Left to right: Arno Michaelis once belonged to white supremacist gang. A racist murdered the father of Pardeep Kaleka. They will talk about overcoming hate in an event organized by Masood Akhtar.
Aug. 5, 2012, was the last time that Pardeep Kaleka wanted to feel so helpless.
That morning, he was driving his two children to Sunday school at the Oak Creek gurdwara, the Sikh temple that his father founded. His daughter had forgotten a notebook at home, so they were running behind.
“Typically, it was such a safe spot that you could drop them off and they’d run inside and you could go do errands,” says Kaleka.
Not so that morning. When he was about a block away from the temple, their car was stopped by police. “The police officer said there’s been a shooting at the temple and the scene is not secure,” says Kaleka, who had worked as a police officer for five years in Milwaukee before becoming a teacher. “I realized it was probably some kind of active shooter.
“Right after that, I started getting phone call after phone call after phone call,” he adds. “Sometimes it was people inside the temple, sometimes it was people outside.”
Kaleka spent the rest of the day frantically trying to find his parents, who were inside. He found his mother unharmed. She had escaped the gunman — 40-year-old Wade Page, a U.S. Army veteran involved with a white supremacist group — by hiding inside the temple’s pantry. But she had no idea where Kaleka’s father was.
It would take 12 hours before the family would learn from media reports that Satwant Singh Kaleka, 65, was among the six people murdered. Four others were injured and Page killed himself.
At the time, Kaleka thought back to reservations his father had about this country. He always thought his father was just being disgruntled, but suddenly Kaleka realized: “We really aren’t accepted.”
“We felt like we couldn’t do anything about it,” Kaleka says. “The worst way you can view life is life is happening to you. That became the last time I ever wanted to feel like that.”
But he quickly realized he wanted to try to counter the hatred that had been directed at his family and friends. He began reaching out to other victims of hate crimes. And he also sought to understand the mindset of violent extremists. And so he tracked down Arno Michaelis, a man who had spent years in a white supremacist group. Kaleka was hoping that Michaelis could tell him why someone would be driven to such hatred and violence.
“I wanted to understand the why,” Kaleka says of his thinking at the time. “If you don’t understand the why, you can’t do the what. I knew that I couldn’t assume the why. And so, I reached out to Arno for that.”
Arno Michaelis grew up in a dysfunctional, alcoholic household in Mequon and started to lash out at a young age.
“By the time I was 16, I was very familiar with violence. Like a lot of teenagers, I hated society, the government, the cops, school,” he says. “That’s when I heard white power skinhead music, which really seemed to give a context to all the hate and violence.”
He helped found the Northern Hammerskins, which later became Hammerskin Nation. He also started a hardcore thrash band, Centurian. Michaelis fronted it, singing lyrics like “Now it’s your turn to die/ Nigger, prepare to burn.”
Thinking back to that time, Michaelis says he wanted people to see him as a monster. “It’s much easier to make people fear you than to have them respect you,” he says. “You can’t make people respect you. Respect can only be earned through your deeds. Fear is easy to evoke — just be an asshole.”
He became increasingly violent, his actions rooted in self-contempt.
“If you have a good sense of yourself and a positive value of yourself, you’ve got no reason to be violent,” Michaelis says. “Anyone who is being violent is doing it because they’re miserable. It’s a way of trying be important, and say, ‘Hey I matter.’ But it’s a very lazy way of trying to do that.”
After having a daughter in 1994, Michaelis began to be disillusioned with his life. One of his friends was killed in a street fight; others went to prison. “It hit me that if I didn’t change my ways, death or prison would take me from my daughter,” he says.
He quit hanging out with his skinhead friends and discovered the rave scene.
“It was really healing for me and cathartic. Everyone in the rave scene accepted me even though I still had swastikas tattooed all over me,” he says. “It demonstrated that everything I had believed in was wrong and that there’s a way better way to live your life.”
Eventually, he quit drinking, wrote a memoir and helped start Life After Hate to inspire change and forgiveness.
When Michaelis first heard about the shooting in Oak Creek, he was horrified that he might have had a role in it.
“I had a sinking suspicion that a white supremacist was responsible for it,” he says. “I laid awake that night wondering if it was somebody I recruited.”
When media reported the next day that the shooter was Wade Page, Michaelis realized he didn’t know him.
“But I still felt a huge responsibility,” he says. “The guy who committed that atrocity was a member of the gang I helped start, he was in white power bands. I’d be shocked if he never heard of my band and it’s very likely he was a fan. I felt a real urgency to renew my peace activism efforts.”
After becoming friends, Kaleka and Michaelis founded Serve2Unite to counter hate. The two give seminars together promoting peace and understanding.
They will give a free, public session at Monona Terrace on Dec. 10 from 1:30 to 4:30 p.m.
Kaleka says sometimes it feels like the two are preaching to the choir. But they have also spoken in rural communities where the crowds are “oppositional.”
They were invited to a small New England town that had a large Hindu population moving in. “There were a lot of white people who felt threatened by this, saying ‘I don’t know if we want that in our town,’” Michaelis says.
“Generally people who show up have some kind of anxiety about the future,” Kaleka says. “And that fear is typically around what I call ‘cultural preservation.’”
He counters that fear by getting people talking about the nature of change. “Can we preserve a culture or is it just the truth that things will change? How do you keep something from changing and how much energy does it take from you? Wouldn’t you just be better off if you navigated this change?”
Both avoid demonizing people in violent, extremist groups. Michaelis warns that some rhetoric on the left — such as an effort to label America as a nation of white supremacists — is counterproductive.
“Saying that white people are the problem isn’t going to solve anything and there’s way too much of that going on and that helped get Trump elected as well,” he says. “The Trump campaign cleaned up on that, white supremacist groups cleaned up on that. It’s recruiting for them in the same way that Islamophobes recruit for the Islamic State.”
Kaleka says it’s important to see violent extremists as humans, not monsters. Their approach violent extremists is trauma-informed, asking not “What is wrong with you?” but “What happened to you?”
For him, that means trying to understand what drove Wade Page to become radicalized, join a white supremacist group and then kill Kaleka’s father and friends.
“If you don’t think about what was driving him, it creates this narrative of monsterhood, which is this person can’t be a person anymore and becomes bigger than life,” Kaleka says. “That’s why I have no problem saying his name. I don’t want people say this was anything more than a person. We can do things about people, we can’t do things about monsters.”