What would you do if you were face-to-face with hatred?
Would you yell?
Would you punch?
For Aaron Courtney, a high school football coach from Gainesville, Florida, the answer...
was hug.
Courtney was on his way out from a protest against white nationalist Richard Spencer's
speech at University of Florida when he spotted his chance to confront someone who hates his very existence.
He had just one question:
"Why the f*ck you don't like me?"
But Randy Furniss, a neo-Nazi skinhead, didn't have an answer.
Instead, he stared.
That's when Courtney, taking his father's teaching as a bishop to heart, offered Furniss a hug.
And, finally, he got an answer:
It's a gesture that a former white supremacist recommends as more effective than a punch,
and Samantha Bee recently even dedicated a whole tongue-in-cheek segment to it.
"I would imagine in the history of the world, nobody's changed their opinion because they
got punched in the face.
Because it now makes them the victim.
So...hug a Nazi."
Christian Piccolino now runs a Life After Hate, a counter-radicalization group, and
says that the key to reaching and reforming white supremacists is understanding.
"The best way to destroy hate...is with love.
"I'm sorry. You said what now?"
Daryl Davis, a blues musician from Chicago, has also employed love and understanding as
tools in dismantling hate.
Over the last 30 years, 200 Ku Klux Klan members
have given up their robes as a result of their friendship with Davis.
"If you spend five minutes, just five minutes, with your arch enemy, you will find that you
have something in common with him or her."
But many don't agree with Davis. In a sit-down with two Black Lives Matter activists in his documentary, Accidental Courtesy, he tries to explain his approach
"We all have to live in this country together. We do."
Otherwise we're going to end up self-destructing."
"Instead of spending time collecting the history of hate, why not spend that time trying
to collect the history that was stolen from us?"
Critics of Davis and of those trying to fight hate with hugs, ask: Why must the burden of
being the bigger person continuously fall on the oppressed?
And, specifically, on people of color?"
And while the concept of hugging the racism out of a person is attractive.
The reality is that doing so puts yourself at risk when facing someone
whose entire ideology is at odds with your safety.
It's a question that separated schools of thought in the Civil Rights movement, too
Malcolm X urged for equality "by any means necessary..."
While Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. preached about the "weapon of love".
There's no manual for how to erase hate and intolerance.
What is the right way to approach a Nazi? Is there one?
But if there were a chance you could, somehow, open someone's eyes to a new perspective, through kindness, would you?
For UPROXX, I'm Steve Vasquez.
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