In various articles, and in two books, I have mentioned something that happened to my younger cousin that I intend to clarify here. I have also been asked to clarify my negative involvement with race-based white groups that have made such a negative impression on me. I will cover that subject on weeks, such as this, when nothing of racial significance happens in my Harm City life. I regard it as significant that I might live as I do as a poor white pedestrian in a famously violent majority black city in times of media-managed heightened racial tension and go an entire week without being threatened, insulted, attacked, or discriminated against on a racial basis.

Nelson is now in his mid thirties. He is the eldest son of my mother’s aunt’s eldest daughter, a girl named Mary who is nearly sixty now. Mary was the daughter of my Aunt Ann and Uncle Bernie, who was the fire-plug deer-hunting uncle who had a rug made of a bear he killed that I used to lay on and watch westerns while he complained about the settlers in the wagon train not shooting the horses out from underneath the circling Indians.

Bernie was best of friends with my Uncle Robert, who was either half or a quarter black. Bernie had fought in Korea and hated the Chinese. He, Robert, Mike, Bill, and other uncles, along with my grandfather Fred, would sit and drink and sing and argue. Fred was deaf and was rejected for military service in 1941. Uncle Robert served in the merchant marines in the Pacific. He was once on board a ship that was sunk by a Jap sub and spent weeks in a raft. Family legend had it—a legend that Bernie’s wife Ann clung to until her death last year—that Uncle Robert tanned so darkly because of that time spent roasting under the Pacific sun in that life raft!

When I laughed out loud at this bit of family myth last month my mother said, “Well, that’s what our parents told us. And in our day you believed whatever your parents said. Besides, Uncle Robert looked like Hercules with Greek hair, and his brother Aflonso looked like a Latin lover like Rudolph Valentino. All of us girls would go gaga over him. So nobody wanted to think bad of them; they were so gentlemanly and well dressed and from New England, and lacked the accent that we associated with black people. I had an inkling one time when I was older and said that I could not imagine dating a black man, and Aunt Alice gave me a hurt look. Besides, the man was brilliant, the smartest man in the family so who—in those days—would want to point out the fact that he was part black, even if they knew?”

I recall once playing with Uncle Robert’s coin collection in his living room, listening to him and Uncle Bernie and Uncle Bill discussing the ‘black problem’. I was perhaps eight and these men were in their 50s, about the age I am now. Uncle Bernie had a solution, and suggested that we make the blacks swim back to Africa, with a Jew under one arm and an Italian under the other, to be dropped off in route. In light of Robert’s time in that raft, and his Steve Reeves like physique in that picture of him drinking beer on the beech that Aunt Alice kept on her end table, I suppose this was something of a backhanded compliment.

In any case, by the time that Nelson was a teen age boy, Bernie and Robert were dead and gone, and Mary had married a ‘louse’ as my grandmother labeled men who were poor providers. Nelson was the same age as my eldest son Vance. I recall visiting them once where they lived not five blocks from where I now reside and write. The husband was a zero, did nothing with his son, and just complained to me about ‘niggers’ and lost job opportunities. The neighborhood was becoming black and Nelson and Vance elected not to go outside and play for fear of being picked on by black kids. I played with the boy when I could get away from the whining husband.

Eventually I found out that Mary had ‘gotten rid of the louse’ and that she was living in Pennsylvania. I met her new husband, a man named Ben who I rank among the best men, fathers and husbands I have met. He has treated Nelson like his own flesh and blood, as does his son by a former marriage, as long as they have been together. The story below I have from Ben, for Nelson can still not speak of it. I suspect he is mentally maimed from this experience from his youth. He is currently in poor health, physically older than I am, being 16 years his elder. He is a highly intelligent and sensitive man, and it still burns me up that he fell prey to the very same 1990s white supremacist movement that failed to deter me, and in fact made me stronger by resisting it.

The following fragmentary account was had a year after the event from the subject’s step father, who was called to the hospital where Nelson ended up after he went missing one winter day. I will not raise this subject with Nelson. If he decides to speak to me of it it will find its way into a White Wednesday article or book.

Having moved into a small Pennsylvania city from Baltimore, where it was not safe for a white guy to walk the streets, Nelson made some cool friends. These friends informed him that they were involved in a ‘white resistance’ movement. He joined, enjoyed the beer, the heavy metal, the camaraderie and the feeling of belonging to a brotherhood.

At some point Nelson was informed that he had to earn his place by attacking a random black person; that a tone had to be set to keep the blacks in line. Not being violent, and not having been raised to hate along racial lines—as his father’s racism failed to put an impression on him, and Mary and Ben were ‘live and let live’ kind of people—Nelson could not bring himself to attack an innocent person, a person he did not know, and particularly disliked the idea of terrorizing women and children.

He informed his friends that he would have to decline initiation into the group; that even though he would miss their company, he would not feel right trying to fit in with a group that he could not put his heart into. His best friend, the one that recruited him, said that it was no problem, and that even though he would not be a member in full standing, that he could still ‘hang out with’ and ‘socialize with’ them at their house parties.

Nelson was invited by his friend to a house party.

His friend drove him to the house party.

His friend walked him through the front door.

His friend was standing behind him as he walked into an interior room to the smiling faces of these cool guys who still wanted to hang out with him even though he could not bring himself to commit a crime on their behalf.

The lights went out.

Ben was notified by a police officer that Nelson was in intensive care. A fish and game warden out checking the local river banks for illegal fishing had found Nelson laid out naked, and unconscious in the snow with a bleeding head injury down by a river bank.

Nelson recovered, did not remember anything, and declined to press charges, not even knowing who had attacked him.

Ben wanted to kill someone, but had an entire family to worry about. Ben was a tough man—who—at age 60 just last year—beat down some young punk for insulting a white woman in a local bar. He once survived a brutal murder attempt in Texas, and even then did not show anger or seek revenge. He was angry when he told me of this.

The problem with all gangs, as I see it, is that they go after the weak, and they go after their own, no matter what their supposed purpose is.

When white criminals I worked with formed a workplace gang with the stated objective of stealing from our employer and driving away black coworkers, and I declined to join, and they tried to kill me and failed, I felt like I had been gifted with a clarity previous denied me, and to this day do not hate these men. Three weeks ago, as I knocked off from work one Saturday morning, I saw the man who once spent nearly a minute of his short brutal life using a steel shelf to open my head, and I smiled as I saw him ambling off. He helped forge the person I am.

When a leader of Baltimore Area Skin Heads hired members of the Wasted Youth to kill me, I felt honored. When I ran into the punk years later in a supermarket—and heard his fat wife speaking to him like he was the family dog who had just pissed on the carpet—I smiled in his face and nodded that the score between us was even. As the man that he had expected to knock his teeth out instead left him to a life of marital hell he seemed to sink into oblivion. He too, in his pathetic way, had helped forge me.

But when I think of Nelson and what happened to him, I say to myself, “If I come down with terminal cancer, I’m going to speak with Ben about a name and an address.”

There is just something about surviving the same bad intentions that take one of your own, that brings out the tribal strand in my soul, which is something that this white race traitor generally keeps deeply hidden in his guts.

Last month I spoke with a friend of mine who I met in Baltimore a few years back. He had spent some time living in another small Pennsylvania town, and told me that he had similar dealings with a white resistance group, that, in his words, “…did nothing but pick on the closest weakest black person, and go after other whites.”

He continued, “If these guys were for real they would have been driving into the hood beating black asses in the street, not picking on some suburban black guy and threatening a guy like me for keeping to himself.”

In this light, and based on my experiences in another small Pennsylvania town, as well as my time dealing with neighborhood politics in general, I think what Nelson actually fell prey to was not a racial outlook, white supremacy, white resistance or white nationalism, but ancient, basic, human clannishness manipulated by one or two alpha types to enhance their status in the eyes of their fragile feral imitation of a true tribe. Latino, Black and Asian gangs in American cities prey on members of their own racial group far in excess of attacks on members of rival races. Whites are apparently no better when it comes to eating their own.

As I am involved in writing a book on tribalism—and its benefits—I should state here that I see gang activity as a hijacking of the healthy human tribal impulse; a feral corruption of the human way of gathering. I was recently speaking to a Jewish man, who said, “I don’t want you to think that my jabs at the Jewish community reflect some self-hating impulse. My tribe is flawed, but I remain a loyal, supportive member.”

My response was something along the lines of, “A healthy sense of tribalism should be accompanied by a self-deprecating sense of tribal humor. It’s a way to keep our self and our associations in perspective. After all, humor is essentially the perception and expression of social nuance.”

If you are a Crazy Mark fan, the white urban survivalist in the recent installment of RetroGenesis, White Boy Wayne! Help A Brutha Out! is based on my favorite white renegade. I’d like to think Mark would approve.