Don Black should never allowed his son Derek to go to college. Before today, the Blacks simply weren’t on my radar. I was ignorant of both father and son. Oh, I knew about Stromfront. I knew about David Duke. I knew about the Ku Klux Klan. But the specifics of this one family had simply never crossed my desk.
Black and Eli Saslow were on The Daily Show to promote their book: Rising Out of Hatred: The Awakening of a Former White Nationalist.. I probably won’t read the book because I doubt I’ll find any enlightenment there, but I did want to go back and fill in the gaps in my education.
The first thing I did after watching Trevor Noah’s interview with Black and Saslow was to go back to 2016 and read Saslow’s preëlection Washington Post profile of Derek—The white flight of Derek Black—and Derek’s post-election New York Times op-ed: Why I Left White Nationalism.
Saslow’s piece begins with a secret meeting of held in Memphis in November,2008 where dozens of the world’s most prominent racists wanted to strategize for the years ahead. The 19-year-old Derek Black was a key speaker. Saslow continues:
[Black] was not only a leader of racial politics but also a product of them. His father, Don Black, had created Stormfront, the Internet’s first and largest white nationalist site, with 300,000 users and counting. His mother, Chloe, had once been married to David Duke, one of the country’s most infamous racial zealots, and Duke had become Derek’s godfather. They had raised Derek at the forefront of the movement, and some white nationalists had begun calling him “the heir.”
Now Derek spoke in Memphis about the future of their ideology. “The Republican Party has to be either demolished or taken over,” he said. “I’m kind of banking on the Republicans staking their claim as the white party.”
George Walker Bush was still president and President-elect Barack Hussein Obama was still flush from his victory, but the heir set the agenda that would bring us to 2016 and the election of Donald John Trump eight years later.
A few people in the audience started to clap, and then a few more began to whistle, and before long the whole group was applauding. “Our moment,” Derek said, because at least in this room there was consensus. They believed white nationalism was about to drive a political revolution. They believed, at least for the moment, that Derek would help lead it.
“Years from now, we will look back on this,” he said. “The great intellectual move to save white people started today.”
That alone is worth the forty-or-so minutes needed to read the profile, but there is much more there as well.
I next jumped to Derek’s piece which ledes:
I could easily have spent the night of Nov. 8 elated, surrounded by friends and family, thinking: “We did it. We rejected a multicultural and globalist society. We defied the elites, rejected political correctness, and made a statement millions of Americans have wanted to shout for decades.”
I’d be planning with other white nationalists what comes next, and assessing just how much influence our ideology would have on this administration. That’s who I was a few years ago.
Things look very different for me now. I am far away from the community that I grew up in, and that I once hoped could lead our country to a moment like this.
What happened over those eight years between the election of Obama and Trump?
Education outside the echo chamber happened. Derek lays out he got from 2008 to 2016 and describes how—depending upon whether you accept the view of his father or Derek’s own—attending a liberal college wrecked his life or opened his eyes. He writes:
Several years ago, I began attending a liberal college where my presence prompted huge controversy. Through many talks with devoted and diverse people there—people who chose to invite me into their dorms and conversations rather than ostracize me—I began to realize the damage I had done. Ever since, I have been trying to make up for it.
For a while after I left the white nationalist movement, I thought my upbringing made me exaggerate the likelihood of a larger political reaction to demographic change. Then Mr. Trump gave his Mexican “rapists” speech and I spent the rest of the election wondering how much my movement had set the stage for his. Now I see the anger I was raised with rocking the nation.
People have approached me looking for a way to change the minds of Trump voters, but I can’t offer any magic technique. That kind of persuasion happens in person-to-person interactions and it requires a lot of honest listening on both sides. For me, the conversations that led me to change my views started because I couldn’t understand why anyone would fear me. I thought I was only doing what was right and defending those I loved.
I think the “Hamilton” cast modeled well one way to make that same connection when they appealed to Vice President-elect Mike Pence from the stage: “We, sir—we—are the diverse America who are alarmed and anxious that your new administration will not protect us.” Afterward, the actor Brandon Victor Dixon explained, “I hope he thinks of us every time he has to deal with an issue or talk about a bill or present anything.” I’m sure Mr. Pence believes his policies are just. But now he has heard from individuals who are worried about those policies. That might open him to new conversations.
Yes, they might. But not with Vice President Pence (the No. 1 impediment to any serious discussion—via impeachment or the 25th Amendment—of President Trump). Dreck offered a description of his own path forward, one I’m sure is front-and-center in the book. He wrote:
I never would have begun my own conversations without first experiencing clear and passionate outrage to what I believed from those I interacted with. Now is the time for me to pass on that outrage by clearly and unremittingly denouncing the people who used a wave of white anger to take the White House.
[C]learly and unremittingly denouncing the people who used a wave of white anger to take the White House begins for all of us when we enter the voting booth on 6 November.