‘The Klansman’s Son’
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‘The Klansman’s Son’

Child of the white supremacist movement talks about how she left and what she learned

Adrianne Black grew up as a white supremacist and now she can explain that world to us.
Adrianne Black grew up as a white supremacist and now she can explain that world to us.

Adrianne Black grew up as the heir apparent to the white supremacist movement. Her father, Don Black, a onetime Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard, is the founder of the Stormfront, an online group devoted to antisemitism, racism, and hate in general; her mother, Chloe Black, was married to David Duke — the white supremacist and neo-Nazi whose heyday is long past but still pops up occasionally to spout hate — before she married Don, and shares both her husbands’ beliefs. Duke is Ms. Black’s godfather.

Ms. Black will speak, on Zoom, at the Kaplen JCC on the Palisades in Tenafly, on January 23. (See box.)

(Ms. Black perhaps is better known as Derek Black; she transitioned recently, and Derek Black still is listed as the author of her memoir, “The Klansman’s Son: My Journey from White Nationalism to Antiracism,” which came out last year. The author’s name will change in the next edition, Ms. Black said.)

Ms. Black, 35, grew up homeschooled, very smart, and a nimble proponent of her parents’ worldview, which she shared with audiences regularly; she was a precocious child.

She’s a native Floridian, so she chose the state’s New College “for mundane reasons,” she said. The school used to be at least niche famous for the freedom it gave its largely freethinking students to think for themselves, and to structure their own educations in ways that would work best for each one of them. (The school since has changed, as Florida’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, has undertaken as a challenge the reversal of its culture, assumptions, and life.)

But also, “Florida’s instate tuition is quite low, and it’s a small, self-directed school. You could make your own major, study what you wanted.” It was home to “quirky, smart kids, honors students; it made this kind of education accessible to people who weren’t going to go to a northeastern liberal arts college.”

When she was in college, Ms. Black found herself increasingly split. She’d gone there also because she was so secure in her worldview that “I thought that I wanted to listen to the arguments countering me. I wasn’t afraid of having my opinions challenged; if anything, I thought that it would make them stronger. Because I didn’t want to believe in some random fact if it wasn’t true.

“So if there was some specific thing that somebody smarter than me could show me was wrong, I could stop believing in that particular thing. But I didn’t think that my worldview was in danger.”

She was wrong.

She went undiscovered on campus for a while, socializing with people whose views she once found abhorrent, growing less repulsed and then more receptive to those views, while still maintaining an off-campus presence as a white supremacist.

In a way, she was used to that. She grew up in South Florida, which was “one of the most racially diverse parts of America,” she said. “It was a place with the highest per capita Jewish population in the United States.

“My parents went out in the world. They worked with other people. In a way, that reinforced their prejudices, because they had an easy out. If somebody said, ‘You just don’t even know these people you’re talking about,’ they could say, ‘No, no, no. I know them.

“My parents were very polite. They didn’t use racial epithets. They didn’t use curse words. “When I showed up at college, I had this sense that I had always tried to be open to other people. I had the sense that I really didn’t want to be somebody who was afraid of my worldview being challenged. I didn’t want to be somebody who foreclosed the possibility of a friendship with someone because of their group.”

So she maintained a double life. But eventually she was outed. Instead of being shunned, though, some students — many of them Jewish — tried to develop friendships with her. She was invited to Shabbat dinners. Her views were probed, questioned, and disproved, but she was not shouted at.

Eventually, she broke with her family and her childhood and began a new life. But her background has made her possibly uniquely able to decipher what’s going on in the white supremacist world.

Much of it is racism and antisemitism; in fact, antisemitism is basic to that world. It fuels it.

She’s not sanguine about the next four years.

“The world now is more open to the far right, to white nationalism, to racist antisemitic impulses,” she said. “But it’s a movement that’s existed for many decades. It’s not new. It hasn’t been reinvented. It responds to political moments.”

Those ancient hatreds “are common,” she said. “They exist in a more passive, less extreme version in mainstream society, in people who come from the same society as the rest of us. They’re not aliens, coming from somewhere else, trying to proselytize.

“At times when the political world is less friendly to their worldview, they go more internal; they organize, they try to raise membership, they try to think about what they’ll do next. When politics is more open to them — and I don’t think it ever has been more open to them than it is now — they become much more public, they try to march, they try to run for office, they do things that are much more visible.

“So I think we’re definitely going to see them much more in the public eye, and much more willing to seek their goals.”

Over the last decade, and increasingly, the distinction between the white power movement and mainstream politics has been decreasing, Ms. Black said. “No mainstream politician in the past talked about a Jewish conspiracy in the same way that they do now. Now, it’s not dominant, but you can find it. It exists in mainstream politics now. Now, you can see politicians talking about immigration from an explicitly racial perspective.

“The white power movement is fundamentally apocalyptic. It thinks that everything has to go. That everything is going to end in destruction. They really believe that the future involves violence against the government. Against society.

“Six, seven, eight years ago, I would have said that idea was not part of any mainstream political movement, but I can’t say that now.

“There still are firewalls between those ideas and any sort of mainstream group repeating them, but it feels like each of the barriers between them become thinner and thinner every year.”

But she does not despair. “We can counter it on a fundamental level, by just being clear about the world that we want. It’s not like there’s some kind of magic spell saying, like, this is how our country must be.”

Ms. Black takes a great deal of encouragement from her own story.

Part of her family’s beliefs is that everyone necessarily is a stereotypical member of their group, but now she knows that everyone is an individual, capable of surprises.

When she was in college, “I retrofitted the idea that in the large aggregate race and group predict things about people, but on an individual level it does not.”

Since then, she’s come to believe in the importance of individuality and relationships.

“I think that the generalizable aspect of my life, the lesson I feel like I can take from growing up, is that we tend to underestimate exactly how much the community around us, the people around us — not just individuals, but the sort of network of people around us, the ones we care about, the ones we love — can shape our beliefs and shape our identities.”

It’s not that there isn’t real, objective truth in the world — “some things just are more verifiable and true than others,” Ms. Black said — but change doesn’t come through lecturing about it.

No one ever changed a deeply held, emotionally potent belief by listening to a debate about it, she said, so the way to change minds isn’t by pontificating. Instead, it’s through relationships, and gentle discussion. “These kinds of conversations should be more ‘Is there a misunderstanding here? Is there a way that we can get on the same pages?’ instead of starting with ‘I’m gonna debate you right here, right now.’”

In the end, it’s about relationships and trust. Change is most effective when it’s one to one; that seems to be a huge task, given the number of people in the world, but “the entire world is just lots of networks of people talking with each other. We notice the times when it’s us making hard decisions, but it’s really millions and millions of people constantly making these decisions about the people in their lives and about being an individual person to another person.”

She does have another life — she’s writing the dissertation that’s the last step before she gets her Ph.D., in early medieval history from the University of Chicago. She’s examining “proto racial archetypes in early medieval thought,” she said. “They get used in the colonial era to develop what we know as race. But the ways of thinking about human difference, the ways they were thinking about distinctions of behavior, is something that existed before that point.” She’s focusing her research on the part of Western Europe that shifted between France and Germany.

But the world of fighting racism, antisemitism, and anti-immigrant bias matters too, she said. We can’t afford to give up that fight. Adrianne Black certainly won’t.


Who: Adrianne Black

What: Will talk about her book, “The Klansman’s Son: My Journey from White Nationalism to Antiracism,” with Sue Gelsey, the JCC’s chief engagement officer. Ms. Gelsey also is the founder and director of Community Calls, “a multi-faith and multi-cultural coalition with over 25 organizational partners focused on strengthening relationships, disrupting tensions, and advancing change in our community,” according to the JCC’s website.

When: On Thursday, January 23, at 11 a.m.

Where: It’s an online session of the Kaplen JCC on the Palisades’ JCCU.

How much: JCC members pay $12; everyone else pays $15.

To register: Go to www.jccotp.org/series/jccu, or go to the JCC’s website, jccotp.org, click first on “adults” in the menu at the top of the homepage, then click on “lectures and learning,” and then click on JCCU Winter Term. From that page, no matter how you got there, click on “register now.”

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