Courtesy Milwaukee Jewish Day School
Arno Michaelis has devoted his life to repairing the damage he feels responsible for causing when he was leader of a notoriously racist heavy metal band.
It’s a gray, rainy morning in late October. In an assembly room at the Milwaukee Jewish Day School, about 140 seventh- and eighth-graders seated in row after row of chairs chatter restlessly.
They comprise three distinct groups. White students who attend this private school in Milwaukee’s affluent near-north suburb of Whitefish Bay. Students from Bruce-Guadalupe Community School, a primarily Latinx charter school on Milwaukee’s south side. And African American students from Milwaukee College Prep, another charter school with several campuses in the predominantly black neighborhoods northwest of the city’s downtown.
A white man strolls into the open area at the front of the room. He has a thick head of dirty-blond hair that looks like an overgrown crew cut. He wears rimless glasses and a black shirt emblazoned with a large white handprint and the words, “Serve2Unite,” the name of the group putting on the presentation. Colorful tattoos covering his arms peek from the end of his shirtsleeves.
The man, Arno Michaelis, looks around. “We’re already segregated in this room,” he says. “So I’d like everybody to get up and sit next to somebody you don’t know.” His voice is confident yet casual, authoritative but not bossy. The students follow his instructions.
They don’t know it yet, but what Michaelis has just encouraged them to do starkly contradicts the life he once led, the beliefs he once held, the message he once screamed into microphones while fronting a notorious racist heavy metal band.
It’s a life Michaelis gave up more than two decades ago. A message he has spent more than a decade working to eradicate. A legacy of violence and hatred he strives to shred, even as he knows it can never be erased—indeed, should not be, if only because however hard the truth hurts, it must not be forgotten.
Michaelis was once not just a white, racist skinhead, but a white, racist skinhead leader—a gang leader, he will tell you. He has left the beliefs that drove him—the bigotry, the hatred, the violence—far behind.
Yet he has not turned his back on that world or the hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people who inhabit it. Instead, Michaelis is devoting his life to repairing the damage he feels responsible for and embracing the human diversity he once hated and feared. He hopes to encourage those flirting with that life to turn away before it draws them in, and help those locked into that worldview to find their way out.
Michaelis, who will turn forty-seven in December, is part of a loose network of ex-racist extremists who have renounced their former ideologies, ranging from neo-Nazi groups and the Ku Klux Klan to the so-called alt right.
As others have documented, the election of Donald Trump last November has emboldened extremists. Their August march and melee in Charlottesville, Virginia, culminated in the murder of counter-protester Heather Heyer. This new visibility has sparked a debate about how to respond, ranging from pleas to respect “free speech” no matter how abhorrent, to the unapologetically militant response of antifa groups.
Michaelis and others are suggesting another way.
One of the movement’s standard- bearers is the group Life After Hate, based in Chicago and made up of a number of former white nationalists and other extremists. The group offers support to members of extremist groups who want to get out.
Michaelis, who lives in Milwaukee and works in information technology, founded an earlier iteration of Life After Hate. He’s left the organization, but remains part of the movement to transcend the subculture of hate he once moved within and now abhors.
At the assembly in Whitefish Bay, Michaelis’s colleague, Pardeep Kaleka, steps to the front of the room and talks to the middle-school students about what just happened. They entered the room as a reflection of diversity—white, brown, and black—and then self-segregated. “We were together, but not really,” Kaleka says. “We were separated out.” He pauses a moment. “Where else do we see this happening?”
In neighborhoods, answers one young man, an African American. Kaleka nods. Over the course of this morning, he explains, the students will be urged to push past these divisions.
Next up is Mark Denning, a member of the Oneida tribe who lived on the Menominee Reservation in northern Wisconsin until he was eight (“the forest was my playground,” he says), then came to Milwaukee to live with his mother. His story is a long, humor-laced account of the ensuing culture shock, but its real point comes when he talks about courage.
Denning tells the students that courage is often described as standing up and fighting for yourself, but he offers a different definition. “My grandfather talked about the courage within,” he says, meaning the courage to “do the right thing,” however difficult it may be. Courage is a community value, fostered by collective support—and among the most important lessons they can learn is that “this is a bigger world than just me out there.”
With that, he turns the floor back over to Michaelis, who relates his own life story. He grew up, he jokes, “on the rough streets of Mequon”—a posh suburb of Milwaukee. He never went hungry. “My parents were together. I got a ton of positive affirmation growing up.”
And yet he became a bully. Looking back, he believes his father’s alcoholism and his mother’s alienation replicated themselves in him, and he found his own escape in violence.
“I got this huge thrill from lashing out,” Michaelis tells the students. “For me, causing trouble was my drug.” And as with actual addictive drugs, his need escalated: “I had to cause more and more trouble.” Breaking and entering as a young teenager, then vandalism. He was drinking before he was old enough to drive, and by age sixteen, he says, “I was very violent.”
“For me the feeling of ‘I hate you’ was another rush, another thrill.”
He pauses, clearly wanting to avoid accidentally glorifying the raw anger of his teenage years. When anger brings forth hatred, he warns the middle schoolers, “don’t grab onto that.” And then, he adds, “For me the feeling of ‘I hate you’ was another rush, another thrill.”
In his late teens, Michaelis, formerly a fan of punk and hip-hop music, gravitated to the underground world of violent, racist heavy metal. It was a natural fit. “I had to have a story that had a bad guy,” he says. “We were messed-up kids.”
He shows the students a YouTube video, projected onto the screen behind him. It begins with a closeup of Michaelis’s face, his head shaved clean. He is in his early twenties, clutching a microphone, screaming racist, domineering lyrics amid crashing drums and violent guitar chords, his face locked into a scowl.
Even in those days, Michaelis tells the students, he knew deep inside that his hatred was irrational, wrong. But, he says, echoing Denning’s remarks, he lacked the “inner courage” to stop.
Michaelis’s drawn-out break with the white power movement started in 1994. In his memoir, My Life After Hate (self-published in 2010 and revised in 2012), and in a long interview with The Progressive, he attributes his growing alienation to two factors. One was being thrust into caring full-time for his eighteen-month-old daughter. The other: Being a diehard racist is isolating and exhausting.
“That ideology sucks the life out of you every waking moment,” he says.
To bolster his belief in white superiority and racial purity, Michaelis—a fan of the Green Bay Packers football team since childhood—swore off the game because pro sports teams were integrated. And then there was the popular TV show, Seinfeld, with its Jewish co-creators and writers (Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David) and Jewish stars (Seinfeld, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, and Jason Alexander). He recalls taping the show on the sly and labeling it as his daughter’s “birthday party,” so if his white power friends dropped by they’d have no interest in watching and seeing what he was up to.
By 1996, Michaelis was “completely finished with the white power movement.” Over the next decade he trained and went to work in IT. He gave up drinking and became a practicing Buddhist (he’d grown up with no real religious background). He went on to volunteer for Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign and to weep “a stream of exhilarating, cleansing tears” the night Obama was elected.
Michaelis grew disillusioned as he saw the Obama Administration’s “efforts gutted and perverted by corporate interests.” But he recoiled even more from the emerging Tea Party and Birther anti-Obama movements, seeing in them “the fiery reflection of who I used to be.”
Shortly before 10:30 a.m. on Sunday, August 5, 2012, Wade Michael Page, a former U.S. Army missile repairman, entered a Sikh temple in Milwaukee’s southern suburb of Oak Creek. Page, armed with a 9-millimeter semiautomatic pistol. He shot and killed five men and one woman at the temple that day and wounded four others, including a local police officer who survived fifteen bullet wounds.
As police closed in, Page turned the gun on himself, taking his own life. His connection with neo-Nazi and other white supremacist groups emerged less than a day later.
The dead included the Temple’s founder, Satwant Singh Kaleka, age sixty-five. By chance his eldest son, Pardeep, and Pardeep’s wife and children hadn’t arrived at the temple for the weekly communal meal that was being prepared at the time of Page’s attack.
Pardeep Kaleka was thirty-six at the time. A graduate of Marquette University, Kaleka had joined the Milwaukee Police Department after college as a patrol officer and was assigned to Milwaukee’s near north side. But several years before the mass shooting, he turned in his badge and went into teaching, working at a public school in the same neighborhood where he had once been a cop.
In the immediate aftermath of the shooting, Kaleka’s brother, Amardeep, made a five-minute “video poem” about the massacre to raise funds for the family members of victims. For Pardeep, the incident brought home the interlocking issues of violence, white extremism, and the easy access to firearms in the United States.
An Internet search led the Kalekas to Against Violent Extremism, which had been founded just one year earlier under the sponsorship of Google Ideas and the Gen Next Foundation. The group, based in England, is made up of former violent political extremists and gang members from around the world, as well as survivors of attacks by such groups, academics who study extremist ideologies and groups, and nongovernmental organizations.
Kaleka perused the group’s website, which includes biographical statements of former extremists from all over the world, and discovered Michaelis living just a few miles away. Though wary, he reached out to the man whose one-time ideology had driven Page to kill Kaleka’s father and five others. They met for dinner at a Thai restaurant on Milwaukee’s east side in October, two months after the temple attack.
“Within hours, we knew this was going to be a longer-lasting friendship,” Kaleka says in an interview. He was impressed by the “genuine honesty” Michaelis showed in talking about his past. They also shared a common belief: The hate that drove Page to kill would be reinforced “if we don’t respond the right way.”
Kaleka found himself moving toward his second major career change, from teacher to counselor. He got a master’s degree in social psychology, and now divides his time between private practice and working with a local nonprofit that counsels male domestic violence offenders.
The violence of August 5, 2012, also propelled Kaleka to found Serve2Unite, in an effort to heal the divisions that spur racially motivated attacks. He invited Michaelis to join. In the years since, the organization has put on programs and presentations with schools, including the Milwaukee Jewish Day School visit. Another recent program for high school students paired a Palestinian with a defender of Israel’s settlement policies in the occupied Palestinian territories. And Kaleka and Michaelis have traveled to communities including Charleston, South Carolina, and Charlottesville, Virginia, in the wake of hate-group violence.
At the assembly, Kaleka offers an abbreviated version of the story of meeting with Michaelis. He notes that Michaelis apologized to him for the role his own racist music may have played in stoking Wade Michael Page’s extremist views and subsequent violence.
“We don’t know the actions that we put into effect,” Kaleka tells the students. He thanked Michaelis for the apology, and describes their deepening friendship. “It wouldn’t have happened,” he says, “if we didn’t get uncomfortable.”
Both Michaelis and Kaleka speak critically of antifa-style preemptive violence against fascistic groups. “When you violently oppose Nazis, you make them stronger,” Michaelis says. “And you drive people from the center toward the fringes.” He recalls making trips during his white power days to Ann Arbor, Michigan, to publicly demonstrate and brawl with militant counter-protesters. “It justified everything we believed.”
“When you violently oppose Nazis, you make them stronger,” Michaelis says. “And you drive people from the center toward the fringes.”
Michaelis even considers peaceful direct counter-protests of far-right demonstrations ineffective. Instead, he counsels progressives to provide a sort of counterprogramming to those demonstrations—occupying nearby spaces, ignoring the rightists, and celebrating ethnic and cultural diversity. For good measure, he adds, they might use these occasions to raise funds for worthy causes—something Serve2Unite does with periodic partnerships with veterans’ aid groups.
As individuals, Kaleka and Michaelis agree that Trump is bad for the country. Michaelis sees him as someone who manipulates by exploiting people’s fears. Kaleka says his presidency is forcing the nation to confront its history of racism and abuse “that has been here all along under the surface.”
But, as a 501(c)3 organization, Serve2Unite doesn’t focus on electoral politics. It sets its gaze higher, resisting forces much bigger than Trump.
“We’re focusing on compassion,” Michaelis says. “That’s a core value.” Kaleka chooses somewhat different words, but in much the same spirit: “This is a protest against polarization.”
At the Milwaukee Jewish Day School assembly, the students are divided into three groups, each a mix from the participating schools. They’re sent into break-out sessions with the three leaders. Michaelis is in a classroom, and he sees, once again, that they are clustering with their own schoolmates and ethnic groups. He points it out, but also makes it clear that he’s not blaming them.
“We’re all conditioned to do this,” Michaelis says, before instructing them to do a better job of mixing. Then he points to a board behind him that bears the words, “Hurt people hurt people.” He asks the students what this means.
A girl answers: When someone does something bad to someone else, they’ve probably had something bad happen to them, and they’re lashing out. Michaelis nods.
Then he has the students pair off with someone from a different school. He instructs them to take turns telling each other about a time when they have been hurt, or when they have hurt someone else. The speakers are to bring as much detail to the story as possible. Their listeners are to listen only, not interrupt.
As the students follow through with this activity, Michaelis walks around the room, prodding students to put more effort into their stories when it’s their turn to talk. At the end of each session, he tells the partners to thank each other.
“It’s a gift to be listened to,” he says, “and it’s a gift to listen to someone else.”
Erik Gunn is a Milwaukee-based freelance writer.