McKenzie says the roots of intolerance are in all of us.

He remembers his loving, kind aunt -- ``Saint Alice, helper of all beings of all colors,'' -- admonishing him as a boy when he was about to pick up a discarded cigarette butt, saying, ``Put that down, some nigger might have been smoking it.''

Today, McKenzie, who is a diversity trainer, offers workshops, wears and sells a $3 ``RRN'' badge and candidly talks about his life.

He grew up in the Pittsburgh suburb of Penn Hills, became a volunteer fireman and tried to distance himself from that environment of racist talk and joke-telling.

Two incidents changed his life -- one the day he dived into the Allegheny River to recover a man.

WHEN he brought him up, he watched with disbelief as the rescue crew performed an outmoded life-saving technique.

``Even at that time, back pressure/arm-lift was out of the books,'' he said. ``Mouth-to-mouth was the thing to do, and everybody knew that. I couldn't believe it, and it was only because he was a black man. I took comfort only in the fact that he had been in the water 45 minutes and was most surely dead when I brought him out.''

In the second incident, it was McKenzie who donned the vestments of a racist.

There was a drill designed to familiarize firefighters with where things were kept on the trucks and their purpose.

``We would pick something off the truck and say, `I got it out of this department and this is a hydrant wrench,' '' he explained.

Earlier there had been a racial disturbance in the black neighborhood of Penn Hills called Lincoln Park.

``I got a rubber mallet that is used to open a stuck hydrant. I held it up and said, `This is a rubber mallet. It is used for beating niggers in Lincoln Park.'

``There was one black firefighter in our group and our eyes met as I said it. I couldn't believe that I, the one person who had tried so hard to avoid that kind of thing, had actually said that.' ''

ANALYZING it afterward, he believes his need to fit in was stronger than he realized and that he ultimately succumbed to racism.

``Those two experiences combined showed me how subtly you can become racist without being around the KKK, and how hard it is to extricate yourself from the group-think or the group mind,'' he said.

McKenzie gets various reactions when he wears the ``RRN'' badge. Usually it forces people to ask what it means and that grants him a tiny step in his war against racism.

But just pinning on a badge or refraining from making racist statements will not do the job. Things don't change unless people want to change, he said. It requires deeper, ``inner work.''

Along the way, he hopes to ``decriminalize'' racism, which he emphasizes is not just about black and white relationships, but all groups.

``I want people to understand that it is not a hate crime. It is not the KKK. It's that subtle way that we all have learned to be what, for most of us, is unconscious but inadvertently harms people of other races and cultures.''

But if anything reminds him that he must persevere, it could be an e-mail he received from White Aryan Resistance leader Tom Metzger, who wrote, ``We are winning.''

Recovering Racists Network is at 2455 Marcia Drive, Pleasant Hill, Calif. 94523. Phone (925) 682-4959, fax (925) 687-4437, e-mail info@rrnet.org, Web site http://www.rrnet.org .
Write Loretta Green at the Mercury News, 310 University Ave., Palo Alto, Calif. 94301; fax (650) 688-7555.