TV REVIEW : Voices of Hate vs. Voices of Reason

Tonight’s provocative special “Face the Hate” (Channel 11, 9 p.m.) is aptly named, an in-your-face dialogue about home-grown racism with skinheads, gays, straights, people of all colors, teens and adults. The voices are passionate, the hate is real; so is the attempt to break through the alienation that pits one group against another.

Hosting the town hall meeting/magazine-style show is “Beverly Hills, 90210’s” Gabrielle Carteris, but this is no vanity piece. Carteris, who is filmed visiting neo-Nazis as they tell her she is a “disgusting Jew” and say they would kill her on the spot if their God “commanded it,” is the hour’s emotional center and its conscience.

One of the in-studio guests, a teen-age girl, belongs to the same neo-Nazi organization. When members of the racially mixed group protest her message of hate, she calls them “scumbags” and tells them they will die. She is seated next to a father, a Vietnam veteran, who tells of his son, murdered by racist skinheads because he was half-Asian.

Among many who have their revealing say are a reformed leader of the Aryan Nation, an anti-fascist East German rapper, a former gang member who mediated the gang truce after the Los Angeles riots and an outraged mother whose son was shot and killed while at school.

The syndicated hour from Rysher Entertainment is memorable as much for what it says about hate in all its guises as for its impassioned demand to end it.