statue of Liberty was a French (Jewish?) plot.

These policies are surely the work of right-wing hate groups, like FAIR (the Federation for American Immigration Reform), that have Steve Bannon’s blotchy Caucasian ear and the soul of “more than kinda” racist Stephen Miller. And they are catnip to white supremacists. You thought they went gaga over Trump’s unconstitutional Muslim ban and Attorney General Jeff Sessions praise of the 1924 “Whites Only” immigration act. (That’s the one that caused the 1920s KKK to close up shop because they got what they were marching for.) The Little Hitlers are going ape poo over Trump’s latest plan to make America white again. I know. I lurk in their world of stupidity. And we don’t even have to get into his silencing of the First Lady (First Ladies are to be seen and not heard), or the stomping on transgender rights (“No boot camp for you!”). Fascist forums have threads dedicated to both. The immigration thing alone has them ginned up like frat boys on pledge night.

Yes, America has a president who was endorsed by the Ku Klux Klan. But Trump won’t get his final solution. He’s clueless at how America works. The guy can’t even speak in complete sentences or keep his lies straight. The Republican congress has blocked him and the courts have blocked him and the diverse patchwork of the American populace will continue to block him. But there will be casualties along the way as the 2017 alt-right versions of those 1980s skinheads believe they’ve got their strong leader. That’s why Americans cannot be silent or still.

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Interviewing Neo-Nazis has taught me how to talk to Trump supporters

March 9, 2017March 10, 2017 ~ Randy Blazak ~ 5 Comments

March 9, 2017

Riding on a Portland bus one time, I was talking to one of my PSU students and said, “I was at a Klan rally once…” and I think all talk on the bus stopped. My student knew I was referring my years of undercover work in the white supremacist world, but the passengers on the Number 8 likely thought I was one of the racist recruiters that pop up in the city looking for fresh cuts for the coming race war.

It’s impossible to count the number of white supremacists I’ve interviewed over the last 30 years. Over 200, for sure. Some of that was at covert Klan rallies in Georgia, in dark strip bars in Oregon, and in the bright light of the mainstream media. (Somebody please put my appearance on the Sally Jesse Raphael Show on YouTube. It’s a Klanriffic hoot!) I’ve interviewed anti-government militia members in a cabin in Montana and Aryan murderers in a Texas prison where I had to wear a Kevlar vest (to protect my vital organs, the guard said). And I’ve interviewed grandsons of real Nazis in Berlin, standing next to the rubble of the wall. And I’ve heard it all.

In qualitative research we call it “data saturation.” When you start hearing the same thing over and over again, you’ve probably got enough information to start building a theory. Did you know the world is controlled by a secret Jewish cabal? Did you know that Jews in the music business want white kids to listen to rap music so they won’t listen to their own “white” music? (Yodeling, perhaps.) Did you know that if a white woman has intercourse with a black man, his sperm is so potent, any child she has after that will be part black? (I always thought that one was a pretty good case for black supremacy.) These people were mastering alternative facts before Sean Spicer knew how to chew gum.

People often ask, “How can you sit down and talk to these Nazis?” Well, beer helps. And growing up in a Klan town, like Stone Mountain, Georgia, doesn’t hurt. Many of these “extremists” are a lot like the people I grew up with, a few who went off and joined the Klan or other racist groups. They are, at their core, human beings who are trying to make sense of the world with the tools they’ve been given. And that’s why there is hope.

When I started interviewing racist skinheads in the 1980s, people would ask me, “What happens to these people when they grow up?” And I’d say, “I don’t know. Talk to me in 30 years and I’ll tell you.” Now there is a whole world of former racist activists who are actively engaged in the other side, working to undue the hate they once spread. They have written amazing books, like Autobiography of a Recovering Skinhead, and formed vitally important organizations, Life After Hate. Individually and collectively they talk to young people about the mistakes and thinking errors they made that caused them to burn up valuable time in their lives while undermining the essential peace in our communities. The best person to talk about the problems with living in the extreme right-wing is somebody who used to live in the extreme right-wing.

When Trump launched his political campaign in 2015, it was painfully clear he was borrowing the playbook from white supremacists. My blog post on the parallels of Trump’s rhetoric and what you’re likely to hear at a KKK rally has over 270,000 reads and has been posted across the world. (I was even interviewed by a newspaper in Spain about its assertions.) In the time since then, I’ve written about how a good number of his followers share many qualities with the rank and file followers of neo-fascist subcultures.

I’ve been honored to help many people leave the world of hate. They use their experience as both a source of reflection and advocacy. I have to think the same will be true with many Trump followers. That as the true agenda of his administration becomes clear, many of those people who voted for him, including people in my family, will see the thinking errors and reject his dangerous demagoguery. The best people to talk about the dangers of supporting Donald Trump will be people who used to support Donald Trump. Just like inside every white supremacist is a potential committed anti-racist activist, inside every Trump supporter is a potential social justice warrior. The threat of Trump to core American values is just too serious to not try.

I want to briefly outline a few traps that both white supremacists and Trump fans (and plenty of liberals) get caught in. Maybe these issues can be addressed when attempting to appeal to the humanity of either. (By the way, I could write a book on each of these. But here are 3 quickies.)

Low-Effort Thinking

When we are young we learn in opposites. Up/down, good/bad, hot/cold. It’s been something of a miracle that I’ve convinced my 2-year-old daughter that there is a category called “warm.” But when we’re kids, the Good Guys are always good and the Bad Guys are always bad (and look it). Similarly, we think of gender as “opposite sexes.” As we get older, things become more nuanced and endlessly shaded in grey, depending on context. Are those guys terrorists or freedom fighters? It depends what side you are on. Is that person male or female? Try asking them how they identify.

Many of the people I studied never graduated to shades of grey. Figuring out the context was too much work. They’d say things like, “How come black people can use the N word but I can’t?” Everything associated with white was good, and non-white was bad. Men were men and women were girls. Their leaders were infallible (until they weren’t) and anything outside their tiny subculture was perverted and corrupt. Stereotypes were absolute and they actively looked for anything to confirm them (“Did you hear about that black guy who raped the white girl?”) and ignored anything that invalidated the stereotype (like their own white criminality).

Numerous studies have backed this up. Feminist Patricia Hill Collins has long examined how dichotomous thinking fosters racism and the research supports the idea that people who see the world in black and white have a hard time empathizing with people they don’t see as members of their group. A 2012 study found this type of “low-effort thinking” pushed people towards the conservative end of the political spectrum. It’s just easier. John Wayne never worried about “nuance,” right?

Of course this is the hallmark of the Trump supporter who hates Obamacare but wants to keep the benefits gained under the Affordable Care Act. (Anything associated with Obama is “bad.”) In Trumpland, you are either with us or against us. America first! There’s no need for diplomacy when your arsenal is bigger than theirs. Trump was the guy who said the show Blackish was racist because you couldn’t have a show called Whiteish (which would be 98% of the shows on TV). And Ben Carson’s goofy comments about immigration and slavery are no different than Obama’s. Don’t ask me to look at the “context.”

On its surface, it seems moronic, but we all engage in some type of low-effort thinking. I still think anyone who plays for the New York Yankees must be care more about money than the game. Could I be wrong?

It’s a conspiracy, I tell ya!

That low-effort thinking paves the way for conspiracy theories. Nazis are the master of this. It all goes back to their hackneyed belief that events across the planet are controlled by a secret gang of Jewish rabbis. Why is circumcision the norm in the United States? Those rabbis want to lob off gentile foreskins to force the goyim into submission. They’ve got a million of these.

The conspiracy theory orders their world and simplifies it. A white student fails social studies? It’s because he or she is being forced a “multicultural curriculum meant to make whites feel guilty.” A white dude can’t find a girlfriend? It’s because the Zionist Occupation Government gets non-white women to die their hair blonde so you can’t tell who is truly “white.” (A Neo-Nazi once shot up a bunch of beauty parlors for this exact reason.) The theory explains literally EVERYTHING. No context or thinking required.

You have to think Joseph Goebbels would be proud of Donald Trump, the modern master of the alt-right conspiracy theory lifted straight from Alex Jones’ Infowars. From “Obama’s birth certificate” to “Obama tapped my phones!,” it’s an endlessly fact-free world and his supporters love it. The Mexican government is conspiring to send its rapists across the border and the “fake media” is conspiring to make him look bad. The definition of “fake news” has been repurposed to mean anything that’s not favorable coverage of his ego-driven administration, sending his loyal troops to get their information from “real news” sources, like Breitbart and the National Enquirer. Conspiracy theories about Muslims and refugees and Arnold Schwarzenegger. It’s the dumbing down of America. Where have we seen this kind of cultural thinking before? Hint: You won’t find the answer at Breitbart.

Inside the bubble

All this leads to something we’ve been hearing a lot about lately, life under the dome. (And not the cancelled CBS show I was briefly addicted to.) Hate groups work a lot like cults. The flow of information inside the bubble confirms all biases and anything outside the bubble must be avoided, including that gay uncle and cousin who dated a black guy, as well as the classmate who went off to college and was brainwashed by the liberal Jewish (or Jewish liberal) education system. Under the dome their is complete accord – that everyone outside the dome sucks.

That echo chamber is a powerful force on social media where it’s easy to mute a noisy neighbor who has upsetting viewpoints. I’ll admit I’ve blocked a few Trumpies this past year, mainly because I don’t want to waste time arguing. I’m happy to engage, but anytime I see the word “libtard,” I just close my laptop and make a sandwich. That’s not a person who wants a reasoned conversation.

While there are echo chambers on both the right and left, research shows conservatives are more likely to seek out news sources that confirm their own political positions while liberals are more likely to seek out opposing views. (I always enjoy a quick dip in the Fox News crazy house.) Conservatives tend to be more distrustful of anything coming from outside their bubble. There’s little chance for an alternative perspective if your Trump-loving dad thinks the New York Times is “fake news” and would rather proclaim, “Ditto, Rush!”

Learning from ex-Nazis

The path out of the white supremacist world is often a very personal one. I’ve published about male racists connecting with females who impressed upon them the value of empathy and their own potential victim status as women. Frank Meeink, former racist skinhead leader, has written about how life routinely put people in his path who shattered all his stereotypes. One of my friends was involved in a notorious racist murder in Portland and her conversion started when she befriended her black cellmate and began listening to stories from outside her bubble.

Even the most hard-core Trump supporter has potential of moving to a radically different position. We’re already seeing scores of disillusioned Trump voters who see that they’ve been duped. If we can help move others out of the black/white thinking, away from the simplistic conspiracy theories, and out of their echo chamber, the possibilities are endless. They’ll reflect back on the days when they were chanting, “Build a wall!” and “Lock her up!” and shake their heads. Instead of pushing them further into a dark corner, we can walk them out to the light.

This piece is dedicated to my family and friends who voted for Donald J. Trump in 2016. It’s 2017 and the door is open.

Forsyth County, Georgia, January 24th, 1987: The day we marched for freedom and won

January 24, 2017January 24, 2017 ~ Randy Blazak ~ 2 Comments

January 24, 2017

Millions of people marched last Saturday to stand up to Donald Trump and the ongoing war on women. The actual turnout dwarfed expectations and the global images must have put the powerful on notice. But still the naysayers chimed in, including other women. “What good does marching do?” “These people should have voted!” “Get back in the kitchen and make me a sandwich!” And worse (or more stupid).

So here’s a short story. Thirty years ago today about 20,000 people marched on the tiny town of Cumming, Georgia and changed the world in an afternoon. I was there. I was part of the change just by being there, walking next to a guy in wig with a sign that said, “KKK – Drag Queens from Outer Space!”

Forsyth County is just outside of Atlanta, and like many places across the country (including here in Oregon) was known to have a “sundown laws.” Sundown laws were informal but strictly adhered to. Everyone knew what they meant: if you were not white you needed to be out of the county before sundown or risk your life. In 1987, I was a graduate student at Emory University just starting my work looking at the rise of racist skinheads, but I knew about Forsyth and its county seat, Cumming. Cumming was most famous as the birthplace of Junior Samples, the extra-large hayseed “comedian” on the TV show, Hee Haw. But we all knew there was a dark side to the white people in Forsyth.

There had been a small freedom march to protest discrimination in Forsyth the week before. It was led by Hosea Williams, part of Martin Luther King’s inner circle. A few dozen marchers were met by 20 to 25 locals who pelted the marchers with rocks and drove the agents of change right out of Forsyth County. The attack made national news and plans for a second march came together quickly. Even Oprah came to Cumming to do a show on the local racism. It stands as the most uncomfortable moment on Talk TV and Oprah reportedly wasted no time of getting the fuck out of Forsyth.

January 24, 1987 was cold as hell. There were busses and carpools headed up to snowy Forsyth for the second march. Rumors were that the Klan and the “Forsyth County Defense League” planned a countermarch. It promised to be explosive and historic. I wasn’t there for Selma but I would be there for Forsyth. I booked a ride with a bunch of sociology grad students and our fearless leader, the late great Professor Terry Boswell. I made a sign that said “Racism is Ignorance” on one side and “Freedom from Fear” on the other. I brought a date from our punk rock scene named Musey and we headed toward the frontline of history excited and a bit fearful.

When we got off Highway 19 it was clear that this wasn’t going to be a small second march. The national media was there as well as 2000 National Guard members in full riot gear. I still remember all the helicopters hovering in the frigid January sky. And over 20,000 demonstrators arriving to tell the hicks of Forsyth to get ready for a new day in Georgia. We got their early, in time for the Klan rally that preceded our march. Because I was young and crazy, I took my homemade sign and pushed my way into the middle of Klan rally and held it over my head. I only remember a few grizzly Klansmen screaming at me before I felt a National Guardsmen grab me by the collar and drag me out of the crowd, threatening to arrest me for inciting a riot.

When the march finally began, it wasn’t actually peaceful. White people threw rocks and spit on the protestors. A friend (and future screenwriter) was hit by a flying cinder block. I’ll never forget one zombie-looking toothless (literally) redneck with a sign that said, “Niger Go Home!” We all laughed at him and he couldn’t figure out why. I guess spelling ain’t too important to the master race. What I do know is that the white racists of Forsyth must have crapped themselves brown when they saw the mass of 20,000 marchers coming down the road into Cumming. And we were white and black together. I marched with my friends, including Jonathan Serrie, who now a senior reporter on Fox News. But I made more friends there and we sang, “We Shall Overcome,” knowing the arc of the moral universe is long, but, as Dr. King said, it bends toward justice.

The spotlight of morality was placed on Forsyth County and those sundown laws faded. As Atlanta grew, those outlaying areas became suburbs of the city, and like any suburbs, were as diverse as America. These days in Cumming, your more likely to live next door to a Pakistani than a Ku Klux Klanny. The same thing happened to my hometown, Stone Mountain, the birthplace of the KKK. Stone Mountain is now a mostly middle-class black suburb of Atlanta. Where did all those racists go?

Well, some of them just stopped being so racist. That tends to happen when you become friends and neighbors with the people you’ve been taught to fear and hate. Forsyth is still a pretty white place but those marchers 30 years ago forced them to pick a side. They could either stay in their divided past and suffer with their hate or join us in the modern world of love where there’s a hot dance party and a good Thai restaurant down the street.

So don’t let anyone tell you that marching doesn’t change things. I saw it happen. I saw the lovers stare down the haters and then invite them to join their side. But little did we know that some of those haters have been hiding their hearts waiting for a leader to come and create an empire just for them. But we are ready to march again. The resistance is strong and growing. People are getting off the sidelines and ready to flood the streets with love. And we’ll make fun of your misspelled signs.

Postscript: Women from Forsyth County were at the Women’s March in DC on Saturday. Change happens.

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