San Bernardino and the Mechanics of a Double Life
TODAY 12:01 AM
BY EVAN OSNOS
... The mystery of double lives persists partly because extremists are rarely available, after the fact, to explain the mechanics of their deception. But, by approaching the question from a slightly different angle, two researchers have illuminated the psychology of how extremists hide their tendencies from relatives and co-workers. Over nearly a decade, Pete Simi, at the University of Nebraska Omaha, and Robert Futrell, of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, interviewed eighty-nine white supremacists—skinheads, Klansmen, neo-Nazis—with the goal of understanding what the researchers call “strategies of calculated concealment and revelation.”
They noticed patterns. In many cases, newly converted zealots do not understand the level of resentment and fear that their new views will engender. Occasionally, they try to explain to parents and friends their changed view of the world, only to discover, as one white supremacist put it, that “when I did they ranted and raved about me being an evil Nazi and racist.” So, they learn to cope–to hide tattoos from employers; to listen to White Power music on headphones at work, as a form of private rebellion; to lie low at family gatherings, and avoid inflaming the people whom new friends describe as “normals.” Mack, a member of the Aryan Front, said, “My philosophy on the family front is to just keep the preaching down to a minimum. I hide my white pride stuff, do the typical suck up crap.” An activist whom the researchers call Charlie recalled, “I finally said screw it and ordered a basic swastika flag and they hated it. So I just keep the flags in my room in a box with some other stuff I collect and that way it doesn’t cause any problems.”
... At its horrific extremes, concealed in the hidden life is a sense of menace that can be hard to grasp. Terry, a member of the neo-Nazi American Front, described to Simi and Futrell the way he makes peace with the diversity in his wife’s workplace. “She works with a couple of black girls. They’re not her friends, so to speak, but they are very close, as everybody is,” he said. “The black workers are work associates that she will talk to and never be rude to. But I help her understand that, in the time of war, we are to cut their heads off.”
... We study the mechanics of crime not to fan our paranoias, but, rather, to defuse them—to tether our imaginations to facts. To keep ourselves truly safe, we have to acknowledge that some of the worst among us hide in plain sight, but also recognize the difference between the hidden and the unfamiliar. It is comforting to assume the latter is the threat. That would be a mistake.
http://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/san-bernardino-mechanics-double-life
