Hate leaves an unwelcome message
When Robert Waggener checked the voice mail at his family-run electrical contracting company in East Oakland on a recent weekend, what he heard unsettled him.
The voice mail, just over one minute long with theatrical background music, is disguised like an ordinary campaign message, but the message’s goal is to spread fear and hate.
“Negroes are not humans,” the voice mail begins. “Negroes are low IQ, violent impulsive animals meant for brutal, primitive life in tropical Africa.”
The automated phone call goes on to say that “Negroes” are incapable of contributing to white civilization.
“Negroes ruin every place they infest in large numbers, like Detroit,” the voice mail concludes. “End the Negro plague now before it’s too late.”
Waggener, who is white, certainly got the message.
“It’s sick. It’s sick,” he said repeatedly as I sat in his office one morning last week.
The voice mail was the latest in a string of hateful messages delivered to Bay Area residents by a robocall this year.
In June, my colleague Joe Garofoli reported on a robo-
call that included antiSemitic slurs directed at Sen. Dianne Feinstein. The calls urged listeners to support the campaign of Patrick Little, a neoNazi who was running as a Republican for Democrat Feinstein’s U.S. Senate seat.
In July, Contra Costa County residents received an anti-Semitic robocall in support of John Fitzgerald, who is running for Democratic Rep. Mark DeSaulnier’s congressional seat representing Richmond, Walnut Creek, Concord and other cities in the county. Fitzgerald, a Republican who has made anti-Semitic statements, drew 23 percent of the vote to finish second in June’s primary.
I wish I was shocked that Fitzgerald has any support at all.
The robocall Waggener received has a glaring similarity to the ones from earlier this summer: They all end with the words “paid for by TheRoadToPower.com.” According to the Spokesman-Review and the Sandpoint Reader, two news publications in Idaho, “The Road to Power” is a podcast hosted by a white supremacist living in Sandpoint.
The same podcast now is said to be behind ugly robocalls targeting Andrew Gillum, the African American candidate recently elected as Democratic nominee in the contest for governor of Florida.
My calls to the podcaster went unanswered.
But what 82-year-old Waggener and his family heard wasn’t a political endorsement. It was simply an endorsement of hate.
“It’s so not true,” Waggener said as his voice trembled. Tears ran down his face. “I’ve never had anybody think those thoughts in my presence.”
He reached for a box of tissues.
Hate is a scourge that needs to be eradicated like smallpox. Instead, aided by the current U.S. president, hate has been weaponized. If we’re going to fix this country’s racial problems, we have to acknowledge and rebuke the people inflaming racial tensions.
The hateful message has affected Waggener’s family. He said his granddaughter, Lexi Anderson, couldn’t listen to the entire message.
“Ominous, wasn’t it?” said his son, Rex Waggener. “It’s scary times.”
The family doesn’t want to live in a country where this is accepted as normal, and neither do I. I went to meet Waggener because he sent me a one-sentence email with the subject “racist phone call.”
“Most of us would just hang up and say this is BS and delete it,” Beci Anderson, Waggener’s daughter, told me. “But it really bothered him, and he felt like he needed to do something more.”
Waggener grew up in Detroit, the youngest of nine children born in a working-class family. He remembers how Orville Hubbard, the segregationist who for 36 years was the mayor of Dearborn, a city that’s part of the Detroit metropolitan area, vehemently railed against integration.
It shaped the way Waggener sees unfairness in the exclusion of others. After moving to San Mateo in the ’60s, he joined the local Elks lodge so his children could swim at the club’s pool. He gave up the membership because it required all members to be white.
A single father, Waggener raised three children. One son is a defense attorney. He taught Rex and Beci how to be electrical estimators, a job that calculates the projected costs involved in electrical projects.
In 1985, the three opened Beci Electric, an electrical contracting company in Oakland. Rex runs the field operations, and Anderson, after whom the company is named, manages the business. She’s the boss.
Anderson and her daughter, Lexi, who is taking classes at Berkeley City College and Chabot College, stay at his home in the Adams Point neighborhood during the week. They go home to Murphys, a town in the Sierra Nevada foothills, on weekends.
Anderson told me Lexi keeps care packages for homeless people in her car. She said Waggener also gives to homeless people.
“He doesn’t wait for somebody to come up and ask him for money,” Anderson said. “He sees someone that looks hard on their luck; he pulls a $5, $10, $20 bill out of his wallet and walks over and gives it to them.”
This is a family that takes time to look at people instead of looking past them. A repulsive voice mail isn’t going to stop them from doing what they’ve always done.