oregon

Issue #44

Last Update March 2, 2006

Reviews Fear and Banality in Portland by Lou Katz On the night of November 18, 1988, three Portland skinheads got into a street fight with three Ethiopians resident in Portland, Oregon; the skinhead Kenneth Mieske beat the Ethiopian Mulgeta Seraw with a bat; Seraw died that night.

Elinor Langer describes a version of this event and its aftermath drawn from extensive interviews with the skinheads and their associates, with the family of Mr. Seraw and with the public officials involved in this case.

Written in an extremely easy to read narrative style, this book is remarkable in its calm and documented factual presentation of the activities and actions leading up to the tragic confrontation and the legal activity following.

When the skinheads plea-bargained, and long, second-degree murder jail sentences were handed out, no criminal trial took place, and the whole ugly incident might have faded away. But the victim's uncle instituted a civil case, and with the Southern Poverty Law Center and its founder Morris Dees, sued Aryan Resistance leader Tom Metzger for 'causing' the murder, similar to suits against the KKK for 'causing' the criminal actions of its members. Metzger’s connection to the case was pegged on a letter of introduction to the local skinhead group.he had given to one of the assailants.

Tom Metzger's decision to act as his own lawyer, was, from a legal point of view, a disaster for him. Ms. Langer shows his connection to the Portland skinheads as tenuous at best, and she thinks it quite likely that competent counsel would have gotten the case dismissed. Instead, Metzger treated it as a free speech issue and did not have anywhere near the skill needed to counter the SPLC attack. Metzger lost the case, and the plaintiffs were awarded monetary damages; the trial cost him his house.

What was the reaction of Oregonians to the civil case? Relief. They needed the 'we aren't like that' catharsis, even though Oregon has a long history of racism which is often ignored.

What makes this book both fascinating and creepy is the ordinariness of the skinheads as portrayed. The book is also in some sense a portrayal of justice gone awry. Without disputing the heinousness of the crime, Elinor Langer sees the skinhead trial as a political trial. Her version of the events shows a bunch of no-goodnicks looking for a fight (and cranky because some other things they had planned hadn't come about). An action that was technically manslaughter got turned into a premeditated hate-crime due to mass public guilt. The skinhead plea bargain was (I think) for a stronger crime than the facts might have supported. Metzger really didn't have anything significant to do with the incident, but he was a convenient Politically Incorrect target. His civil trial, if anything, enhanced his status in his bigoted world, and nothing was really done that diminished the racist forces.

This well-written and well-researched book provides a non-hysterical view of racist activity and attitudes in Oregon and Portland.

"A Hundred Little Hitlers" By Elinor Langer, Metropolitan Books 2003, Henry Holt & Company, NY ISBN 0-8050-5098-1