EASTHAMPTON — Christian Picciolini’s history with white supremacy starts in 1987 with a joint in an alley on the South Side of Chicago.
He was 14, the son of Italian immigrants. His parents loved him, but they worked hard to stay afloat — 14 hours a day, seven days a week at their beauty shop. Besides that absence, Picciolini had low self-esteem. He was insecure.
“Just like every other teenager, there were three very fundamental needs that I was searching for: an identity, a community and a sense of purpose,” he told a packed room at the Flywheel Arts Collective Tuesday night, an event organized by the Karuna Center for Peacebuilding and Critical Connections.
He spoke not as a current neo-Nazi, but as a reformed one. He told the room about how he joined the skinhead movement in the working-class Blue Island neighborhood, became a leader in the movement, got in fights, was expelled from several schools, and opened a music store selling white supremacist music. And then, gradually, he gave up the ideology.
But before all that, there was that joint in that alley.
“A man drove his car up that alley and he screeched to a halt just a few inches away from me,” Picciolini said. “When he got out of the car, he had a shaved head, and he was wearing boots and he walked over to me and he grabbed that joint from my mouth and said, ‘don’t you know that that’s what the communists and the Jews want you to do to keep you docile?’”
Picciolini didn’t know whether he knew any Jews. He wasn’t familiar with communism. And he didn’t know what docile meant, either. But he soon found that community and that purpose he was looking for.
“I had lived a very powerless existence,” he said. “And he promised me one thing, and it was very simple. And it had nothing to do with ideology and it had nothing to do with racism. It had to do with acceptance.”
Picciolini said he is no longer a Nazi. At his store, he sold the white supremacist stuff. But he also hawked punk rock, heavy metal and hip-hop. And that attracted a diverse crowd.
“At first, I was very standoffish,” Picciolini said. “But the customers were black and gay and Jewish and Asian and you name it.”
The conversations shifted from typical shopkeep-customer interaction to personal talks.
“For the first time in my life, I started to have really meaningful interactions with the people who I thought I hated,” Picciolini said.
These days, he works to convert white supremacists. In 2009, Picciolini founded the nonprofit Life After Hate. To date, he said, the group has helped more than 100 people leave hate groups.
He has also been quoted in publications such as The New York Times and the Times of Israel. And Tuesday, on the heels of a walkout at Easthampton High School following a racist social media post, and reports of an uptick in hate crimes targeting minorities across the country, Picciolini spoke in Easthampton.
In his talk, moderated by Mehlaqa Samdani of the Longmeadow group Critical Connections, he laid out his story and used it as an example for how others can be lured into hate groups.
He urged empathy and engagement, and said resorting to violence against extremists would do no good.
“The way that we’ve been so successful is not by battling ideologically with them,” Picciolini said. “When we listen, inevitably they will tell us what the potholes are in their lives that exist that deviated their paths. … I fill those potholes in with things to make them more resilient.
“It could be job training. It could be education. It could be tattoo removal. It could be mental health therapy,” he said. “And what’s magical about that is that once these people become self-sufficient, more resilient, more self-confident, the ideology falls away.”
Picciolini also touched on the “fake news” phenomenon, saying the “alt-right” is just a “massaged” version of Nazism minus the boots and shaved heads.
He also noted possible warning signs for online radicalization, including that children are getting news from alt-right news sources, that they have black-and-white thinking, and changes in language.
“It’s kind of the same thing you look for if your kid’s getting into drugs or getting into gangs,” Picciolini said, adding that parents can pre-empt this by teaching children empathy and supporting their passions.
After the talk, University of Massachusetts Amherst graduate students Michael Acosta, 31, and Elizabeth Kiefer, 26, said it was great that after President Donald Trump’s election — which coincided with a documented rise in hate crimes, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center — there were so many area protests, so many forums, so many speakers.
But they shared a frustration with no clear solution: Are these events reaching the right people?
After the speech, Picciolini said the room of maybe 150 people should engage in dialogue in small groups for a few minutes — but he wanted diversity within the groups.
“He didn’t want it to feel like an echo chamber,” Kiefer said, “because that’s what all these events feel like.”
Jack Suntrup can be reached at jsuntrup@gazettenet.com.