Skinheads and Diversity
On the night of September 17, 2009, in front of a packed audience at Baker Hall, TJ Leyden, a former Neo-Nazi white supremacist recruiter, gave Lehigh University students some StrHATE Talk on how to turn away from hate. At least, this is how it was advertised – and you know what they say about truth in advertising. It really should have been “Former Neo-Nazi talks about all the bad things he’s done in his life and why other people shouldn’t do them.”
Specifically, the flyer for the speech said Leyden became “one of the nation’s most compelling advocates for the importance of diversity and cultural importance.” Pfft. Leyden spent maybe five minutes of his two hours on diversity. He mostly talked about his history in the white supremacy movement and the violent acts he committed. The explanation of his exit from this lifestyle was more of an afterthought. He never really explained how he repented. He also found time to insult the US military, equating the Marine Corps to a racist organization that hates gay people. He even said that “The military made [him] a better racist.”
TJ Leyden was a white supremacist, and this feeling was deeply held. He recalled one particularly gruesome event in which he kicked a kid in the thumb with his steel-toed Doc Martens so hard that air escaped the body as the bone broke the skin. His explanation for leaving the white supremacist movement was even more confusing than that event was grotesque. He said he got out of it because he didn’t want his two sons to become radicalized and end up in prison. This led him to turn his life around, somehow. The problem here is repentance. He goes into an anecdote about how his mom forced him to go to a Jewish tolerance center. At no point in the lecture did he explain how he realized his beliefs were wrong, nor did he fully explain these so-called activities of repentance.
Leyden is a consultant for the Simon Wiesenthal Center, a Jewish human rights organization. But he didn’t really explain how his “expertise” is of value to their efforts. For all we know, he’s just capitalizing on his knowledge of the skinhead movement. I doubt he talks to them about diversity…
This lecture was marketed as a Neo-Nazi turned diversity advocate. If he’s the latter, he didn’t make that clear. He had some compelling words about how important diversity is, but he also made a very judgmental remark. First off, he told everyone to “Fight racism with your mind, not your fists.” Powerful words indeed, but not something most college students haven’t heard before from sources with considerably greater moral authority.
That’s not to say this lecture wasn’t interesting. The fact that there’s a video game where the objective is to kill the “Master Jew” in the subway is twisted enough to border on comedy. I also learned that the inventor of the electric can opener, Ben Klassen, founded a white supremacist group called the “World Church of the Creator,” which advocates a whites-only religion. And there’s at least one thing Leyden and I can unequivocally agree on: he’s a Packers fan.
