This Woman Turned Away From Violent Right-Wing Extremism
“It finally started to seep into my conscious mind, you know, like, ‘What are you doing?’” she told researchers
“Sarah” was bad news. In high school she fell in with a group of skinheads. When the group split between anti-racists and neo-Nazis, she sided with the neo-Nazis. She tattooed herself with swastikas and got in fights. Whenever she sensed herself faltering, she said, “I literally made a point to go out and recruit more people and, you know, to be more hardcore and start more fights.” The time her boyfriend robbed a store and severely beat the owner, she was the lookout and getaway car driver. The police eventually caught up with her for that crime, and she went to prison.
There’s a happy ending. In the prison, non-White inmates showed her kindness despite her swastika tattoos, even giving her cigarettes. She reciprocated, teaching some of them to read. “You know, it, it … very simply, it was like breaking a bad habit. You know, I trained myself to think that way, so I had to kind of untrain it,” Sarah said. “And to do that when I noticed myself having thoughts like that, I, I would literally stop and talk to myself and say, ‘Why did you think that? What, you know, what about that person made you think this?' And really try to engage, you know, that way. It's kind of ironic that I used to be, you know, this bully and used to beat people up.”