In the Land of Hate

Raphael Ezekiel explores America's racist subcultures

By Ken Gewertz

Gazette Staff

About a month into his study of neo-Nazi groups in inner-city Detroit, Raphael Ezekiel had a disturbing thought.

"I was driving into Detroit to see some of the kids I'd been working with, and I was thinking about what I could maybe do to help one of them. And then it occurred to me, 'I'm thinking of helping a Nazi?' "

Dissonant thoughts and feelings are familiar territory for Ezekiel, a social psychologist whose recently published book, The Racist Mind: Portraits of American Neo-Nazis and Klansmen (Viking, 1995), vividly brings before the reader the results of seven years of field research among America's racist right.

Ezekiel, 64, is currently a senior research scientist at the School of Public Health's Public Health Practice Initiative and an instructor in the Department of Health and Social Behavior. He is retired from the University of Michigan's Psychology Department.

Ezekiel, who is Jewish and politically left-leaning, never attempted to hide his ethnic background or his politics from the people he studied. When it was useful, he would argue with them. He attracted his share of hostility and suspicion, but on the whole, his respondents were surprisingly cooperative.

Ezekiel attributes his acceptance partly to his unpretentious, down-home manner, the result of growing up in a small town in Texas. But mostly he believes that his racist informants opened up to him simply because he was sincerely interested in what they had to say.

"I told them that professionally I was interested in understanding the world they lived in and that I was going to present honestly what they said. Like everyone else in the world, they love to talk, and I think they suspected that I'd do less distorting than newspaper people did."

Ezekiel's book presents a series of portraits, ranging from a small band of young urban neo-Nazis who call themselves Death's Head Strike Group; to Tom Metzger, the cynical and restless leader of White Aryan Resistance; to Richard Butler, guru of the Christian Identity movement, which teaches that only white people of European descent are the children of God.

The rhetoric of hatred and paranoia that links these groups is both frightening and depressing, and one wonders how Ezekiel was able to maintain his own equilibrium under the constant onslaught of their members' lunatic ravings. But the other dominant characteristic that emerges from these portraits is the relative ineffectuality of the extremist sector of America's racist right.

Memberships change constantly as recruits are drawn in by racist propaganda, then become bored and drift away; groups split into internecine factions; and leaders turn on one another to avoid legal prosecution. Ezekiel's ethnographic techniques bring us into close proximity with his respondents and reveal, as no other method could, their pitiful marginality.

"In that Detroit bunch, there were a lot of very poor white kids who didn't have a lot in their lives," he said. "They have no job skills, no future, no grasp of history or social forces. They don't have any clue as to why their lives are the way they are, and calling themselves Nazis for a while and going to meetings and demonstrating, talking about that big family called the white race, gives them something to imagine they're part of, something that matters."

But Ezekiel does not believe that the racist right's current ineffectuality justifies dismissing it as irrelevant. One of his main points is that the radical ideologies represented by these groups are merely an extreme form of the racism that is prevalent throughout American society. As economic conditions worsen for those on the bottom, authoritarian leaders may use this incipient racism as a psychological lever with which to impose social control.

"I think we are in a very dangerous period of history right now," he said. "Pretty soon this economy will have to deal with the question of what to do about the fact that a quarter to a third of the work force is unemployable. Those who are in control will have to do something about that, and I think the easiest solution is increased authoritarianism, and I think racism is the easiest way to sell authoritarianism."

How did Ezekiel survive his long immersion in a culture that was both personally and philosophical repugnant? He calls the experience "deeply depressing, that people could invest their lives in something so pointless, and that truth doesn't matter."

What drove him was not an interest in the Klan or other racist groups, but concern for the children of the poor.

"I care about kids in Detroit, kids in Dorchester, who go hungry, and a big part of why they go hungry is because of widespread, everyday racism, which enables politicians to demonize poor people. I thought, OK, here's racism without any filters on, any pretense. Let's see what it looks like."

While Ezekiel found his encounter with the racist right disturbing, its impact paled beside that of his previous research on the lives of low-income African Americans living in inner-city Detroit, reported in Voices from the Corner: Poverty and Racism in the Inner City (Temple University Press, 1984).

That experience, he said, not only disturbed him profoundly but radicalized him as well. During the mid-1960s, Ezekiel spent three days a week in the inner city, learning about the day-to-day lives of his respondents. He found that making the transition back to academia and his own middle-class life became increasingly jarring.

"It got real clear that policy discussion at the university, in Congress, in the media, was all bullshit. It was the middle class amusing itself, titillating itself. I was teaching a course on psychology and social problems, and I'd go have coffee with my students and talk about my research, and the next day I'd go back to Detroit and Ruby's kids would still be eating corn flakes and water. Nothing had changed, nothing was going to change."

Although Ezekiel's encounters with human misery have made him suspicious of glib policymakers, he does not allow himself to be paralyzed by a sense of futility.

"Doing nothing is more futile," he said. "One thing I can do is try to tell the truth, and I think that's important."

Another activity that sustains him is working with young people. His current project has brought him back to a milieu much like that which produced Voices from the Corner. He is conducting a preliminary study of Boston groups like Gang Peace that serve the needs of inner-city youth.

"I'm trying to get a handle on groups in this area that are working with low-income kids and the resources that are available to these kids as they try to construct their lives."

As he learns more about the lives of low-income Boston youth and their opportunities for growth and change, Ezekiel often hearkens back to that disturbing impulse to extend a helping hand to a young neo-Nazi. What he realizes now is that both the victims and perpetrators of racism might benefit from the same opportunities, provided those opportunities are offered honestly, through real, one-on-one contact.

"When I was working with the young racist kids in Detroit, it became clear that their needs could have been met in many more interesting ways than by flirting with the Nazis. We've got to give people a decent social goal. And we've got to make some jobs available. It doesn't do a lot of good to send a kid out into a world where there isn't any work."