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Leadership
We Do Not Concede, Nor Do We Condemn (Part 1)
Chronicling the fight against white supremacy and domestic radicalization.
Posted August 6, 2020
This post offers an excerpt from my latest book, Leadership: Performance Beyond Expectations (Routledge, October 2020). I was fortunate enough to feature this interview with Life After Hate CEO Sammy Rangel in the book, alongside interviews with other high-profile leaders. The interview is featured here as Part 1 of a three-part series.
Life After Hate
Life After Hate exists to help individuals leave violent far-right groups and reintegrate positively into society. Life After Hate has successfully lowered recidivism rates amongst ex-prisoners, rehabilitated hundreds of former white supremacists, and successfully challenged social media-based hate speech. Having recently raised over $1 million via crowdfunding, the organisation remains the only one of its kind to actively rehabilitate white supremacists and alt-right extremists in the USA. Sammy is the author of FourBears: The Myths of Forgiveness and holds a master’s degree in social work. Here he shares his insightful experience and valuable thoughts on Life After Hate—an organisation that captures the very essence of what transformational leadership seeks to achieve.
“The motivation for Life After Hate started at a summit in Ireland against violent extremism. We work with ‘formers’—people who have left extremist groups. Formers Anonymous is something that I created personally, bringing in best practice from the clinical field alongside strength-based approaches. I apply the concept of Formers to the 12-step community where there is no space to address criminality, hatred, or violence.
We have what is known as an 80-20 rule—you can spend 20% of the conversation talking about the issues, but then you need to be spending 80% of the time talking about solutions, strengths, etc. The best practice science behind that is what you spend your time talking about is what you crave for yourself.
I think that a problem that exists with older and existing models aimed at de-radicalizing and rehabilitating people is that they spend a lot of time talking about problems. We are trying to reverse that—and we also try to remove language that can act as barriers for people to come to the table—religion connotations and language, for example."
Remarkable Stories
"I think that everyone that we help has a remarkable story. I remember cases where someone wanted to shoot up a mosque or church, kind of inspired by other similar events that had already happened in the country years ago, who ended up praying with the same people that they wanted to harm. These people ended up being accepted into the community they wanted to harm.
Then you get another real story about exiting extremist groups—which relates to someone I am working with now. This person has left an extremist group, but his community continues to condemn him (or what or who he used to be)—so much so, that it continues to impact his dealings in family court, in the emergency room, at his church, and trying to access alcohol and drug service in his community. This community has basically tarred and feathered him. It’s been a couple of years and he still can’t make progress. Life after Hate can only do so much for you in the face of that. It’s hard for that gentleman to make traction and a reminder that changing your life isn’t always rainbows—you aren’t always welcomed back with open arms."
Facing Hostility
"We face a lot of trouble from white supremacy groups. The first time I experienced it was with a white supremacy group based in Germany. That group took upon themselves to do a two-hour special on Life After Hate and they aired out all of our details, all of our pictures, all of our website info, and really acted with the intention to hopefully trigger someone into doing something to us.
The other members of Life After Hate (I’m not an ex white supremacist but I do have a very similar trajectory and experience) are former members of white supremacy groups. Some have been out for more than 20 years, yet they’re still daily named in those white supremacy circles. We have to turn over messages or screenshots where they are like, ‘Hey so-and-so will be at this university at 2 p.m. … why don’t one of you good chaps go and shake their hand and say hello?’ And you know, it’s not shaking our hand that they’re really coming for."
Fighting Back
"We get trolled a lot and don’t really engage—we pass it on typically to law enforcement in the same way that any other organization or individual would when they receive threats of any kind - and they will log it and if there is something there that’s enough they will follow up on it. Standard stuff. The problem is, these groups are quite experienced in how to toe the line and get right up to the line without crossing it, whilst at the same time trying to trigger an event.
One of the significant differences between traditional gangs and white supremacy groups are that gangs are pretty localised—if you leave your neighbourhood you should be safe enough. But these white supremacy groups, they have international reach. They are an international problem. As a result, wherever we go as an organization, we are running into components of that same group who want to pass on the torch of hate to make sure we are never feeling too comfortable, regardless of where we are. So that is a real problem for us."
Can Anyone Be Radicalized?
"An older sociological belief was that the majority of people who commit crimes or engage in extremist activity have a broken home, a broken nuclear family, severe socio-economic issues, and so on. While that remains true in many cases, I believe that that model doesn’t explain this extremist, radicalized group as it is today. Quite a few of our Formers and co-founders were raised in privileged homes, for example, with highly educated parents, middle to upper-class homes, what I’d consider wealthy.
So-called alt-right groups (who are just white supremacists re-branding themselves) do a lot of recruiting from campuses. There are multiple groups following this same ideology, who demonstrate common factors around past experiences of trauma, abuse, neglect—but we also see a healthy model of people who don’t fit that paradigm. You will be able to find markers, though. I remember a couple of brothers from Michigan who we really helped, and while they were with us, we were taking one of the brothers through a black neighborhood—and he shared that he grew up there and he used to get beat up all the time. He was the white guy in the black neighborhood—so you don’t need to be a rocket scientist to see what started a fracture that in his case led to radicalism. If you look hard enough you can find the reasons.
But we can’t afford to say they [radicalized individuals] are all poor, they’re all broken—it's just not the case. There’s not one way to answer how radicalization happens. I wish I could answer that. Everyone is scrambling for the way to create the recipe for fighting that. But I will say I think if there is an underlying component that contributes to this it is grievances. Like this young man from Michigan who grew up as a white male in a black neighborhood, ‘I got beat up all the time’. It’s an unaddressed grievance."
* NB. Life After Hate is not directly involved in re-entry work; when Sammy Rangel discusses re-entry in this interview, it is in the context of his professional roles & experiences that took place before joining Life After Hate.
Part 2 of this three-part series will be published next week. For more information in the meantime, check out these links:
- Life After Hate.
- We Counter Hate.
- Enzinna, W. (July/August 2018 Issue). Inside the Radical, Uncomfortable Movement to Reform White Supremacists. Mother Jones.
Click here to learn more about Leadership: Performance Beyond Expectations.
