Tag: Racism

Neo-Nazi Music Is on the Rise. These Companies and People Are Taking It On

Posted on by robbie


Updated: Aug. 19, 10:12 a.m.
When white supremacists and neo-Nazis recently marched in Charlottesville, Va., they chanted old, racially-driven mottos like “blood and soil” and “Jews will not replace us.”
The tenor of the protest’s cheers were horrific to many Americans glued to their televisions or mobile phones, but the slogans are nothing new for white supremacists who have been listening to them for decades with the help of hate music, or “hatecore,” a genre of white supremacy and fascist music.
Heavy rock songs like “White Victory” by the band Blue Eyed Devils is a favorite on white pride forums, and one of the individuals involved in the events in Charlottesville, Ryan Roy, was a member of a white power heavy metal band called Hate Speech.
But there’s another favorite among white supremacists that differs from the typical anger-filled lyrics of traditional fascism music: fashwave.
The music, based on the hipster genre “vaporwave,” is a mix of cybernetic swells matched with video game 8-bit sounds and is a throwback to music of the 1980s, when Halloween-esque theme songs collided with pop culture bass to create a genre fully centered on beats and synthesizers.
“Fashwave is almost like this transient music that puts you away. It’s definitely a different kind of beast,” says a senior investigative researcher at the Anti-Defamation League familiar with hate music and fashwave. “But we can’t view it as just a flash-in-a-pan trend, because we’ve seen that this kind of music doesn’t just go away.”
Fashwave’s influence is no different than the American neo-Nazi punk rock and industrial music that rose out of the mid-80s and became popular among white supremacists in the 90s. With more of the youth population interested in indie-pop electronic and the EDM scene, it was only a matter of time before white supremacists would evolve their tastes for music, as well. But there is a push by activists and organizations to stop the spread of fashwave and other hate music while also using music and other art forms to teach impressionable youth to appreciate diversity.

A HIDDEN MESSAGE OF HATE

Music has always been instrumental in getting citizens to rally around political and cultural movements. The hundreds of thousands of people gathered in upstate New York at Woodstock in 1969 to listen to music were also protesting the Vietnam War and celebrating free love. Today’s white supremacy groups use it as a recruiting tool.
“Music is incredibly effective in bringing together communities, and the alt-right recognize that and are using it to generate excitement about their cause,” says Scott Crow, an author on subcultures and music, referring to white supremacists who bill themselves as “alt-right.”
Arno Michaelis, a self-proclaimed former skinhead and former lead singer of the band Centurion, a white power band, echoes this sentiment. “It’s not a new thing. Through the skinhead and punk-music surge of the late 80s, it likely revealed the power that music had to move people,” he says. “Going forward, the movement won’t ever miss a beat as far as using music to spread their message.”
Michaelis, who left the band — and the white power movement — close to a decade ago, says that the music coming from neo-Nazis resonated with him as a teenager.
“It was like crack. It conveyed the message in a really catchy habitual way,” Michaelis tells NationSwell. “And if it has that kind of effect on you while conveying a message of blood and soil, it really indoctrinates you into that ideology like nothing else can.”
Today’s fashwave music has the same mission, but goes about it differently. For one, the music is mostly lyric-free and is a hodgepodge of electronic and video game sounds, and trance-like beats. And with the exception of a few song titles, such as Xurious’s “Team White,” or tunes that have sampled vocal tracks (like C Y B E R N ∆ Z I’s “Angry Goy,” which is paired with portions of speeches made by Adolf Hitler) it’s entirely possible that listeners have no clue what they’re actually hearing.
“It’s always better to reach people that don’t think like you and convince them to think that the international Jew is the ultimate enemy of the human kind,” C Y B E R N ∆ Z I tells NationSwell in an email. “It makes no sense to compose music only for people that think like you when you want a peaceful change of regime.”
NationSwell reached out to Xurious via social media, but did not receive a response by time of publication.

Now the leader of an anti-hate group, former skinhead Arno Michaelis describes neo-Nazi music as “like crack” to angry teenagers.

In a 2016 post entitled “The Official Soundtrack of the Alt-Right,” Andrew Anglin, founder of the white supremacist news website The Daily Stormer and an organizer of the Unite the Right event in Charlottesville, said “The forms of music associated with previous White Nationalist movements, various forms of rock music, are pretty dated… the solution to this problem had been staring me in the face all along. The Whitest music ever: Synthwave.” He continued, “Synthwave represents the truest sound of the Alt-Right, … Within this genre is the sound of reading the Daily Stormer…the sound of an old guy punching a Black Lives protester in the face at a Trump rally.”
On the song “Hail Victory” by Xurious, the voice of then-presidential candidate Donald Trump is heard saying, “We will have so much winning if I get elected, that you might get bored with winning.”
The song is not a parody or a mockery of President Trump, but instead a galvanizing piece used at white supremacist rallies — such as the one in Charlottesville — and championed within the circle as a rally call.  
President Trump hasn’t defended the use of his name by white supremacists, but did say during a contentious press conference that there was blame “on both sides” in regards to the Unite the Right rally, which left one person dead.

MUSIC CAN DIVIDE, BUT ALSO EDUCATE

In 2004, Panzerfaust Records (a white power record label that was named for a German weapon from World War II) released 100,000 sampler CDs to middle and high schoolers as part of its “Project Schoolyard” mission. The company failed, though, when parents, schools and the Anti-Defamation League caught wind.
To mitigate the spread of hate music, organizations such as the ADL have called on leading tech companies to take a proactive approach to uncovering the content and having it removed or flagged. The group hasn’t been able to track how effective its efforts have been, but various businesses have started cracking down on hate speech in the wake of Charlottesville.
In the matter of just a few days, The Daily Stormer (which had a dedicated “Fashwave Friday” blog) was taken offline by its host, GoDaddy. When the publication tried to transfer its domain registration over to Google, the tech giant canceled its account. BuzzFeed News reported that Apple disabled Apple Pay on white supremacist websites and Squarespace will no longer serve white nationalist businesses or individuals, including Richard Spencer — the self-proclaimed leader of the “alt-right.”
Spotify, the music streaming provider, removed dozens of artists from their platform after the Southern Poverty Law Center released names of current bands. Neo-fascist and fashwave playlists created by users, however, were still available to be streamed.
When NationSwell contacted Spotify and asked for an explanation of its policy on allowing fashwave playlists and users, the company seemed unaware that the genre was even on their platform. A spokesman for the tech company immediately responded, saying the company was “glad to have been alerted to this content — and have [sic] already removed many of the bands identified today, whilst urgently reviewing the remainder.”
At the local level, former white supremacist Michaelis now works as a leader of the organization Serve 2 Unite, which introduces students to arts and different cultures to combat hate and radicalism. It was organized almost immediately after the 2012 mass shooting of six Sikh members in Milwaukee, where Michaelis lives. The shooter in the attack, Michael Page, was part of the supremacist band End Apathy.
Michaelis says that even though music can divide and radicalize, it can also bring education and hope to those who have been taken in by far-right ideologies.

Arno Michaelis (center) leads a group of students working toward creating an inclusive environment through arts and service.

He says, anecdotally, that at the hundreds of speeches he’s given on converting from radical white supremacist to open-hearted peace advocate, he’s been approached by young white men who have gone down the path of racist thoughts and have “changed their way of thinking,” he says.
And according to research conducted by Reinder’s Research and posted on Serve 2 Unite’s website, the nonprofit’s work increases students’ personal, behavioral and social growth, on average, 52 percent.
“If you get that angry young white kid, and involve them in an art project, like music, that shows positivity, they are empowered because they see a problem in society that they can solve and be a part of something,” he says. “That process is the biggest blow you can give to hate groups.”
Additional reporting by Sean Ryon
MORE: Can You Really Improve Race Relations in a Country Divided?

How the Arts Are Saving Small Towns From Extinction, Finding Redemption Through Friendship and More

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Can the Arts Help Save Rural America? Stateline
In nearly half of America’s rural counties, more people have moved out than in during every single decade since 1950: Young people, seeking a vibrant culture and job opportunities, have fled to big cities in droves. To avoid becoming ghost towns, small communities across the country have begun investing in music festivals, remodeling old opera houses and opening art galleries to bring young families back to their hometowns.

The White Flight of Derek Black, Washington Post
His father created Stormfront, the infamous racist web forum; his godfather was once Ku Klux Klan grand wizard. By high school, Derek Black was primed to lead America’s white nationalist movement. Yet after enrolling at New College of Florida, a Jewish classmate (who’d read Black’s neo-Nazi posts) invited him to a Shabbat dinner. As this story of redemption shows, there’s a way to defeat right-wing, racist extremism: not to attack its hate, but to overcome it with conversation and understanding.

California Restaurants Launch Nation’s First Transgender Jobs Program, NPR
Transgender individuals are twice as likely to be unemployed as the rest of the nation’s workers. To change those figures, Michaela Mendelsohn, a transgender businesswoman, hired 150 trans workers at her six El Pollo Loco restaurants, and she recently persuaded the 22,000-member California Restaurant Association to join the effort to overcome discrimination in the workplace.

Why America Must Remember Its Lynching Past, The Compassionate Nonagenarian Who Knits Hats for Those on the Streets and More

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The Legacy of Lynching, on Death Row, The New Yorker
Bryan Stevenson, one of the foremost civil rights lawyers of our time and founder of the Equal Justice Initiative, sees a link between wrongful convictions, today’s police shootings of young black men and the nation’s barbarous history of lynching. To honor the 4,000 African Americans killed in the former Confederate states, Stevenson plans to build a $20 million memorial in Montgomery, Ala., on the site of a former public housing complex.
Man, 91, in hospice care knits hats for the homeless, WXMI
For the last 15 years, Morrie Boogart, a 91-year-old in Grandville, Mich., has knit hats for the homeless. Using donated yarn, Boogart has made at least 8,000 caps to keep the homeless warm during the winter. Confined to bedrest from skin cancer and a mass on his kidney, he’s spending his last days in admirable service to others.
Yes, Queens, The Ringer
When one thinks of podcasts, the image of a bespectacled white man, like “This American Life”’s Ira Glass, probably comes to mind. The seriously irreverent, wildly popular weekly podcast “2 Dope Queens,” hosted by Jessica Williams, formerly of “The Daily Show,” and Phoebe Robinson, a standup comedian, opens the medium to a new type of host. Racism, sexism and politics, as seen from a black woman’s perspective, are all carefully discussed, and somehow hilarity ensues.
MORE: Why Sleeping in a Former Slave’s Home Will Make You Rethink Race Relations in America

This Former Inmate Fights for Others’ Freedom from Life Sentences

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Jason Hernandez never thought he would see the outside world again.
Since 1998, he had been serving a life sentence in federal prison for selling crack cocaine in his native McKinney, Texas. It was his first criminal offense, but due to the Drug Act of 1986 and the mandatory minimum sentences it required, Hernandez found himself locked up at the age of 21. Then, in 2013, his prayers and petitions were answered: He was granted clemency by President Obama.
Watch the video above and see how Hernandez uses Crack Open the Door, his sentencing advocacy nonprofit, to spotlight and fight for the release of other first-time nonviolent drug offenders serving life without parole.
MORE: Criminal Justice Reform Is Imminent. Here’s Why

Fighting Prejudice in America: One Woman’s Battle to Change the Rhetoric Surrounding Race

Posted on by robbie

Can a person, by their very existence in this country, be illegal? Or is an action to cross a border without proper documentation the law-breaking act? On the flip side, does using the terms “illegal immigrants” or “anchor babies” mean a person’s entire viewpoint is clouded by racism? Broadly speaking, are we all responsible for an unequal system that justifies racial profiling, even if we don’t overtly employ the practice ourselves?
Race is a fraught topic in American politics. There are no easy answers to its age-old questions, and the discussion is all too easily derailed by accusations of ignorance or racism. Rinku Sen, president and executive director of the New York-based nonprofit Race Forward, is attempting to change the dialogue about race in the United States. Bringing her immigrant background and a journalist’s reliance on facts to the conversation, her seminars and stories in Colorlines, Race Forward’s daily news publication, teach people to see the structural inequalities — in education, law enforcement, housing and employment — that are an everyday reality for minority populations in America.
“People have a really narrow definition of what racism is. In most Americans’ minds, racism is always individual, it’s intentional and it’s overt. The thing is, that racism takes on an astonishing number of forms. Many of them are unconscious, and they’re systemic and they’re hidden,” she says. “The question that we start with isn’t, ‘Who’s a racist?’ The question that we start with is, ‘What’s causing racial inequity?’”
Sen’s family arrived in the States from India in 1972, when she was only five years old. They settled in Ellenville, a small community in upstate New York. “There were no other Indian immigrants. It was a really white existence,” she recalls. “In order to survive and make it through, I had to suppress most notions of myself as a person of color.”
That self-effacement of her ethnicity lasted until her sophomore year at Brown University, when a racial incident the first week of school in 1984 sparked her interest in activism. “My friends wanted me to go to the rally [the day after the incident], and I said no. They said, ‘Rinku, you’re not a girl anymore; you’re a woman now. And you’re not a minority; you’re a person of color,’” Sen says. “The next day I went to the rally, and for the first time since we had immigrated, I felt like I was with people that I belonged with.”
Sen translated that energy — and her newfound pride in her culture — into three decades of work focused on race. For half that time, she worked as a community organizer before beginning to feel that her work focused on the wrong areas. “Even though I was proud of many of the things that we had won locally, I felt like we had really lost influence on big issue areas: policing, education, housing,” she says.
She became more involved in Race Forward, where she was already working as communications director, because so many issues seemed to link back to structural inequalities based on race. After attending journalism school to hone her ability to “change the way the public thinks about something,” Sen instituted her theories of social progressive action — focusing on equity, rather than diversity.
“Diversity only speaks to variety and the kinds of people that are in the room. It doesn’t actually speak to power and what people are able to do once they are in the room,” she says. “We are in a strategy where we really have to reboot how the movement talks about and thinks about racism.”

Can a Video Game Really Reduce Racial Bias?

Posted on by robbie

As the deaths of Eric Garner and Michael Brown stir sentiments over race relations and social divide in America, one game is aiming to discuss the subject through a mathematical model from more than 40 years ago.

Multimedia online storyteller Vi Hart and game developer Nicky Case created a game that’s an “explorable explanation,” looking at how segregation easily creeps up using a simple game of shapes. Parables of the Polygons turns Thomas Schelling’s 1971 mathematical model of neighborhood segregation — demonstrating how small preferences among individuals for neighbors to be like them can transform into big social divides.

“We never thought our project could get more timely than when we started,” Hart tells CityLab. “Yet it just keeps getting more relevant.”

Using personified polygons, players learn Schelling’s model by interacting with different shapes in different communities and “how harmless choices can make a harmful world,” as the game states in the beginning. It introduces the polygons as  “50% Triangles, 50% percent Squares, and 100% slight shapist. But only slight! In fact, every polygon prefers being in a diverse crowd.”

Sarcasm aside, the game points out that even with the preference that 33 percent or more neighbors (aka, shapes) looking like them, the polygons are actually not happy until divisions are pretty drastic. When a player increases individual bias, things get even more divided while lowering the bias in a community that’s already segregated doesn’t change much either.

“In a world where bias ever existed, being unbiased isn’t enough! We’re gonna need active measures,” the game explains.

Which is where Hart and Case diverge from Schelling’s model to prove that we can reverse the effects of segregation through encouraging more individual “anti-bias,” as CityLab explains. In a community that begins with 33 percent individual bias, if shapes demand to move if less than 10 percent and more than 80 percent of their neighbors look the same, the world becomes more inclusive.

“There’s a weird mindset that people have, that by giving special consideration to including someone who is a woman, or who is black, is somehow sexist or racist by itself,” Hart tells CityLab. “There’s no need to feel guilty for seeing people for who they are. That’s how we’re going to make change.”

The game is meant to illustrate how people can affect change even as they feel unnerved by taking the first “anti-bias” step.

“All it takes is a change in the perception of what an acceptable environment looks like,” the game poignantly points out. “So, fellow shapes, remember that it’s not about triangles versus squares. It’s about deciding what we want the world to look like, and settling for no less.”
That’s a lesson we can learn in shaping our own society.
MORE: The Surprisingly Easy Way to Make People More Tolerant

Can the Use of Virtual Reality Reduce Racial Bias?

Posted on by robbie

How can you change a person’s view of race? Try changing the color of his or her own skin.
Researchers discovered that making white people feel that they are wearing brown skin is associated with a decrease in racial bias. Researchers Lara Maister, Mel Slater, Maria V. Sanchez-Vives, and Manos Tsakiris write in Trends in Cognitive Science, “Ownership of an outgroup body has been found to be associated with a significant reduction in implicit biases against that outgroup.”
How did researchers convince study participants that they were in an “outgroup” or minority body?
In the first technique — the “Rubber Hand Illusion” — participants watched a screen that showed a brown-skinned rubber hand being touched while their own hands were touched in a similar way. In the second, called the “Enfacement Illusion,” white participants watched a video in which the face of a dark-skinned person was being stroked with cotton, while having their own faces touched in a similar fashion. In both of these scenarios, test subjects showed signs of reduced racial biases.
In the third experiment, “Full Body Illusions,” participants played virtual reality computer games in which their avatars either had brown, white or purple skin. Those that played the game with brown-skinned avatars demonstrated reduced bias against black people in a subsequent test, while those who’d played the game with white or purple skin showed no change.
Researcher Slater tells the Huffington Post, “Generally using these techniques, it is possible to give two sides of a conflict an experience of what it is like to be a member of the ‘other side,’ This should help to build empathy.”
Unfortunately, real world applications have yet to be developed. But in light of all the recent civil unrest in this country, organizations such as police departments and schools could definitely benefit from these findings and any subsequent usage of them  — leaving a lasting impact on this nation.
MORE: Why Every American Should Read Harry Potter

Watch: How One Man is Saving His Community, One Child at a Time

Posted on by robbie

Some people experience bad things, leading them towards a life of violence and crime. But with others, tough situations encourage them to help others.
Billy Lamar Brooks Sr., fortunately, belongs to the second group.
Brooks, a former Black Panther member, has experienced many of life’s challenges as a black man living in North Lawndale, Illinois, a neighborhood just outside of Chicago. As a young boy, he experienced racism from Chicago police, lost his son — Billy Lamar Brooks, Jr. — to murder right before Father’s Day in 1991, and has seen how poverty affected his hometown. Despite all this, Brooks continues to help his community the best way he can: By impacting the lives of young people in his neighborhood.
Currently, Brooks serves as the Director of YouthLab@1512 at the Better Boys Foundation (BBF), where he works with kids ages of 13 to 18 throughout the year. “I love them [students]. That’s why I’m here. I enjoy doing what I do,” he said. “It’s my profession. It’s my career. I wouldn’t have it any other way.”
While he helps his students with their academic and prevocational goals at BBF, he is also out on the streets every day, trying to teach the neighborhood’s kids the value of their choices. “There are times we have to go out there and hunt them down, and chase them, berate them, but it’s all out of love.”
In The Atlantic‘s video, republished by Upworthy, he says, “It’s about choice, when I tell young people this today. One does not have to come from a middle class, two parent household to be successful in life.”
MORE: What Can Former Gang Members Teach Psychology Students?

The Surprisingly Easy Way to Make People More Tolerant

Posted on by robbie

No longer do Latino immigrants remain living in border states and other places where there are long-established Hispanic communities. But while they are successful in finding jobs in the Midwest and the South, they encounter another problem when arriving in these geographic areas: housing segregation.
According to one study, this segregation happens particularly within suburban and rural areas. And another study suggests that hate crimes against Hispanics rise whenever there is an increase in Hispanic immigration. Most of these crimes are reported in places where Latinos are new to the area, as there are few hate crimes in long-established Hispanic communities. The Pew Research Center found that the percentage of Latinos who think discrimination against Hispanics is a major problem in America is increasing, with 61 percent of Latinos saying so in 2010, compared to 47 percent in 2002.

Ryan D. Enos of Harvard University set out to find out why some Americans have negative biases against Latinos. He identified nine commuter rail stations in the Boston area used almost exclusively by white passengers. Then he randomly selected a few of the stations to receive an intervention — two Latino people talking to each other in Spanish while waiting on the platform for the train for two weeks. After that, he surveyed people at each of the stations about their attitudes toward immigration. His findings? He discovered that those who had stood near the Spanish-speaking passengers demonstrated increasingly negative attitudes toward immigration — despite the fact that the Spanish speakers were not aggressive and did not act in an abnormal fashion.
But, he also found that the longer white people were exposed to the Spanish speakers, the less “exclusionary” their attitudes became. When he surveyed people after just three days of exposure to the Spanish speakers, he found them to be much more exclusionary than when he interviewed people after spending ten days near the Spanish speakers on the platform.
Enos’s findings, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, mirror those of a recent Oxford study published in the same journal that found people with racist attitudes become less so when they simply see people of another race in their neighborhood over an extended period of time. Those with exclusionary attitudes don’t even need to interact with those of another race. To become more tolerant, all they need is to go about their daily business in close proximity with those of different ethnicities. Professor Miles Hewstone, the director of the Oxford Centre for the Study of Intergroup Conflict told Sarah Knapton of The Telegraph, “If two white people with identical views went to live in different postcodes for a year, the person in the neighborhood with more mixing between ethnic groups would likely leave more tolerant.”
Racism and discrimination against Latinos hasn’t ended yet in America, but by 2043, when the U.S. Census has projected that whites will no longer be in the majority in America, it could ebb, just by virtue of increasingly mixed neighborhoods.
MORE: Latino Families Were Hit Hard by the Recession. Here’s How They’re Fighting Back.