Fear and loathing

America's war on hate isn't being fought just on television and in lecture halls. It's being fought underground, too, and it can be confrontational and controversial.

by Jason Gay

When the bullet-riddled bodies of Daniel Shersty and Lin "Spit" Newborn were found on the rocky plain northwest of Las Vegas over the Fourth of July weekend last year, law-enforcement authorities weren't immediately sure what had provoked a double murder in the desert.

In the days that followed, however, police got some clues. Shersty and Newborn, they learned, were active in Vegas's underground punk-rock scene and shared a passionate disdain for the neo-Nazi skinheads who occasionally crashed local concerts and parties. Both men also had ties to the city's newly formed chapter of Anti-Racist Action (ARA), a national organization dedicated to crushing hate groups around the country.

In short, both Shersty and Newborn might have been expected to have enemies. So two months later, when police arrested a reputed Vegas skinhead, John Edward "Polar Bear" Butler, and charged him with both murders, it merely reinforced what many had suspected for some time: that Shersty and Newborn had been killed in retaliation for taking a strong stance against racism.

To some, this twin killing in the Las Vegas desert was nothing less than the first murder of American civil-rights activists in more than 20 years. Even those who had never heard of Shersty and Newborn were shocked. Many observers had previously regarded battles between skinheads and anti-racists as little more than harmless suburban skirmishes.

To activists around the country, however, the Las Vegas murders were an unsettling reminder that taking a public stand against hatred is potentially dangerous, even deadly. "It woke a lot of people up to the fact that we have become targets," says Jerry Bellow, a volunteer at Anti-Racist Action's headquarters in Columbus, Ohio. "[Neo-Nazis] saw these guys as a threat to what they were doing."

But many people had never heard of groups like Anti-Racist Action until the Vegas murders, and that's not surprising. Although it is one of the nation's fastest-growing anti-hate groups -- its national mailing list now exceeds 35,000 people -- ARA has traditionally shunned the mainstream. It operates without major publicity or financial support, surviving through the underground networks of the Internet and the punk-rock scene, fueled by plenty of young, energetic support.

"We believe that the only way racism is gonna get smashed is by doing it ourselves!!" proclaims an introduction to the Web site of Minneapolis ARA (http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/Lobby/2853/), the nation's first chapter. "So we're not about relying on the courts or the cops. Don't let our name fool ya -- we're also anti-sexist and pro-queer. So check out our shit and if you dig it, then get in touch."

It's not exactly ready for prime time, but even without mainstream support, Anti-Racist Action has emerged as a player on the national anti-hate stage. "ARA has grown a lot in the past few years," says Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center, a Montgomery, Alabama-based organization that monitors hate groups nationally. "They've got something like 100 chapters, and that's pretty remarkable."

ARA has been around since the mid-'80s, when hardcore fans, frustrated with brawl-happy neo-Nazi skinheads who were poisoning the scene, decided to fight back with an organization of their own. Though some of its members are skinheads themselves -- in fact, some identify themselves as "Sharps," short for Skinheads Against Racial Prejudice -- Jerry Bellow says ARA is now less than 10 percent skins. There are punk ARA members, goth members, fans of heavy metal and ska. There are even ARA members with a few Dave Matthews Band CDs stashed in their bedrooms.

Music has provided a constant backdrop to ARA and to the underground anti-racist movement in general. This summer witnessed the first-ever Ska Against Racism tour, a North American jaunt featuring bands including the Toasters, Mustard Plug, and Kemuri. And earlier this year, Attitude and Asian Man Records released the Anti-Racist Action Benefit CD, including performances by Veil, Fahrenheit 451, Jello Biafra, and Boston's own Mighty Mighty Bosstones.

"I think the ARA is outstanding," says Margo Tiffen, the associate editor of Rude International, a Cambridge-based music-and-culture 'zine founded by Bosstones saxophonist Tim Burton. "The newsletter they put out is incredibly informative, and they really do circulate a lot of information [about hate groups] to kids."

There were already as many as 20 ARA chapters on the West Coast in the late 1980s, but the organization has grown dramatically during the latter half of this decade. (New England remains a weak spot for ARA activity despite the region's solid hardcore/punk music scene, says Columbus ARA's Bellow, citing the relatively small number of hate groups in the region. It's places like the Midwest and Ontario -- both areas fraught with hate groups -- where ARA is the strongest, he says.) Retooled in 1994 to focus less on music and more on politics, ARA regularly assembles gatherings of underground-scene anti-hate activists in the US, and it closely monitors neo-Nazi and Ku Klux Klan activity in its chapter areas. An ARA conference held in Columbus, Ohio, attracted more than 1000 activists; next year, the conference will move to Chicago to accommodate an even larger crowd.

"Apathy is a myth in our generation," says Bellow. "Unlike previous generations, it doesn't take a war to get us on the move."

But though ARA may be dedicated to action, it's far from a traditional anti-racism organization. It loathes the politically correct, eschewing the pragmatic passive-resistance approaches favored by groups like the NAACP and the Anti-Defamation League in favor of anger and an occasionally twisted sense of humor. The Las Vegas ARA Web site (http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/5826/), for example, features a graphic of a man in red shorts urinating on a swastika.

Put simply, ARA's brand of civil-rights activism is not the lunch-counter sit-in kind. "It gets the goods," says Bellow. "Our rallies are a lot more effective than nonconfrontational tactics in stopping and checking the growth of white-supremacist groups.

ARA stands apart, too, in its antipathy toward police. One of the group's most prominent side projects is "Copwatch," in which members monitor police procedures and incidents of brutality and harassment. And the main ARA site (www.aranet.org) has a link for both neo-Nazis and police to click on; when they do, the screen displays an illustration of Adolf Hitler with a gun in his mouth and the inscription FOLLOW YOUR LEADER.

Bellow believes that hate groups on society's fringes should not be considered in isolation from the racism found in social institutions such as law enforcement. "You can't be fighting against one and ignoring the other," he says. "Especially with the number of white supremacists infiltrating police departments, notably Los Angeles's."

Not surprisingly, talk like that has led more-mainstream anti-racist organizations to distance themselves from the youthful group. Some critics charge that groups like ARA are muddying their message in their zeal to fight racism. The Southern Poverty Law Center's Potok, for example, says that occasional outbursts of violence by ARA members -- particularly anti-racist skins -- have undermined the group's positive strides.

"I think anti-racist skinheads are essentially a good thing," says Potok. "The criticism is that they share a certain violent street culture with racist skins. . . . I don't think it helps the world much to smash beer bottles over anyone's heads, even if it's a [neo-Nazi's] head."

David Goldman, who operates Hatewatch.org, a Cambridge-based monitor of racist Internet sites, agrees. Worse, he says, their anger plays straight into the hands of hate groups, which tend to be desperate for any kind of attention.

"While I applaud their activism in pursuit of noble ends, I do take issue with that sort of in-your-face confrontation," says Goldman. "Its value is short-lived, and it tends to draw away from the issue at hand, which is the rise or spread of some type of bigotry or intolerance."

Tiffen, however, thinks ARA's provocative rep is overblown. "They are not irresponsible kids running off and beating up Nazis," she says. Rather, she sees ARA's free-for-all spirit as mirroring the "do-it-yourself" ethic found in the underground punk scene.

"It's like they're saying, 'We just don't think you're fast enough. We think you're too involved with red tape. We don't have to be involved in the bureaucracy and wait for someone to wave a flag and say it's okay to do something,' " Tiffen says. "[They're] just going to go outside the system and do it on their own."

ARA's Bellow, too, is unfazed by the criticism from mainstream anti-hate groups. "We have a right to defend ourselves," he says of the organization's confrontational spirit, and he points to the organization's growth as proof that its message resonates with younger people. "ARA exists and succeeds because there is a vacuum created by the abject failure of other [anti-hate] groups," he says. "If they were right and we were wrong, we wouldn't exist."

And Bellow says that ARA is getting more sophisticated with its communications -- not just on the Internet, but with e-mail and pagers and cell phones and plans to unveil a more formal newsletter in the coming year. The idea, he says, is to give ARA a more centralized "official voice."

Though skirmishes between neo-Nazis and anti-racist skins had occasionally escalated into serious violence, there's little question that the murders in Vegas this summer stunned ARA members. In the aftermath, it would have been understandable for some to flee the group, fearing for their lives. But ARA Vegas stood strong; an August 29 rally for Shersty and Newborn attracted several hundred ARA members from around the country.

In fact, the murders have served to reinforce ARA's mission, Bellow says. And now, he expects the group to continue to grow throughout the country.

"All of America has a problem with race," Bellow says.

Jason Gay can be reached at jgay[a]phx.com.