What Made Fmr. White Nationalist Derek Black Change his Mind

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: And now, to a story of a hate-filled heart transformed. Derek Black was raised by a family dedicated to white supremacy. His father founded the notorious white nationalist website. His godfather is the infamous David Duke. Black spread his own racist beliefs on the radio waves as host of a popular program where he coined the term “White Genocide.” But at college, black’s friends confronted him about his bigoted feelings and slowly clipped away until he eventually renounced those views. Here he is now talking to our Michel Martin.

MICHEL MARTIN: Thanks, Christiane. Derek Black, thank you so much for joining us.

DEREK BLACK, FORMER WHITE NATIONALIST: Thanks for having me, Michel.

MARTIN: I think a lot of people think of white nationalism as something that used to be common, like most people believe, that you know, back in the day, most white people believe that, you know, white people were better than other people, smarter, better, prettier, et cetera, but that in the current moment losers believe that. You know. These are people who are not successful in the rest of their lives and so they kind of latch on to this because they are basically losers living in their mom’s basement and, you know, that’s how they feel good about themselves. Why do you think your parents — well, first of all, I want to the ask like what is your take on that? Who do you think is attractive and I’m particularly curious why your parents were attracted to it?

BLACK: Right. First of all, I would point out that people from all walks of life become participants and engaged members of this movement, that when we look at things like Charlottesville or a few years before that the big conference in D.C. right after the president was elected in 2016, people who attend those things and donate to those things tend to be middle class. They come from every socioeconomic status. They are lawyers. They have grad degrees. They have college degrees, and there’s also people who come into it who only have a high school degree, but I think we really miss something if we believe that the white people in America and in other countries who are attracted to this movement come only from poverty or uneducated. It’s not accurate, and I think it’s also kind of dangerous to assume that that is who we’re talking about. And they think the second point is there’s probably a distinction between the history of racism in America and white supremacy in its political and social forms which is what white nationalists like my family are trying to tap into, and the movement itself, like I try to use the term white supremacy to talk about that history and white nationalism to talk about the social movement. Because it’s a movement where people recognize each other. They know their friends. They know — get baby-sitters who are also white nationalists to take care of their kid, they marry white nationalist and their goal is to convince more mainstream people who hold less extreme racist beliefs to amp up those beliefs. They want to tap into beliefs that are still widespread and latent in the United States, things like black communities are more criminal or that immigrants from Latin America are lazy, like things that you can find millions of people who believe these abhorrent things, but they are not willing to go so far as to commit to it as an ideology, and white nationalists want to bring that to the surface, turn it into a political movement. Get people to vote for candidates who say those things explicitly and I think understanding it that way, seeing this substrate in America and wanting to tap into it, like that’s the best way to understand how these dynamics work.

MARTIN: So, you’re saying that these views are not just strictly held by people who are not successful in society and don’t fit in, they are held by a lot of people. So, I guess what I’m saying, what accounts for that in your opinion?

BLACK: It’s that we are putting too much emphasis on presenting people with the right facts. I can use myself as an example here. I consider myself a pretty smart person. I’m in grad school. I try to be really analytical my whole life. And yet, I showed up at college when I what is 19 years old believing that all the supposedly scientific stuff that white nationalists use to support the idea of race being predictive and segregation being good and all of this stupid stuff, I totally believed. I thought they were right, and I thought everybody was just denying it, and it took a community of people in college over years to condemn my beliefs, to show me kindness, to show me real vitriol, to be in the private conversations where we could go over the facts, and it took a long time for me thinking I was really smart and analytical to accept that it was morally wrong, that it was ethically wrong, that when people came up to me and said that, white nationalism is making it harder for me and my family, that they were not misunderstanding, it, that they were really being harmed. We don’t believe things because we’ve read the best books. We believe things because that’s what our community believes. We believe things because of what our parents believe. And being smart doesn’t necessarily mean that you always believe the correct thing. You have can come up with a lot of reasons to believe just about anything and sometimes I kind of wonder if the smartest people are able to convince themselves of the dumbest things because that have.

MARTIN: I mean, you were once called the — you know, the former grand was David Duke, people call you the leading light of our movement. You were kind of like the heir apparently, like the princeling. And it’s my understanding that your innovation was to stop using racial slurs, for example, openly, right, but to kind of pivot toward that white genocide, the idea of white genocide, rather that — instead of that white people are perpetuators of racists and what racists are, that white people are the victims of racism. How did that insight come to you?

BLACK: So, the family that I was born into had already spent years trying to mainstream white supremacy, that the year that I was born was also the year that David Duke won his first election in Louisiana for state legislature. My dad was volunteering on that campaign and had to drive home because my mother went into labor slight early. And so, this was something in the air, was that if they mainstreamed white supremacy correctly, they could get people to buy into it and not back away because they’re afraid to being called racist. And I don’t want to downplay the role that I played in it from — all throughout my teenagers I went to these conferences, I’ve met the people that my dad had worked with over the decades. And I was totally committed to this ideology and my contributions were continuing that sort of political mainstreaming, producing radio programs and YouTube videos and memes and trying to figure out ways that you could access people and make them feel like it’s OK to lean into what nationalism, that they don’t have to be afraid of being branded with that label, and I just wanted to say running for local office in Florida. I don’t think people realize the praise that you get for doing that. I think if you are — if you’re outed as a white nationalist that it means that you only that you face scandal and shunning, and that’s real, but you also face people constantly on the street giving you high-fives or saying, I saw you on news and that you’re saying the things that they don’t want to say, and that level of public support, even more than a decade ago when I was running these campaigns was prevalent, was widespread. And in the same year that Barack Obama won the presidency was the same year that I ran a little local election in Florida and got just an upwelling of support from even the local Republican Party.

MARTIN: What difference do you think it has made to this movement, to the white nationalist movement, to the white identity movement even if people don’t necessarily think they belong to it to have Donald Trump as president this last four years given how he has conducted himself in office on matters of race? I mean, let’s go — you know, going back to Charlottesville, telling people — there’s good people on both sides. And even to the current moment when he was telling the — sort of the Proud Boys (INAUDIBLE) to stand back and stand by, and seems to have acted even saluted them when they, you know, showed up in Washington, D.C. this past weekend. See this helicopter sort of circled and that was seen as kind of a salute to this group that then went later on rampaging kind of through city. What difference do you think that that has made?

BLACK: I think that that kind of support is huge. You can look specifically at Charlottesville and see the reason that that march was so big was because they saw themselves as fulfilling the promise of Donald Trump. The reason why they were so public, the reason why I — we can look at the manifestos of many of the mass shooters both in the United States and abroad over the last few years who named Donald Trump as part of their motivation, and part of that is PR, part of that is trying to get press but part of it is real, that if the presidency is held by somebody who holds a lot of most extreme beliefs that they do, it demonstrates to them that there is widespread mainstream support for those beliefs. And in the same way, Donald Trump losing with those campaign platforms I expect will be a real blow to organizing far right extremists and anti- immigration groups. They will still exist. They will still keep organizing, but it is going to be a lot less energy, it is going to be more underground and it is going to wait until there’s another moment or political eruption where they will come back again. This has been the history for decades. That this movement, as I mentioned in the beginning, goes back decades, at least to the 1960s as a pretty consistent movement with the same heroes and figures continuously over time and it has had moments where it went underground, it has had moments where it was out in public with thousands of people marching in the streets and whatever happens next, it’s still going to be there. It’s still going to be a concern. It’s still going to be recruiting people, talking to people on the internet and in person, and that’s what we need to be watching out for.

MARTIN: I do want to talk about something specific that happened this weekend in Washington, D.C. where, you know, I’m not quite sure of the numbers, you know, different groups always exaggerate their numbers, but at least a very large complement of some of these folks. They desecrated like two historic black churches in Washington, D.C. I mean, they gave it — do kind of overwhelming damage but they — you know, they pulled down their Black Lives Matter signs which were on their property, burned them in the streets, stomped on them and made a big sort of show of it and put it up online, OK. So, what’s your take on why they would do something like that?

BLACK: I think the goal of terrorizing black people is very much had a part of their action. And they would justify it by saying that they were the ones being targeted, right. They would justify it by saying that Black Lives Matter is some organization that hates white people, that is trying to destroy — they will come up with a whole bunch of rationalizations for their actions terrorizing a black community that has been trying to make its own space in Washington, D.C. for more than a century, and they will call themselves the victims while they’re doing it.

MARTIN: So, let’s wheel around to the present moment. As we are speaking now, you know, a new administration will take office in a matter of weeks. So, what difference does it make that there’s a new person coming into office and that the person who has been sort of an ally if not a champion has actually lost? Does that matter?

BLACK: I do think it matters, and I think it is going to be deflating for these movements to not have a champion in the White House. But with that also said, I think there’s a real danger that sort of rest on the laurels and say that Donald Trump didn’t win and so, therefore, the movement for anti-racism has won, and that’s really far from the truth. We still have to look at elections that are going to be happening next year and year after that. We have to see what Donald Trump and supporters in the GOP are going to do and we also have to think about millions of people who saw the most explicit white supremacy attached for this administration and still voted for it. The idea that this one election, which was way too close for comfort is the end of this advocacy I think is misguided. And at the same time, we should be somewhat optimistic. I think this year alone we have seen huge shifts in all American opinion but white opinions specifics on black lives matters, on police violence, on discrimination of people of color, there have been huge shifts in opinions. And while white people still voted majority for Donald Trump, I think there is a huge flood of people who are not quite sure what they want to do or feel like they need to do and could easily be persuaded to act in a more equitable way to advocate against white supremacy on the basis of their own interests because in a very real way living in an inequitable country where some people face harsher sentences, where some people face harsher policing, where some people can never gain as much wealth because of their background is not a society that is stable, and not a society that even the people who are coming out on top should want to live in, and I think that that’s an argument that we’re in the middle of making.

MARTIN: Could I ask you a personal question?

BLACK: Sure.

MARTIN: You know, in your case, I mean, your — the change in your life and heart and mind came when you went to college and friends basically embraced you and refused to let you go even when your sort of past history had — was discovered. They argued with you. They argued with you but they also just loved you, right? They just loved you. Would that work with your parents?

BLACK: I think it could, but it’s the situation. I think the setting was so important, the fact that I had left the community I was in. I had gone to another community that I knew was opposed to my ideology and I knew they would react negatively when they found it out a, but I didn’t realize how much being a part of that community would make me willing to listen to what they had to say when they did. And without that, I don’t know where I would be right now, without having a — caring about that community and being willing to listen to them, I like to think some other way I would have talked myself out of it or in the least dropped out and stopped advocating it even if I didn’t fully understand the implications, but I’m just not sure. And so, I think my parents could easily be persuaded — well, could possibly be persuaded, but not in the situation that they are in, not where their closest friends are white nationalists. Not where the cause of their life is white nationalism, not where they fear if they ever change their minds that they would be ridiculed for it, like all these things make it impossible. And I think also being much older also makes it difficult.

MARTIN: So, what would make a difference? I mean, there’s national leadership. The fact that Joe Biden as the president-elect speaks a different truth and speaks it consistently and then has surrounded himself with people who don’t look like him, who he respects and has put in positions of authority and who he’s — you know, does that matter or is it just more personal?

BLACK: I moved to Chicago after renouncing white nationalism and sort of trying to figure out what my role should be in the world and being silent for years. And I remember the first few years after I condemned white nationalism living in Chicago, which was one of the most segregated cities I’d ever been in. I traveled throughout the south my whole life and I had never been to a place that had such hard lines between where the white people live and where the Hispanic people live and where the black people live. And in being in conversations, I also heard people utter some of the most explicitly racist things even though they voted Democratic and were liberal people because they lived in a city that promoted their worst instincts about race. They lived in a city where they could see exactly where the black neighborhood was and that that neighborhood was poorer then they could make a whole lot of assumptions about black people and just move on in their life that way, and I took a lot of lessons from that, that a city that votes Democratic and see themselves as liberal can be incredibly racists, and I think it’s going to take a lot more than loosening the explicit laws that prevented integration in neighborhoods, like we need actual pushes for this. We need to encourage people to make these changes. Like you can make some statements about how committed you are to anti- racism, but if you then make sure that your kids only go to the majority white schools or only live in neighborhoods that are majority white, you’re making the same decisions that white nationalists want you to make, that white nationalists think anybody who agrees with them would make, and I think these sort of choices in our daily lives are very difficult, but there’s something that people on individual levels need to be thinking about. We all have these neighborhood councils and school boards where we can go speak and speak against segregation, speak against racist policies and those are the places where individuals can make huge differences, and we have to lean into doing that, even though it’s kind of scary.

MARTIN: Derek Black, thank you so much for talking with us today.

BLACK: Thanks, Michel.