Challenging Beliefs: How Derek Black Renounced His Family's White Nationalism Ideology

Derek Black: 00:00:00

So thinking about it as like I grew up in one of the central families of this white nationalist movement that knows itself as being a very international movement, has international conferences. You know, they meet in hotel banquet rooms.

I think it doesn't always look like what people might expect to have this vision of the future, which is terrifying.

Arnold Stricker: 00:00:34

Welcome to St.

Louis in Tune and thank you for joining us for fresh perspectives on issues and events with experts, community leaders and everyday people who make a difference in shaping our society and world. I'm your host Arnold Stricker, along with co host Mark Langston. Our guest is Derek Black, an American former white supremacist and memorist.

They are a child of Don Black, founder of the Stormfront online community and godchild of former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard David Duke. Derek Black publicly renounced white nationalism and chronicled their personal journey away from their family's beliefs.

Derek will be speaking November 12th at 7:30pm at the Merowitz Performing Arts center about the Klansman's My Journey from White Supremacy to Anti Racism. Derek, welcome to St. Louis in Tune. Glad to have you on the show today.

Derek Black: 00:01:24

Oh, thanks for having me. I really appreciate it.

Arnold Stricker: 00:01:27

I guess the first thing I would like for you to define for listeners is something that I think people may not be clear on in their mind because they really don't know the intricacies of it is the difference between white nationalism and white supremacy. And then people will throw in Nazi in there. Would you please define that so it's clear for people?

Derek Black: 00:01:47

Sure, sure.

That's one of the main reasons that I wanted to write my book and I don't want to present it like white nationalists are not racist or white supremacist or something.

f the main founders of in the: 1960

And it's a real, it's a social movement where people know each other, where they have particular strategies, where it runs spectrum of violent revolution and terrorism to things that are more like what my, what I grew up in in my family that was political and they thought they could win elections. But it's a social movement in the sense of people meet up, they know each other, people often marry each other like my parents did.

Whereas when we're talking about white supremacy or racism or something like that, I try to describe that as just. People can have racist views.

People can be anti Semitic, people can be anti immigrant, but that does not necessarily make them participants in this particular social movement with these goals, apocalyptic revolutionary goals to overthrow the country. And white nationalism is the second thing. Not a patriotic movement. It's not one that's based in America. It's international.

And so when we're thinking about it, it's really important to realize that people who are running an election in Britain or Greece or Australia are very aware of the fact that they're part of the same movement as people who are doing the same thing in the United States. And understanding that really feels essential to understanding their motivations.

Arnold Stricker: 00:03:21

Some people in the United States would not think about white nationalism outside the United States. Would you distinguish between white nationalism and white supremacy? Is one more militant?

One may do more things physically, or is that a capability of both sides? Especially, obviously, if someone's on the fringe.

Derek Black: 00:03:39

So thinking about it is like, I grew up in one of the central families of this white nationalist movement that knows itself as being, you know, very international movement, has international conferences. You know, they meet in hotel banquet rooms.

I think it doesn't always look like what might people might expect to have this vision of the future, which is terrifying. It. It's militant in the sense that they want a world that looks completely different. They.

They want global segregation, they want an end to civil rights. They want essentially terrorists. But it still runs the spectrum.

My family could always say that they condemned violence, that they banned any illegal suggestions on my dad's website. He founded the first white nationalist website on the Internet.

And they were still a part of the same movement of people that conducted mass violence, mass terrorism. And so they could always say that they were separate. They could always say, oh, we condemn these things. We're not a part of this.

But growing up, I could look at it and say, you know who that person is? You have the same ideology. You both target the same enemies. You say, who doesn't belong here, who shouldn't be allowed to come here?

And so even from a young age, there's this real discomfort about the sense that they could look at people and call them psychopaths or say that they were counterproductive to the movement or whatever, but they could not say that they didn't have the same goals as the most terrifying violence.

Arnold Stricker: 00:05:08

And that was something, in reading the book, that you had an internal conflict about. That's what I perceived, that you would see these people talk, you would hear them talk, and then you would see the other side of what they believed.

And there wasn't a congruence. Am I off on that or am I going down the right direction?

Derek Black: 00:05:26

There oh, no, I think that's right. It was looking back, writing the book, I went into it expecting that I had thought through everything about my upbringing.

It had been over a decade since I condemned my family's belief when I was at college. It was something that I thought, okay, I've talked about this for years. I had come to grips with it.

And writing the book was something that really did make me relive a lot of that stuff.

I recognized what it was like to grow up in the midst of that movement and to see the people who were the leaders of this movement coming over to our house. When I was a kid, and then later on my.

When I turned 9 and 10 and I started giving public interviews, advocating for white nationalism with my dad, he started taking me to conferences around the country and meeting all these people who he had both grown up with himself as his own mentors and then people who he had led this movement with for decades before he was born. It was this feeling like I wanted to uphold their desires and their views. I wanted to show them a different way.

Sometimes I think I saw that I had a sort of perspective, an ability to see people and understand people who they just cut out of their lives from the beginning. And that was where the conflict came.

It was really when I was looking back on it and realizing that I had always wanted to have this two parts in my life.

I had always wanted to feel like I could both be somebody that stood up from a really young age for my family's ideology and tried to find a way forward for them and be somebody who was open to anybody, who didn't close a friendship or a relationship based on anybody's identity, because I could recognize that race didn't seem to predict anything about people on an individual level.

And so I personally created that sort of caveat that my family's ideology must be true about millions and millions of people, which, to mark to your listeners, is not true. Race is not something that predicts anything about people.

But I could see that even as a young age that individual people I met and I grew up in South Florida in a very racially diverse place. Their race didn't seem to say anything about them being Jewish, didn't seem to say anything about who they were.

And I tried to have those two worlds, and they increasingly shrunk around me as I got older.

Arnold Stricker: 00:07:50

Yeah, you talked about that quite a bit and really came to a head at college, at the university you were at. When did you first recognize that? Because I know you did the Jenny Jones interview.

And you were pretty staunch white nationalism there talking about that. Did you sense that back then or.

Derek Black: 00:08:07

When looking back, I can see that there were two things happening that were really hard to parse.

And those two things are the feeling of needing to alienate myself from people, of encountering people who were furiously afraid or harmed by what my family was saying.

And on the other hand, the feeling of care and love and protection for my family and seeing, seeing people call them haters and then saying, oh, they're not haters.

And then from being a 10 year old and saying like, these are the people who draw my bath when I fell off the swing and got the wind knocked out of me or give me a band aid when I get a cut. This sort of feeling of these are the people who care for me and I want to stand up and care for them.

And I could recognize early and looking back especially that I didn't like being a person that people were afraid of that people could say was harming their life. And I tried to separate those things. I tried to feel like they just didn't understand.

And then after I was nine years old, my family started homeschooling me. And so it became a lot easier to keep people at arm blanks and not really engage with what they were telling me.

When people told me that they thought I was harming them or they were scared of what I was saying, I could say, well, they just don't understand this movement like I do. They don't understand the people I've grown up with. And then I didn't have to carry that relationship any closer.

And that is the thing that really changed. In college.

I went to a small liberal arts college and rapidly I recognized that I was building relationships that were closer than any I had in my life. And they were with people who did not know my background because I had not brought it up.

And I recognized that when they were telling me that they had grown up afraid because they were either not white or because they were Jewish.

And this movement that I represented without knowing that I was representing it, they were going to feel horrified and they were going to be right to do. And I had no answer for, how am I going to reconcile that?

Arnold Stricker: 00:10:11

That must have really scared you half to death.

Derek Black: 00:10:14

Yeah, it was this feeling like I couldn't be the person who I saw myself as.

Like, I saw myself as being a genuinely good friend to people who I also saw myself as harming, lying to, keeping this from, unable to live both of the lives that I thought I was trying to live. And just being this future that was going to sort of define me.

I felt like I had defined myself by going on television, national TV and giving an interview when I was 10 and then continuing to do that throughout my teenage years and genuinely wanting to be this sort of scion that this movement could see a future within and not wanting to abandon them and also feeling like I had learned all this stuff was true. I thought that I had spent enough time meeting professors at white nationalist conferences.

There's a lot of tenured faculty who wait until later in their career to start expressing their white supremacy. And then I thought I had spent my teenage years proving that I had been raised with this ideology, but actually it was accurate.

Like we had crime statistics and IQ and all this stuff that I didn't need to interrogate too much because it justified this worldview. And it gave me a feeling that it didn't matter how unpleasant it was, it didn't matter how much it alienated me from people who I wanted to care for.

I couldn't just say, oh, I don't believe this stuff. I can't believe these things that are, that I know are true, that I've been taught are true just because I wish that I didn't need to. Right.

Does that make sense? Like that sort of conflict of.

I could have the feeling that I didn't want to be this person and feel that I know how the world is and I can't just disbelieve it now.

Arnold Stricker: 00:11:58

I know you're extremely intelligent. You had a self directed learning perspective.

It seems that what I gleaned from the book, that your parents let you learn and even though you were homeschooled, you were out reading the encyclopedia, you were going through some learning on your own.

And then you get to the university and you have this variety of discourse and thought and worldview all kind of coming on at the same time challenging you. It seemed that you were a loner in a, in a sense that you were in a silo. And at least that's what I, I got from the book.

And then the university broke these walls down a little bit. Not the university per se, but the, the students who you interacted with, who you had friendships with.

And then you went away and all of a sudden they became aware of your background and some still didn't.

Derek Black: 00:12:57

They didn't.

Arnold Stricker: 00:12:57

They were like, that's okay, you've not been what their perspective of what a white nationalist or supremacist was, that wasn't what, who you were. So it challenged them a Little bit. My question is the importance of this discourse and talking and thought and understanding worldviews.

How important is that now, especially in our society and culture?

Derek Black: 00:13:21

I took a really clear lesson after the fact because. But what happened at college took years. It sometimes feels like a pretty clear story.

Now if you go to a college that is very social justice focused and anti racist focused and I got outed and I came back to the school, I couldn't be somebody who just ran away from it. Everybody who all these relationships I'd built imploded, People felt like I had leave them because I had.

And I just couldn't find a way to square that because I thought, oh, there must be a misunderstanding. I didn't see myself as somebody who wanted anyone to be afraid of me. And I thought, oh, I have a hard truth.

And to say white nationalism has these conferences where people talk about trying to be very intellectual, trying to believe that they have all the facts, and that's not so unusual. I think a lot of very strange ideologies that you could look at and say this seems objectively disprovable are just like white nationalism.

And people can believe pretty wild things, but they often believe them for reasons. They think that they have facts, they think they have arguments.

And white nationalists, they had all these like 19th century stuff to justify racism and say race was distinct.

And so I showed back up on that campus and I spent a couple of years actually with people I met at one of the only spaces that people invited me back in, which was a Shabbat dinner, the observant dinner on Friday night, the Jewish community.

And I got invited to this space and I met people there who were willing to talk with me about what I thought were all these facts because I knew I didn't want to be this person that people on this campus were afraid of. And I cared about these people. But I couldn't just say I don't believe these facts.

And I had to spend two years going through, oh, what is it that we think? What do I, what have I learned that I think is this justification for race? And if you break that stuff down, there is no defense.

Like race is this social thing. It was created in the colonial era. It's not biological. It doesn't predict anything about people, intelligence or crime or anything like that.

If you're willing to look at it, you can get there. But I hadn't been willing to look at it.

And I think that's the lesson, that it felt like debate, it felt like these quiet conversations with trusting people. And it. Because it was. But I never would have been willing to hear those things, to ask, where's the misunderstanding? Like, where is the.

If there's something that I think is that I believe that's not true, definitely, let's talk about it. I don't want to believe something that's not true.

I wasn't willing to get there until I was in a community of people that I wanted to reconcile that with. I wanted to understand, where's the line? How. How could I care for these people who are afraid of me?

And I wanted to find where is the way that they could understand me. And then ultimately I came to a place where I recognized I am just the one who's wrong here. I really need to reassess my own life.

And at that point, I could recognize that I didn't want to condemn the worldview, even though I knew it was morally wrong, even though I knew it was factually wrong, because I didn't want to lose all the relationship that I had built up until that point in my life. I was 23 years old and about to graduate college, and I did not want to lose everybody who I had cared about until I was in my early 20s.

And that felt terrible because I saw myself as somebody who believed facts, who believed arguments, who had good evidence for the things I believed, that they would get there and realize all along I had grown up in an ideology. I had aligned myself with the people around me. I had justified that.

And now the only thing left for me was to abandon this identity I had, which was meant the community I was connected to, and walk off into nothing. And to talk about this now, it really is my lesson that we think things are often about debate.

We think things are often about giving somebody the best fact, arguing them out of what they believe. And it often feels like that. And it takes a trusting communication to have that.

But I don't think that ever happens unless you are first in a community that challenges some of the beliefs that you have, that challenges some of the ways you see the world and makes you fundamentally say, is this how I want to be relating to these other people I care about? And then that's the context where you start listening to facts and debates and arguments and like being willing to change your mind.

And I think there's something pretty universal in how that happens each time. And there's really a lesson there for us about what does it mean for people to change their mind.

People can always change their mind, but it's not by arguing them into submission. It's by finding somebody who's in a community that they want to reconcile the things they believe with.

Arnold Stricker: 00:18:00

That's an interesting point. And the fact that it doesn't happen overnight, as you stated.

You look back now and I read the book, or listeners read the book, and it's okay, that must have happened. Boom. And it's been an evolving process for you, it seems.

Derek Black: 00:18:14

Yeah, it was one that in college, I think two years feels like an enormous amount of time. And I look back on it, I think, wow, in some ways, that wasn't very long. And what happened afterwards?

It was: 2013

I had been extremely public about speaking out for white nationalism, organizing conferences I had run for office before I got to college and won the seat advocating for white nationalism. And so I felt like the only thing I could do was to publicly say, I disbelieve this. I don't. I think this is wrong, and I am abdicating from this.

But then what happened afterwards was not becoming this outspoken person who talks about anti racism or like, advocates against antisemitism or has even the lessons that I have now. What happened immediately was that I felt like I was walking into a void. I physically. I went to grad school.

I found a grad program of medieval history that I could go spend all of my time doing. But what it felt like was that I did not have a place. I didn't have a community of people, that college had been terrorized by me.

It was not a really an experience that I looked back on. I was like, oh, now I have this college community. I.

People were still condemning me after I had left this movement because they said, like, oh, congratulations on not believing the worst things in the world anymore, but it doesn't make you my friend. And I had some close relationships and very close relationships in that period, but for the most part, I felt like I didn't know where I fit.

I didn't know what was the right thing for me. I was really ashamed of what. Where I come from and what I had.

for years. And it was really: 2016

And realizing that was irresponsible. I had some.

Some obligation to explain the way that this movement does have a lot of influence, not because it's got millions of people, not because they have an army not because that they're even going to be elected into any kind of office, but because they have a sense that their beliefs do have resonance in a lot of places in this country and in other countries.

And their goal is to take more mild versions of their beliefs of antisemitism or anti immigration or some form of racism and find people who believe some subtler version of that and then amplify it. Like, tell them that they don't have to apologize, they don't have to rethink anything. They don't.

They, in fact, they can double down and try to make those beliefs more extreme. And that's exactly what they've been trying to do for decades.

And I think we can concretely see ways that their talking points end up resonating, that some candidates will take on some of the positions that they have used, not. Not even if they believe them, just because they'll see it as politically powerful. And it felt like an obligation.

I needed to speak about how it worked inside, but also how anybody can change their mind. And we really should have a lot more optimism and hope with the context of the fact that it's hard. And it takes a lot of personal engagement.

It takes a unique moment in your life. It takes a place where you care about people you didn't expect to care about, and then you're willing to confront the ways that you impact the world.

And we can see when we talk about that as, like, changing your mind, why that's rare and why this doesn't happen a lot, but also why it's always possible. Anybody, I think, can imagine something core to what they believe about the world and imagining what it would take to change that.

And it really would take realizing that you're harming people you cared about, I think, almost every time.

And when we see that, we can in big and small ways, my story is pretty extreme, but I think in a lot of smaller ways, it happens to people all the time, and we can all relate to it at some moment in our lives, whether it was college or last year when we changed our jobs or moved or became parents or were diagnosed with an. There's things that change our lives that connect us to people, and you can feel that shift in yourself in ways you wouldn't have expected.

Arnold Stricker: 00:22:30

well said, Very well said. In: 2016

When was that point in. In your. In your life?

Derek Black: 00:22:45

Yeah, it was: 2016

I could see them hearing on the news, and I recognized this is something that I can't just ignore. I have some obligation to speak about it. And I really didn't want to. I didn't want to open it up.

There were a lot of people in my life who are close, like roommates, co students in my academic program who didn't know my background, who didn't know where I had come from. And I didn't. I was ashamed to talk about it.

And what happened in: 2016

I could look at what I had said and done, look at where I had come from, and I could make lessons that were ways of thinking about our own experiences and give my example in that way.

here and say that? And it was: 2020

I've worked with massive organizations. I've done sort of educational things around hard parts of our history.

But it was: 2020

It was this feeling, like I could see people who had once been very interested in understanding the way this movement I had come from was operating, like, asking questions about it, suddenly starting to tell me that they thought that had been an aberration or this movement was going to go away. And I felt like, this obligation to say, no matter what happens in politics, this is a movement that exists because it functions within our society.

ecades. It was founded in the: 1950

Sometimes there are massive bursts of violence. Sometimes there are political campaigns that come out of this movement, but it always has a sense of what it's going to do next.

Like, people are constantly coming together and thinking about how they want to take advantage of the next political or cultural moment.

And the idea that these things are purely cyclical or completely separate, or we can't have a sense of our own history that goes back quite a long way, if not 60 years and a hundred years. And I wanted to put a lot of things like that in the book.

Just think about how these people are aware of themselves within a much longer history of America and in a longer history going forward.

And that if we are going to think about our own decisions in this moment, it needs to be something that we can see that we can see that long perspective in the same way that this political movement does. And like, that's really what I wanted to write in anticipation of whatever happened.

These things are relatively predictable to the extent that, you know that they're going to be looking for moments to seize and just thinking about that. And so that's what I really wanted to put in the book, is that it's much more historical and social than I even expected.

And I realized that because this personal story that I grew up with was one that they always saw themselves in the context of history. They always saw themselves in a long lineage of people. And the first third of the book is written about things that happened before I was born.

And then there's a lot of pieces in there about how they saw themselves as a part of a long American lineage.

Arnold Stricker: 00:26:31

You even go back farther than that with your University of Chicago doctoral candidacy. You're researching, correct me, Medieval and early modern origins of race. Is that correct?

Derek Black: 00:26:43

Yeah. My academic study.

Arnold Stricker: 00:26:45

How do you find time to balance all of this?

Derek Black: 00:26:49

Sometimes they detract from each other and sometimes they feed into each other. It's something that I think it's pretty clear how I ended up doing academic work where I'm looking at the sort of long history of this idea of race.

But it's something that, I don't know. I find I have been challenged sometimes if people say, oh, you're like obsessed with the way race functions or something.

I have had that criticism, I've received that. And I think I would respond to it and say it's something that you have to face, we have to look at. And race is this strange.

Racism is this strange but predictable kind of thing that's happened in our world where it is fully an idea. I think if there.

Sometimes that's even hard to understand, that you look around at race and you feel like, ah, people's identities are shaped into it. It's a part of culture, it's a part of how people grow up. And I think whiteness functions in that same way.

And one of the things I Do I capitalize white in this book? Because I think it is really an identity that we undermine by not admitting that.

And if an idea like that has shaped so much of society, figuring out where does it come from, how do, how can we see much longer histories of separating people, of thinking about how people are bound to what they were, what category they were born as, what sort of social status that we put on people? It's one of the more fundamental questions of like, how do we end up structuring a society and what do we want?

Because I think one thing that I recognized that I really didn't realize when I was writing the book was that white nationalists and anti racists, the one thing they really have in common is they do look around and they see the same inequality in the world. They do recognize that to be born in the modern world, race will predict how, on average, how much wealth someone has.

Like how they, a lot of their social outcomes are going to be predicted by what racial group they're born into. And white nationalists do that, and anti racists do that.

And what white nationals land on is that they need that to be okay, they need that to be moral, they need that justified.

And the path that they take is by saying that some people are better than others, that some people are more skilled or more worthy than others, and that therefore the inequality we see in our world like that, that can, can't ever change, it can't ever fix it. You just have to accept that it's appropriate at least.

If not, maybe they wish it weren't an anti racist look and they see the more clear sense that there's nothing about people, any individual person or groups of people, that makes them better or worse, more able or more capable. And when you have a massive inequality like that, it is because of a long social history that has disadvantaged people.

And you can either turn your back on it and say there's nothing you can do, or you can recognize that every individual person has an enormous impact in whatever way they live their life in that. And sometimes it's a personal conversation with a friend, sometimes it is interacting in whatever place you find yourself.

But all activism comes down to the fact that individual action is the only way that anything changes.

We all have this responsibility not to change our lives necessarily, not to be book people, not to write books or become politicians, but to find the ways that our lives interact with the world and push for the one we want and not just accept it or say that our, or that we don't have any impact or that we don't have any influence because we all do. And individual conversations were the things that fundamentally changed my life.

And a lot of the people who had them never quite knew what the outcome was going to be.

And so I hope when people read the book, that's less than they get that throughout the course of history, throughout the course of any individual life, it is these individual choices, these individual conversations that really change everything. And we all have that power.

Arnold Stricker: 00:30:43

We've been talking to Derek Black.

They're going to be speaking at the Mirowitz Performing Arts center for the Jewish Book Festival November 12th at 7:30pm and it will be about the Klansman's Son, My journey from White Supremacy to Anti Racism. Derek, thank you for your time today and talking with us on St. Louis in Tuna. I greatly appreciate thank you so much for having me.

Derek Black: 00:31:05

I really appreciated it.

Arnold Stricker: 00:31:06

That's all for this hour and we thank you for listening.

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Want to thank Bob Berthesel for our theme music co host Mark Langston, and we thank you for being a part of our community of curious minds. St. Louis in tune is a production of Motif Media Group and the US Radio Network.

Remember to keep seeking, keep learning, walk worthy, and let your light shine. For St. Louis in tune, I'm Arnold Stricker.