From hate to harmony

Published: Friday, January 29, 1999

Friday, January 29, 1999

TOLERANCE: A former skinhead gives an inside look into America's racist cultures and religions

By Katie Pappert

Daily Bruin Senior Staff

Parties, music, the punk scene and his parents' divorce drew T.J. Leyden into the skinhead culture in the late 1970s. Though Leyden was originally attracted to the violent nature of skinheads, he began to conform to their messages of hate, eventually becoming a perpetrator of several hate crimes himself.

Leyden's sons began to mimic his racist beliefs at a remarkably young age; their behavior was what eventually pushed Leyden to change his life of hatred, violence and jail time.

Though Leyden never planned to speak out against the skinhead movement, his mother advised him to work for the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles. He is now a consultant for the National Task Force Against Hate at the Simon Wiesenthal Center. He gives lectures every day to students and law enforcement officers about his life and the changes he has undergone.

What are examples of things you did when you were a skinhead?

Attacking people, beating people up at the shows, being drunk, being stupid, things of that nature.

I'd beat up anyone who wasn't a skinhead. At that time the skinheads were bi-racial. There was Latinos and whites; this was before the racism came in.

By 1981, five bands came out playing the music we were listening to, called "Oi!". When the five bands came out, they were all racist, so it broke the skinhead movement up into two factions (There were originally two factions, now there are three). There are SHARPs (Skinheads Against Racial Prejudice), neo-Nazi's and Traditionals - they call themselves Trads. They all have one thing in common. They are all violent.

What influenced you to change your lifestyle?

What got me to get out was my kids. They were the ones that started to get the ball rolling. I have two sons. My oldest, at the time, actually came out in the living room, saw what was on TV one day, and he walked over and turned it off. And he turned to me and scolded me. He said, "Daddy, we don't watch shows with niggers on it in this house."

My first impression was, "This kid's cool." But then I started thinking about it, and if he's doing this at three, then what's he going to be like when he gets to be 16, 17, 18?

I started thinking about my life, all the stuff I'd been in trouble with, all the times I went to county jail, all my friends that are dead, all my friends that are hurt. It took more than two years, after that incident, before I left.

I got up one morning, and I took off. I drove away from my house, left my wife and kids in Idaho. Went down to California, went back up and got my kids and brought them to California with me and filed for divorce.

Were there any times when you committed a crime motivated by hate and when you felt like you stepped over the line?

I didn't care. Attacking people and hurting people, that didn't bother me at all. Back when I was doing a lot of my stuff, there was no hate-crime law. I'm pretty sure that the state of California did not pass a hate-crime law until 1992. So from '81 to '92, that's 11 years, I pretty much had free reign to do whatever I wanted. All it would be was a simple assault charge. A lot of times, you can get those brought down to misdemeanors or even less.

Lately, hate crimes have become much more prevalent incidents, with the murders of gay student Matthew Shepard in Wyoming, an African American man named James Byrd in Texas and the UCLA student Thien Minh Ly who was killed by an alleged white supremacist gang in 1996. What kinds of things could help stop future hate crimes? Do you think education, community involvement or legislation help?

Well, in terms of legislation, when they passed the hate crime laws in California, I stopped committing hate crimes. I literally stopped finding blacks, Asians and Latinos to attack, because of the simple fact that you got more time for doing that. So I started basically just beating up on whites.

In the early stages, a lot of us would go especially to West Hollywood to attack homosexuals because they never called the cops. If they called the cops, they had to out themselves, and say "I got attacked because I am gay," and they never did that.

I think that, one, legislation helps. Two, I definitely think that we have to start younger with kids, and talk to them about issues of tolerance and understanding.

I try to lead by example. I have Latinos, blacks, Asians, Jewish people come to my house and eat dinner with me, so that my kids get to see the differences first-hand and get to experience them. I just think that so many of us don't do that when we go home. We want to have everybody that looks just like us in our little area.

There's been a lot of talk, especially at universities, about how important multiculturalism and diversity are. Do you think multiculturalism and diversity could help create tolerance?

I think that they really do, if they're done in the right way. Like student unions, when they first started out, everybody was there, it wasn't just certain groups. I think that once student unions got into the political aspects of the college, they totally changed.

Now it's like black student unions only deal with issues that deal with blacks, and Latinos only for them, and so on. The only time they usually come together is when they are doing a hate-crime seminar or a multicultural event, when they all pitch in and help.

I don't see very much crossing of the color lines - they're all about their issues and nobody else's. And it's become too politically motivated. A lot of other kids on the campus think that, "Well, it's the black student union, and I can't be in because I'm not black." I really think that it divides the school up.

Do you feel like you're making a difference?

Oh yeah. I've gotten 10 kids in two-and-a-half years to get away from the lifestyle that I was living, by talking to them, getting them to understand where they're at and what not to do. I've gone to numerous schools where teachers have said that the kids next day say, "Oh, we see that all over the place, we just didn't know it was happening, or how it was affecting us, but now we do."

What draws young people toward prejudice? Where do you think a lot of people's prejudices stem from?

If you just look at everyday society, there's a lot of prejudice that people just don't ever think about. You know, "I Jewed somebody down," "I nigger-rigged that," or you know, what's the worst thing that a little elementary school kid can ever get called? He gets called a fag. That's like the worst thing in the world to be called when you're in elementary school. These are just little things that we do every day, and then it directs the kid to be that way.

I mean, how many kids are just driving with Dad in the car, and Dad gets cut off by someone of another race, and Dad just starts screaming racial slurs at them. There's a lot of this is in society that we don't even realize is even there.

The first thing is, everybody in the world is prejudiced. That's just a fact. It's just that once you know where your prejudices are, then you can deal with them, and that's when you can really change how you feel about things.

What do you think draws people to the next level? What makes them commit acts of hate?

Kids get involved with gangs, and gangs are so big now, I think, because in the '80s we cut so much of the school budgets. No more bands after school, no more drama, drill team. We stopped having club activities after school.

Now every young man and woman in the world wants a sense of belonging. They want a group they fit in with. Now if they don't have a group that's good like the band, and they can't stay after school, they've got to go on to the streets. That's where the gangs, and the drug dealers and the racists are waiting to talk to them, pick them up and give them a sense of belonging. It's bad, but it's a sense of belonging.

Did you ever personally try to bring kids into your group?

Oh yeah. I would just sit and talk with the kids. Say there's an 8 or 9-year-old little kid, and they're hanging out at a 7-Eleven store. I'd go in, get a six-pack of soda, maybe some bubble gum or a candy bar and give them to the little kids.

Say the kid's now about 13, 14. He's known me for the last four or five years. I start giving him literature, nothing really racist, just small stuff. Like comic books that have racial overtones.

There's comic books that you can buy in comic book stores right now that say, "World War II never happened," "What would it have been like if Nazi Germany and England would have made an alliance together?" and then says like, "In 1946, we would have been exploring outer space because of all the technology." And in one of the comic books it says, "Hitler's really a good guy. He gives kids cookies and milk at a picnic."

You give the kids a CD, the kid goes home and plays the music - it talks about white power. I mean, 50,000 records, 50,000 racist CD's, the last two years in a row, have been sold in the United States, 1997-1998. That's over 100,000. That's a lot. They all have racial overtones, and the kids listen to them. The kids like it; that slowly gets them indoctrinated too.

How would you compare racism now versus back when you were involved? Do you think it's changed or grown?

It's growing, but it's growing in different ways. The skinhead movement isn't growing, but this group called Christian Identity (is). Christian Identity is this church that believes that the Israelites, (people in) the Bible, were all Europeans. They are not from the Middle East, they are all European whites. Jesus Christ was a strawberry blonde-haired Aryan, he wore the swastika as his religious symbol, and the swastika stands for Matthew, Mark, Luke and John in the Bible.

They also believe that Eve had sex with Satan in the Garden of Eden. When it says that she was "beguiled by the serpent," it means that the Devil actually had sex with Eve, and that's where the Jewish people came from. That's what they actually believe. This is the fastest growing segment in the white power movement.

Since they believe that, what they call the (U.S.) government is ZOD, the Zionist Occupational Government, and (they believe that) it's Jewish controlled. And since they think that Jews are the children of the devil, therefore they think that the Devil controls the United States now.

What is the main message that you send when you speak to people?

Everybody's an individual. And just treat every individual you meet differently.

If you like the person you like them, if you don't, fine. But don't be mean to them. Just learn that there's good and bad everywhere in the world, and you're going to come across it all the time.PATIL ARMENIAN/Daily Bruin

Former skinhead T. J. Leyden speaks about his first-hand experiences with hate crimes and his crusade against them.

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