Healing From Hate

By the time Matthias was in seventh grade, he felt he’d better belong to some group, lest he be alone and vulnerable. The punks and anarchists were identifiable by their tattoos and hairstyles and music. But it was the skinheads who captured his imagination. They had great parties, and everyone seemed afraid of them. “They really represented what it meant to be a strong man,” he said.

How does an affluent, middle-class, private-school-attending son of a doctor end up at the Aryan Nations compound in Idaho, falling in with and then recruiting for some of the most notorious neo-Nazi groups in Canada and the United States?

For a half century or more, black people have labored under the spell of what Jesse Lee Peterson calls the “alchemists.” These are the race hustlers, media hacks, politicians, community organizers and the like who promise to “fundamentally transform” America. The transformation they promise, however, produces only fool’s gold—unearned benefits like welfare, food stamps, subsidized housing, payouts from lawsuits, and maybe one day even reparations. Worse, to secure these counterfeit goods, recipients have to sacrifice something of infinite value: the sanctity of the two-parent family. It is a devil’s bargain.

Read almost any piece about Xiu Xiu and you'll see words like 'harsh' or 'brutal' — the same words that appear before 'truth' when an unwavering eye is turned on any intimate detail of our lives. Fair descriptions of the themes central to the music, they sit incongruous to the refined, intricate, and beautiful approach taken in crafting the twelve tracks on Xiu Xiu's new album Dear God, I Hate Myself.