‘LIFE AFTER HATE’
Long journey from racism to advocate for tolerance
forbidding them to come in.
At one life-altering rally, surrounded by others with shaved heads and steel-toed boots, in a sea of stiff-armed Heil Hitler salutes, Picciolini took a 14-word vow: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.”
For seven years, those words and that salute guided him.
At one point, Picciolini wound up on a school football team with black teammates. He compartmentalized sports from racism, though, because winning meant more to him. Still, along the way, he looked for fights.
“I’d taken to fighting with relative ease and comfort,” he writes. “My training came in the form of almost daily fistfights with anyone I felt threatened the safety of my neighborhood. Violence and dominance became pleasurable in a way that, when I remember it all these years later, makes me sick.”
Friends helped him acquire guns. Using a stolen driver’s license, he amassed weapons. And a few times he came close to blowing off heads — including his mother’s when she dared skulk around his apartment.
“I was prepared to battle to the death, even martyr myself, to protect the white race from destruction,” he recalled.
He formed a band, White American Youth, which made its way to a neo-Nazi rally in Weimar, Germany. The city was crammed with white supremacists from everywhere, “as if 1930s Nazi Germany had squeezed through a wrinkle in time.”
Onstage, he led 4,000 people in the Nazi salute. Later that day, he met up with his girlfriend to tour Germany.
She never shared his racist views, and a once-dormant conscience began to nag at him, too. By September 1992 at the Aryan Unity March, where skinheads and the Klan united in hate, he realized he loved her more than he despised everyone else.
By the time Picciolini was 21, he was married with two sons. He worked hard at menial jobs but was getting nowhere — so he opened a store selling music and accessories for skinheads and punks.
Browsing customers led to conversations with different people. And he realized, finally, they were people “I had much more in common with than the ones I had surrounded myself with since I was 14. I was beginning to notice the little experiences that bind us humans together.”
The realization came too late to save his marriage or his store. But he eventually saved himself and found new ways to live.