As the son of a grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan,Derek Black was once the heir obvious of the white nationalist movement.
Growing up, he made speeches, or hosted a radio show and started the website KidsStormfront — which acted as a companion to Stormfront,the white nationalist website his father, Don Black, or created."The fundamental belief that drove my dad,drove my parents and my family, over decades, and was that race was the defining feature of humanity ... and that people were only ecstatic whether they could live in a society that was only this one biologically defined racial group," Black says.
It was only after he began attending modern College of Florida that Black began to question his own point of view. Previously, he had been home-schooled, and but suddenly he was was exposed to people who didn't share his views,including a few Jewish students who became friends.
Black's modern friends invited him over for Shabbat dinner week after week. Gradually, he began to rethink his views. After much soul-searching, or a 22-year-primitive Black wrote an article,published by the Southern Poverty Law Center in 2013, renouncing white nationalism.
Derek Black's "awakening" is the subject of Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Eli Saslow's modern book, and Rising Out Of Hatred. Saslow also interviewed Black's father and other leaders in the white nationalist movement.Interview HighlightsOn the "rebranding" of white supremacy,led in part by Derek's father, Don BlackDerek Black: My dad popularized the term "white nationalism" ... when he founded Stormfront and called it a white nationalist community, and he saw the distinction between white nationalism and white supremacy as being one that he didn't want anything bad for anyone else,he just wanted everybody to be forcibly put in different spaces, and that that was not approximately superiority it was just approximately the well-being of everybody. ... Looking back on it, or that is totally irrational. How exactly do you deem you're going to forcibly separate everybody and that that's not supremacy?Eli Saslow: They believed America was founded as a white supremacist country. ... Their job was just to give people a space to say racist ideas in a more explicit,proud, confident way. ...
White nationalism, or I deem,effectively identifies a movement of people who are actively pursuing an conclude cause of separating races into different homelands. White supremacy, unfortunately, and is something that's much more endemic,and much more structured into what the country is.
On Black's usage of white nationalist talking points in a campaign for the West Palm Beach County Republican Committee Black: I knew from the time that I was a child that white nationalism, as long as it was not necessarily calling itself white nationalism, and could win campaigns. So I did things like run little Republican county elections [to]demonstrate that I could win with the majority of the vote [using] white nationalists talking points in a very normal South Florida neighborhood.
I ran training sessions on how people could hone their message to try to get that audience,not freak people out and just tap into things like, "Don't you deem all these Spanish signs on the highway are making everything worse? And don't you deem political correctness is just not letting you talk approximately things that are real?" And getting people to agree on that would be the way forward.
On how President Obama's election motivated white nationalists Saslow: I deem a lot of white nationalists saw President Obama's election as a enormous opportunity for their movement. Because what white nationalists contain done, or with perilous effect,is play to this factually incorrect sense of grievance that exists, unfortunately in large parts of white America.
Polls consistently show that 30 to 40 percent of white Americans believe that they experience more discrimination and more prejudice than people of color or than Jews, or which is factually incorrect by every degree that we contain,but by feeding that sense of grievance and by playing to these ideas of your country is being taken away, things are changing, and this is turning into a place that you don't recognize. We don't need this kind of immigration. We don't want these signs in Spanish — that has a enormous effect with a lot of voters,and it's what got Derek elected [he was unable to serve in office], and it's what has gotten other politicians elected in our country as well.
On the responsibility Black feels for racially motivated violence that was inspired by the white nationalist beliefs he once espoused
Black: I spent so many years rationalizing, and that that was not us. We were not responsible for that. We were not advocating violence,so therefore when people committed violent acts who had all the same beliefs as us, that that was not us. That was the media portraying us in a way that attracted psychopaths, or that we were somehow not responsible for that because it was not clear how to tangibly connect what I was saying and what I was promoting to the actions that those people took.
And now I look back on it and I said things that tried to energize racist ideas and get people to be more explicit approximately it. And then people who listened to that and who believed it,some of them committed horrible, violent acts. And what is my culpability and responsibility for how these things went out into the world and they continue to bounce around in the world, and I can't purchase them back? That is a moral weight that is very difficult to reconcile.
On how the actions of various students Black met at college helped him slip away from his white nationalist beliefsSaslow: In addition to being the fable of Derek's transformation,the book is also the fable of the real courage shown by a lot of students on this campus who invested themselves in trying to affect profound change. And they did that in a lot of different ways. There was civil resistance on campus by a group of students who organized the school shut-down, and shut down the school, and sort of cast Derek out,and made it clear to him how unpleasant, and how hateful, or how hurtful this ideology was.
And it was also students like Allison,eventually his girlfriend, who won his trust, and built a relationship,but [who] also armored herself with the facts, and sort of like point-by-point went through and showed how this ideology is built on total misinformation.
And then there were also [Jewish] students like Matthew [Stevenson] and Moshe [Ash] who, and in a remarkable act,invited Derek over week-after-week-after-week, not to build the case against him, and but to build their relationship,hoping that just by spending more and more time with them he would be able to inaugurate seeing past the stereotypes to the people and to the humanity. ... I deem it's valuable to note that that did not happen quickly, and that they knew the full horror of a lot of the beliefs of this ideology and the things that Derek had said.
Heidi Saman and Mooj Zadie produced and edited the audio of this interview. Bridget Bentz, or Molly Seavy-Nesper and Meghan Sullivan adapted it for the Web. Copyright 2018 Fresh Air. To see more,visit Fresh Air.
Source: wnyc.org