No Place for Hate: Duo Promotes ‘Alt-Solutions’

Brunswick welcomed Daryl Davis and Arno Michaelis — presenters of “No Place for Hate: Alt-Solutions for Transforming the Alt-Right” — to the Upper and Middle School campuses on Thursday, October 26. 
 
Davis began the program by detailing his first experience with racism: At age 10, in 1968, he was pelted with rocks, splintered bottles, and debris while carrying the American flag for his Cub Scout troop at a parade near Belmont, Massachusetts. He was the lone black boy in the troop.
 
From that moment on, he has sought the answer to the question: “How can you hate me when you don’t even know me?”
 
A self-professed “proud American,” Davis noted the irony in that the U.S. has long been the world’s leader in innovation for communication. “Now,” he said, “our ideology has to catch up to our technology.”
 
Placing himself on racism’s front lines, Davis set out to write a book, Klan-Destine Relationships: A Black Man's Odyssey in the Ku Klux Klan. The work expounded on his unique and successful method of deflecting white supremacists by befriending them.
 
He told the story of his long personal journey with Ku Klux Klan Imperial Wizard Roger Kelly, beginning in 1983 with an interview at a motel in Maryland. Kelly, at first, was unaware that Davis was black, but agreed to sit down with him, nonetheless.   
 
Despite their disparate ideologies, the two continued to meet throughout the years and began building trust and respect for one another as they spoke and (most especially) listened. Davis even attended Klan rallies and invited Kelly to his home for dinner.
 
“When you are actively learning about someone else, you are passively teaching them about yourself,” Davis said. “So, if you have an adversary with an opposing point of view, give that person a platform.
 
“Allow them to air that point of view, regardless of how extreme it may be. And believe me, I've heard things so extreme at these rallies they'll cut you to the bone.
 
“You challenge them. But you don't challenge them rudely or violently. You do it politely and intelligently. And when you do things that way, chances are they will reciprocate and give you a platform. So, he and I would sit down and listen to one another over a period of time,” Davis said, reiterating that he vehemently disagreed with the Kelly, his Klan, and his ideology.
 
“And the cement that held his ideas together began to get cracks in it. And then it began to crumble. And then it fell apart.”
 
Michaelis, a founding member of the world’s largest white-power skinhead organization and former lead vocalist of the hate-metal band “Centurion,” once led a life “hell-bent on the destruction of anyone who wasn’t white.”
 
He did so for seven years (1987–1994) before being inspired to turn his life around by the love for his daughter and the forgiveness shown by people he once hated — and also by the sheer exhaustion of embracing an ideology that separated him from almost everyone else on Earth.
 
He saw enemies everywhere he looked.
 
Today, he’s a changed man — thankful for the courage of people who refused to be subject to his hostility and, instead, responded with kindness.
 
“I now look at the world with joy and gratitude — and I’ve dedicated myself to counteract the harm that I once helped to cause,” Michaelis said. “I appreciate diversity for the beautiful asset to our society it is.
 
“We face a lot of challenges in this world, given the mess we’ve created — and we all have to get busy fixing it,” he told students. “We don’t have time to be hating one another. Be one of those ‘strange’ people who thinks differently. Change the paradigm of the society we live in.”
 
 
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    • Caleb Osemobor '18, president of Diversity in Action, introduced the program.

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