Normalization is not the same as pointing out that Nazis are human beings
“I was wondering why you don’t have a face — but a snout, like Ukrainians do.”
A soft-spoken, well-dressed Russian man once asked me where I’m from. When I told him that I’m originally from Kyiv and grew up in North Carolina, the above was his response.
He proceeded to inform me that I wasn’t human, had no right to speak the Russian language (dirty Ukrainians like me don’t deserve to, I guess), and that it would be much better if Ukraine were nuked and I were run over by a tank. Or something. I don’t remember the specifics of his little speech — only the numb horror of having this man, who was sitting across from me at my university’s main dining hall, quietly insulting me with zero provocation.
When something like this happens to you, and you’re a woman, and he’s a big guy, the first thing you assess is your safety. I wasn’t sure what he was going to do next. Was he capable of being violent? Other people were at our table—we were having a get-together of local Russian-speakers, having advertised it on the social calendar—but most of the other people were preoccupied with conversations of their own. He was staring me down and his eyes were blank with hatred. It was raw and kind of terrifying.
After a moment’s silence, I quickly moved away. I found the event coordinator and tried to explain what had just happened and how stunned and upset I was. By that point, the man was busy insulting someone else—this time for being Jewish. I believe the Kazakhs were next.
The man had shown up to a meet-up of Russian-speakers and decided that it wasn’t ethnically pure enough. Even some of the actual Russians in the group wound up being castigated for having the wrong last names, as I recall. It all happened quickly and it was confusing. I forget how the evening ended, but I know that our coordinator managed to calmly defuse the situation while making sure that the abuse did not continue. I never saw that man again—he was barred from future events.
I thought back to that incident after the New York Times ran its much-criticized and misguided “Nazi sympathiser next door” piece (hastily retitled after the first round of outrage), which contained gems like these:
The stated intent behind the piece was to show that white supremacists and Hitler fanboys are everywhere, they could even be your neighbors/could even charm your mother, and that it’s wrong of us to think of these people as monsters when they are, in fact, human beings.
Plenty of smart people have pointed out why the piece failed on that account. It had to do with everything from its tone — better suited for the Life Styles section — to the way it lacked any appropriate context/soft-pedaled the issues at stake. As it has been pointed out over and over again, the NYT, while strong on many subjects, seems genuinely bereft of the kind of ideological and moral framework needed to tackle this particular phenomenon. For example, why was there so little expert analysis of hate groups included? Experts across America do valuable work in both tracking and analyzing hate, and as a journalist myself, I know that analysis from people like this wouldn’t have to weigh down the piece or take over it, instead it’s there to put the brakes on the rhetoric of normalization.
Patton Oswalt probably put it best:
I have no wish to castigate the author, because it is very obvious that his editors failed him. They wanted evocative writing, a vivid picture, but they forgot that the picture needs to be contextualized and labeled, that this is the socially responsible thing to do—particularly at a time when white supremacists have been emboldened by the outcome of the presidential election, when they welcome publicity, and count on the media to help spread their ideas, ideas that are dangerous to entire groups of people.
Let’s go back to the incident at the dining hall. Was the man who abused me and others that day human? Absolutely. And our coordinator treated him as such. But the coordinator also worked to make sure that the members of our group were not exposed to further attacks. He did not urge us to debate our own humanity with this man. His first priority was keeping us safe from a guy who seemed genuinely disturbed.
Imagine if instead of disengaging and relying on others to protect me, I had instead said something like, “Hey my mom’s Russian, so I’m at least partially human! Can we please be friends? I’d like to build a bridge here” —to a man who literally acted as if he wanted to murder me for being Ukrainian.
Ridiculous and humiliating and possibly dangerous, right? Well, we should not be forcing people to do the same on an institutional level. We should be clear in our strategies and aims.
Yet when we present Nazi rhetoric as something that can be reasonably debated and engaged with, we are doing just that. We’re asking people whose humanity Nazis don’t recognize to throw themselves under the bus.
When you’re covering Nazis, you must consider the interests of people whom the Nazis target.
If these people are not your priority, then you can easily wind up empowering and emboldening the Nazis further. This does not in any way mean that you don’t get to publish exciting, edgy, dark stories or material. On the contrary. Just look at Luke O’Brien’s excellent piece for The Atlantic—it has detail, depth, and drama. It also refuses to shy away from the terror that white supremacists inflict on vulnerable people. You cut that part of the picture out and it results in normalization, whether you mean for it to happen or not.
The NYT is so obsessed with objectivity that it has issued a set of ridiculous and stifling social media guidelines to its reporters. The intent, once again, might be a good one, but I agree with fellow journalists who point out that in the Trump era, this strategy not only provides the enemies of the free press (of which Trump is one) another weapon to use against reporters, it also smacks of appeasement. Sometimes, there is no “both sides.” Particularly when you have a situation in which one group of people would like to murder a bunch of other people. And make no mistake, this is what Nazism — old Nazism, new Nazism, hipster dudebro Nazism, provincial good ol’ boy Nazism — is about.
I think that NYT leadership was certainly right to begin a process of self-reflection in the wake of Trump’s election, which exposed a huge level of tension and hatred in society. But they’re going about it all wrong.
You can begin the slow, arduous process of reaching hateful people through empathy. Through recognizing what drew them to hate, for example — through establishing the process via which rehabilitation can begin. It should be obvious, but I’ll point it out anyway: A lot of people join hate groups because they’re lonely and want to belong and hate groups make belonging pretty damn easy. Recognizing this is not the same as normalizing their views.
You absolutely cannot reach hateful people by saying, “Hey, maybe we shouldn’t be getting so polarized! I mean, I have my side and you have yours! You want to throw Jews down the well so your country can be free? Cool, let’s debate that!”
Unfortunately, the NYT has found itself in that trap. By framing a white supremacist as a kind of strange curiosity — he thinks Hitler was a cool dude but he’s kind of hipstery and plays Nintendo, you guys, whoah—they merely gave yet another Nazi some free publicity and an aura of relatability.
Nazis win in this scenario, and everyone else loses.
