From hate to harmony

Friday, January 29, 1999

From hate to harmony

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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