He left a white supremacy group. Now he's working to help others do the same
Tony McAleer shares how he got into white supremacy and the importance of humanizing one another
Tony McAleer was just 16 years old when he got involved with a hate group.
He said he was into Vancouver's punk scene, where he met a group of skinheads.
"They terrified me," he said.
"I grew up as this sensitive, bright kid. I didn't get into fights at school. I wasn't good at fighting. I was a smart kid, not a tough kid. But these guys had the one thing that I craved at the time, and that was toughness."
So, in order to gain the support of these "tough" people that gave him the power he so desired, he started spending time with them, and eventually participating in their violence.
McAleer soon became active in the White Aryan Resistance, where he became a leader.
But 15 years later, he left that life behind and embarked on a path of healing. He's since founded a non-profit, Life After Hate, which helps other people leaving white supremacy groups, written a book called The Cure For Hate, and starred in a documentary about his journey.
He sat down for an interview with CBC's Daybreak South host Chris Walker ahead of a screening of The Cure for Hate: Bearing Witness to Auschwitz in Kelowna.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
How were you first drawn into white supremacy?
I grew up in Vancouver in an affluent neighbourhood. My father was a psychiatrist. I went to an all-boys private school. When I was 10, I walked in on my father with another woman, and that really rocked my world and my teachers decided they should try and beat the grades back into me. I was beaten with a metre stick if I didn't get an A or B in major tests and assignments. That happened over and over and over again. To this day, I have never felt more powerless than I did.
I'd gone from listening to Elton John and Queen to The Clash and the Sex Pistols. I'd gone to boarding school for a year in England and was introduced to skinheads then. It was at a punk show in Vancouver that I first met skinheads. People feared them. Nobody feared me. When I was with them, that sense of power, that false sense of power that comes with being with people that are afraid of you, was the exact opposite of that powerlessness I felt. It felt so safe to me. And in order to have their protection, I had to have their respect. In order to have their respect, I had to engage in the same street violence that that they did.
I wanna talk a bit about how you got out of this life. In 1998, Nirmal Singh Gill was beaten to death by skinheads outside a Surrey temple. You met some of these people. How did that affect you?
At the time, I was so disconnected from my humanity, I didn't feel anything for Nirmal when that happened. I just thought it was bad for business. It was bad PR.
Hate is a very cold emotion. When we see the yelling skinhead with the Nazi flag, that's rage. Underneath the hate is cold and dispassionate.
I was completely disconnected from my humanity. I couldn't relate to the humanity of another human being. It wasn't until much later that I had the opportunity to go back and work with that temple and work with his family — that was only just six years ago — to do that work of repair for both myself and the community.
What was it that made you question all these beliefs suddenly?
When I left the movement, I still had the beliefs intact. It's not just the ideas in someone's head, it was my whole identity. It was who I hung out with, the videos I watched, the music I listened to. It's challenging to get someone to admit that what they believe is wrong. I left the movement behind, but I was still a jerk. I still had all of the wounds that were spilling out all over everywhere. I used humour, sarcasm, putting people down, I could verbally destroy people without any violence. I was still a jerk because I hadn't dealt with the source of my anger and hatred, the source of my self-loathing.
It wasn't till I met a counsellor — who was Jewish — in 2005. I went through about 1,000 hours of one-on-one and group counselling and really got to the root of who I was. In that first counselling session, I didn't want to tell the counsellor about everything that I had done. The more I tell him, the more he starts smiling at me. I go, 'What's so funny?' and he goes 'You know I'm Jewish, right?' I fell back into my chair. My cheeks flushed with shame. Here's a man who wanted to help me. We'd become friends at this point, he wanted to heal me, wanted to heal my family. And here I am knowing that I'd once advocated for the annihilation of him and his people. He said, 'That's what you did. That's not who you are. I see you.' And with that began a journey of running toward the pain and the anger and the wounds that I've been running away from my entire life.
The more he connected me to my humanity, the more I could recognize the humanity in others. And the more I could connect to the humanity in others, the more I could recognize the humanity in myself.
For people who have friends or family members who they see going down this path and might be wondering if there's any way to help them, what is your advice?
You're not going to intellectually convince them. We want to challenge the ideas. It's not about the ideology. The ideology is how it's expressing itself. It's often about something much deeper than the ideology.
Try listening to the person. Often people's grievance is real, what they do with the grievance is completely out of line. But sometimes they have a legitimate reason to be angry. We just try and listen to them. Just because you listen to someone doesn't mean you accept their values. And just because you listen to someone doesn't mean you are compromising your values.
It's very important that we learn to call out behaviours, we call out ideology, call out the activity, but we need to call the human being in. If dehumanization is at the core of this, then we need to rehumanize them. The way that we rehumanize people is through compassion. When we're compassionate to someone, we hold a mirror up and allow that person to see their humanity reflected back at them. And that's how we can help rehumanize people.
With files from Courtney Dickson and Daybreak South