White Nationalism’s Most Famous Young Escapee Has A Warning (2024)

When R. Derek Black was a child, they were considered the heir to the white nationalist movement in America. Their father, Don, a former Grand Wizard in the Ku Klux Klan, had created Stormfront, the legacy white supremacist website; Derek ran Stormfront’s corollary site for children, co-hosted a white nationalist radio show with their father, spoke at white nationalist conferences, and successfully won a Republican committee seat in Palm Beach County, Florida. Derek’s mother had been married to David Duke; Duke was Derek’s godfather.

But Derek’s life changed when they enrolled in New College of Florida. The Sarasota school is now known for its 2023 conservative political takeover by Christopher Rufo—a takeover Black lamented in a previous interview with Slate. But for most of its history, New College was a progressive haven. Black, while attending, lived a double life until they were outed on a studentwide email thread; what followed was a remarkable and successful student-led effort to convert Black, as documented in the 2018 book Rising Out of Hatred by the journalist Eli Saslow. In 2013, Black publicly renounced their former ideology and now speaks out publicly against it, while also pursuing a doctoral degree at the University of Chicago researching proto-racism in early medieval intellectual history.

This singular life story is now the subject of Black’s memoir. The Klansman’s Son: My Journey From White Nationalism to Antiracism, which covers their childhood in the movement, their ideological transformation, the fallout, and their political awakening with the rise of Donald Trump, came out on Tuesday. Slate spoke with Black, who is transgender and now uses they/she pronouns, about their ideological journey, how they are thinking about student-led activism, the recent protest movement—and how they understand this moment in American politics, when the war in Gaza has realigned people on the left and the right. This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Slate: How did you decide to write this book now, and why?

R. Derek Black: I thought about it for the first time shortly after the Trump election [in 2016]. About three years before that, I had written this public statement condemning my family, and I genuinely thought that would be the last time that I spoke publicly about anything. I was very happy that I had been able to find some kind of niche in academia in medieval history. And after wrestling with how much harm I had caused, I didn’t even understand how it could be an ethical choice to speak out publicly. But watching the Trump campaign, it started feeling sort of cowardly to not be speaking out, as opposed to a moral choice.

People asked me to write a book, and I chose not to. It didn’t feel right—I didn’t have enough context or distance from my family or the movement they built. And I didn’t understand how to think about the Trump movement in relation to white nationalism.

But after Biden won, I decided that this was the time. I had a strong sense that the far-right movement would likely surge, because that’s just historically how that works. And that’s what I would have been doing, had I been in the midst of it still; it just would have made sense as a strategy. With Jan. 6, once again, I had people interested in [a book]. Since January of 2021, I’ve been working on it.

How is your book different from the 2018 story of your conversion that’s told in Eli Saslow’s Rising Out of Hatred?

When I first started writing this one, I wrote it as 13 essays about how people change their minds. My big understanding of my life is that our beliefs that are really core to us are the same thing as the community of people we care about. If we want to try to persuade somebody, the question is, then, who is the community of people they care about? How do they see themselves as being loyal and beholden to those people? Somebody changing their mind is changing the network of people that they feel responsible for.

I was trying to describe what it felt like to come into a community and have to change to maintain my sense of being a moral person in it. I’m trying to make an argument that my experience was fundamentally one of being grounded in different communities.

You come from a background that is both racist and deeply antisemitic. Do you have any insight into how that community is feeling about this moment where some on the right are accusing the anti-Zionist left of being antisemitic?

I remember, shortly after Oct. 7, I got texts from some of my siblings. They said, I bet now even your lefty friends are on our side. And what they meant by that was anti-Israel.

I have built these leftist circles who are adamantly protesting the Israeli government and coming up with this deep anti-colonialist discourse. And I feel deeply uneasy, because a large portion of my social circle is Jewish, and I’m seeing this kind of reaction that even in the best of times really does not seem to take seriously the discrimination and fear that Jewish people in America feel a lot of the time. I think there’s this idea among non-Jewish people on the left that I get incredibly frustrated with, that antisemitism is not an issue they need to be heavily worried about. They seem to take for granted that at least white-passing Jewish people aren’t facing fear or discrimination.

The way that I grew up makes it kind of impossible for me to think that antisemitism is not powerful, not just because my family was running an antisemitic movement, but because they were organizing and seeking out membership, and it was very easy. There was a wealth of people with much more low-key antisemitic views who were always ready to become a part of this movement. Antisemitism was the thread that really held [white nationalism] together as an ideology. Global racism and global segregation was, theoretically, the goal of white nationalism, but the more I look back on it, the more I recognize that the organizing principles that ties it together is antisemitism. And so it just feels incredibly naïve to dismiss how powerful antisemitism is in the modern world.

And I really get upset and angry because [organizers] are not taking into account antisemitic people on the far right coming in and infiltrating. I think that really advantages the antisemitic movement in the United States. Which, to be clear, is broad. If anyone is in a position where they’re organizing against the attack on Gaza, not giving a home to the antisemitic movement has to be just a fundamental priority of what you’re organizing.

I want to emphasize that I don’t see the protests as fundamentally antisemitic. But I am always very alarmed about the fact that antisemitism can easily attach itself to anything criticizing Israel.

On the other hand, there has been Islamophobia and at least one incident of overt anti-Black racism from counterprotesters. This is such a messy conflict, because you also have incidents where pro-Israel counterprotesters ally themselves with traditional fraternities, which have sometimes been overtly racist. It seems to me like this whole situation would delight white supremacists.

The power of the white nationalist movement is not that they have a ton of numbers. The reason they’ve been a powerful force in the United States and other countries since the 1950s as an organized movement is they tap into messages that exist in more latent ways in the rest of society. And they get involved in other, larger protest movements and are able to magnify their own message.

There is racism and antisemitism baked into so much of society that it appears even in the space where people are doing a liberatory protest. That is a perfect fertile ground; that’s exactly what white nationalists look for. And this is something that they’re really reveling in, the idea that criticism of Israel is so pervasive that they can take that and turn it into broader antisemitism.

Speaking of antisemitism being baked into society: Did you happen to see Marjorie Taylor Greene explained her vote against the “Antisemitism Awareness Act” by arguing it “could convict Christians of antisemitism” for believing Jews killed Jesus? This seems to be in step with the recent rhetorical movement on the far right to position antisemitism as being a basic element of Christianity.

I hadn’t heard the Marjorie Taylor Greene comment, but it feels like exactly the kind of thing that white nationalists want to emphasize: this sort of natural idea of antisemitism as being a part of Christianity. People ask a lot if white nationalists are Christians, and I want to emphasize that there are not a huge number of normal Christian people in white nationalism. It’s much more common for people to either be atheist, or be some sort of radical sect of Christianity, or to be some sort of religion they’ve created for themselves. A big part of that is because of how fundamental antisemitism is to them and how inherently morally complicated it is to be very antisemitic via traditional Christianity. On its face, Christianity is a problematic religion to be an antisemite within. It’s so fundamentally beholden to the Jewish tradition.

You use they/she pronouns. Can you share how your view of gender has evolved?

The only thing I think I regret about the book was around gender issues. It’s not a gender book, but I do feel bad there’s just a few little crumbs, because it’s become such a huge part of my life over the last few years. So I want to be more outspoken about it now. I do identify as trans. If anybody reads the book, know that you’re reading about the experience of somebody who along the way had complicated views of their own gender and fear of being outed.

Over the years, I just sort of forgot the difference between wanting something and not being able to do it. If I can’t do this, if it’s not safe to do it, then I must not want it. And in my late 20s and 30s, I reassessed and said, Well, maybe I can want something and assess whether it’s safe to do it. Understanding that has been a more recent part of my life.

Your story is a demonstration of how anyone can change. But do you think having your own struggles with gender identity made it so you could more easily exercise empathy than other white nationalists? Do you think your gender played a role?

I feel confident in saying that it is definitely not the explanation, because it was so hard to come to a place where I disagreed strongly and firmly and clearly with my family’s racism and antisemitism. And when I condemned it, there was no part of me that felt like I could come out with gender stuff, even though I had a lot of gender thoughts at that time. I didn’t feel like it was something that felt possible in any way, so it wasn’t something that was driving me.

But even if I didn’t think that I had any desire to ever live authentically, I still had the sense that people have things about themselves they can’t change, and that to discriminate against them or to marginalize them is a very awful thing to do. … Maybe if you never have that feeling, it would become a lot harder to be open to individuals in the ways that ultimately undid my worldview.

To go back to the protests, gender seems to be playing a role in the politics of the backlash. Far-right commentators have noted how they seem to be led by women, and even made a point of arguing that the female protesters are ugly. Is that something you were familiar with in white nationalist politics?

I’m very familiar with that. Even when I was a kid, I remember arguing with white nationalists about this, like, just lay off. People have different aesthetic goals. White nationalists are not always conservative. They’re open to expansive social programs; they kind of want Medicare for all, but only for white people. But one thing that is very conservative is the idea that there are prescribed beauty and presentation roles. There are supposed to be ways that we all agree to be in the world, and if you break from them, you’re breaking the social contract. That kept me closeted, the idea that it doesn’t matter how you feel inside, what is important is we all are given these social prescriptions, and we all agree that to live in a society and feel safe and have enough resources and get along with each other, we all have to follow these rules about how we’re supposed to dress and what we’re supposed to be.

How seriously do you think people should be taking the white nationalist movement at this particular moment?

I think people should be taking it very, very seriously. And I know that that can sometimes feel a little alarmist, but there is always a potential for direct violence. And I don’t think there have been so many opportunities [for the movement] any time before in my lifetime. Most of my life, the American right has had lots of bulwarks against that kind of racism and antisemitism—and militant, anti-democratic strains. White nationalists want to overthrow this country and install some kind of new racial nationalist regime; I can’t think of any point in my lifetime when it felt like there were more figures within the mainstream Republican Party who were not willing to condemn that.

The thing that I’m most worried about, actually, is that there’s nothing really to stop us from having far-right politicians with a following, who also have private mercenary armies. That’s something that I don’t see Donald Trump doing, but I remember in 2020, I was living in D.C., and I was protesting in front of the White House most days. And he had called up all these security people from different divisions, the Bureau of Prisons and ICE and Border Patrol. In that chaotic moment, they didn’t have identification on them, they weren’t wearing uniforms, a lot of them were carrying weapons and standing around the White House, and they would spit on the ground and show how much distaste they had for us protesters. [Trump] tear-gassed the protesters so that he could go stand in front of the church; helicopters would come really low and sort of buzz the crowd. The fact that while he was willing to use that kind of force against people—It was then that it occurred to me that white nationalists have this vision of 1930s-style fascist politics with politicians with mercenaries that go and intimidate their enemies and people at the ballot boxes. And we’ve seen that a little bit, and there’s a real danger of it happening again in 2024. But there’s even more danger of it over time becoming a staple part of our country, where far-right politics embraces intimidation and violence and personal retribution. And I just don’t think I’ve seen any part of my lifetime where the United States felt more susceptible to that than now.