What’s really behind a white supremacist

An innocent woman died over the weekend at the hands of a white supremacist. Her name is Heather Heyer. She was run over by a man driving a car.

So usually at this point in reporting the story, people start to try and figure out the motivations of the man driving that car. In this case, most people will just take it at face value and grab on to the label “racist.” When it’s not so clear cut, people jump to other labels. You hear the explanation of “crazy” or “monster” or “mentally unstable.” Now some of these might also be true in this case, but I think something else is going on in situations like this.

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After 20 years in radio — where I have to talk about stories like this, and mass shooters, and terrorist attacks — my theory on what is happening has evolved over the years. I think many of these people that end up in the news have a much simpler problem than that.

What we’re talking about here happens way earlier in their lives. I think they never learned how to deal with disappointment, fear, and guilt. Those powerful emotions, left unchecked and unprocessed for years, turn into a pressure cooker of anger, and eventually, it explodes.

Before I got into radio, I use to work with teens in youth groups and teen centers. One of the things we use to do was visit kids in a youth prison. You could spot pretty easily the young people that were still open to changing. Still trying to resist the darkness around them.

I think it comes down to teaching kids when they are very young how to deal with fear, rejection, unfairness, and disappointment. We really have no formal training about these matters in school or at home. I truly believe that this should be a class kids have to take every year like English or Math — How to Live 101.

To me, almost all of these people marching in their white supremacist rallies are angry little boys. They are angry because they are unequipped to deal with disappointment. They have no idea what to do when something is unfair or they get rejected. So they get mad and look for a scapegoat. For a white supremacist, that scapegoat comes in the form of people whose skin is a different color. But it just as easily could be people who have a different religion or sexual identity.

The anger is just a symptom. Underneath the anger, if they were really honest, they would say something like, “I really wanted that job, and someone else got it.” Or “I had a crush on that girl and she made fun of me.”

I get it, some people are just evil or crazy, and are hell bent on destruction no matter what.

But I really believe that if you figure out a way to put your kid in low stakes situations of disappointment and rejection, and then give them the skills to process those powerful feelings, that we would see less of the type of tragedies like we saw this weekend. So let your kid fail, let them be rejected. Just be there to help them when they do. Don’t let anger be the solution. Anger never wins. At least not in the long term.

That’s what we’re talking about here.