Essay 212

The article below appeared in the latest issue of Newsweek. Categorize it as a bad idea gone horribly wrong…

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Race: The White Album

Nov. 7, 2005 issue – It’s not easy being white. Ask Lamb and Lynx Gaede — 13-year-old twins who make up the “defensive racist” pop-music duo Prussian Blue. The blond-haired, blue-eyed sisters went into hiding last week. An ABC News camera crew spent several days shadowing the girls as they sang (sample lyric: “Aryan man awake, How much more will you take, Turn that fear to hate, Aryan man awake”) and urged white people not to mix with other races.

White supremacists hoped the attention would help the Bakersfield, Calif., duo cross over to mainstream audiences. Prussian Blue, wrote National Vanguard, a sympathetic publication, “will be breaking new ground ... creating an entire genre of pro-White music.” But after the TV segment — and an outpouring of criticism — “the girls were in tears. This is going to follow them for the rest of their lives,” says Edgar Steele, the sisters’ attorney. Now, he says, the sisters “are living in an undisclosed location and there will be no personal appearances until this thing is long blown over.” Still, the girls have sold several thousand copies of their first album, “Fragment of the Future,” and a second is due out in a few months.

—Jennifer Ordonez

© 2005 Newsweek, Inc.