When I was in Charlottesville as part of a clergy delegation to protest the Unite the Right rally, I got to look into the faces of “out” Nazis and white supremacists for the first time in my 61 years. And they looked scarily normal. They’re the guys arranging stock at the local big box store or the desk jockeys in a cubicle farm. Decent. Clean cut. Surprisingly young. And white. No doubt I looked into these faces before — on the street, in a restaurant, in church — but I didn’t know it because they weren’t carrying Nazi and Confederate flags, semi-automatic rifles and shields.
What would possess these young white men (and a few women) to chant hateful anti-Semitic and racist slogans, to shout homophobic, xenophobic and misogynistic slurs, to speak of putting Jews in ovens and driving people of color off of “their” soil (land stolen by their immigrant ancestors from the Native Peoples)?
That’s the question many of us are asking.
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