Khalil, you start your story discussing a panel that you were on with Derek Black.
Tell us about Derek Black and why he's relevant to where we are in the, I guess, trajectory
of organized racism, I guess, in this country.
Sure.
Well, Derek Black, as a young person, you can imagine that just about 10 years ago we
were celebrating the achievements of the MTV/VH1 social media generation of young people who'd
grown up in a world far more tolerant and diverse than anything their parents or great-grandparents
could claim.
That's unraveled.
One of the things that I think is fascinating about Derek Black is he grew up precisely
over these years in the 1990s and 2000s, the son of one of the most significant white supremacists
and white nationalists in the country named Don Black, who, according to the Southern
Poverty Law Center, runs Stormfront, one of the largest hate sites in the country.
This young man has renounced his father's teachings.
He's a graduate student at the University of Chicago and tells a story that's been widely
reported in "The Washington Post" and elsewhere, that it was going to college in the first
place that exposed him to competing ideas.
Over a few Shabbat dinners with Jewish friends, he came to realize that he'd been taught hate.
He's renounced it.
As a historian of white supremacy in this country, I was fascinated by having a chance
to meet this young man and to hear his personal story and then to learn a few things about
what's been going on over the past 18 months or so.
Okay, he's giving you some insight in terms of what's been happening because he knows
the code.
Is that it?
Well, he grew up in it.
One way to think about this is people like Linda Gordon and many of my college write
about the Ku Klux Klan.
I write about any number of social scientists, some of whom were absolutely white supremacists
by any standard in today's terms.
But as a historian, we don't usually get to meet these people or their relatives.
We rely on a fragmentary documentary record.
But the fact is that the scholarship is very important.
For American history, it's critically important.
We teach this information, to some degree, much more in college than we do in K through
12.
Intrinsically, this young man is very interesting because the worldview from which he hails
not only stretches back to hundreds of years in this country, but also suggests to us what
precisely those changes have been.
These are things that we need to study in the present and we certainly will look back
on the Trump era and study them as historians.
Okay.
There's two things that direct contact with what, theoretically, down the road would be
a historical figure that it offers you in particular as a historian.
One is how this strain of racism, or how racism, presents itself today relative, and how it's
different than, let's say, it was presented before.
Also, I guess, you're seeing the other side of the perspective.
You're studying this racism from almost the receiving end as opposed to the projecting
end.
It's a little bit more timeless, I guess, in terms of what it shows, a certain dynamic.
Just tell us what you learned in that respect, and then we'll talk about today.
I don't know how unique today is, but it is at least a specific story when we talk about
the alt-right and when we talk about how things have been have to be converted into something
more respectable.
But in terms of that dynamic, what did you learn from seeing that racism generated in
past on from the inside?
Well, there's a very common misconception in our collective national memory somewhere
between what we learn in school and what we keep telling ourselves around the kitchen
table.
That is that racism in America was aberrational, that it was the purview of a small group of
people, when it was at its worst they wore Klan hoods and burned crosses, and much of
this horrible activity took place not only a long time ago but took place in the south.
That's actually not true in the limited way in which we like to remember it.
I'll just cite, most recently, Linda Gordon's written a book about the second Klan.
Her basic argument is that the resurgence of a second Klan, to be distinguished from
the one that is born immediately after the Civil War in 1866, the second Klan emerges
as a national movement.
She estimates along with others about four million people.
There are chapters and pockets and political representatives in many, many states in the
country.
Her point in telling this story is that we have to see the Klan as a social movement,
as a movement of ordinary Americans, many of whom were small business owners, many of
whom were middle to upper income.
They were not rank and file poor folks in terms of the heart of the movement in the
way that we like to think they were.
They had chapters, they had north, south, east, and west.
That's really important because it does help to explain a recurring theme of what today
we call populism, which is another way of saying "backlash movements sometimes rooted
in economic anxiety, but oftentimes rooted in demographic change."
That was an era that gave birth to immigration restrictions in 1924.
This early Klan was responding to Catholics and Mexicans, blacks and Jews.
But by and large, they were responding to people who were not white and Protestant.
We ended up closing our borders, the very borders that today are up for debate again
because of a 1965 revision of those 1924 immigration restriction laws.
If we carry that earlier history to the present, one of the mistakes that many Americans make,
again, is retreating to this notion that it's a small group of people who are outliers in
our society, they don't represent American values, and we shouldn't pay much attention
to them.
God forbid we give them any airtime 'cause that will only fuel their nuttiness.
Well, turns out that we keep learning that more and more of these people not only have
much more significant presence in our communities, they are more affluent, more professional.
Derek Black, for example, said that in all the conferences he attended over his 20-something
years as a kid following his father that the people who could travel were the people who
had disposable income, who were the professional mobile classes.
These were not people who were one paycheck away from the unemployment line.
That's just one example like Linda Gordon's findings, that this movement is much more
present in our society than, again, a lot of people would like to think.
As a historian, what I find particularly compelling about this young man's story is that in our
stories, we don't talk so much about the fine line between moderates and conservatives or
racial conservatives and liberals and progressives.
Generally, we assume that racially conservative people track to people who are either self-identified
with, say, the Democratic party or the solid south back in the day before 1968, or the
contemporary modern Republican party since, say, Ronald Reagan.
But it turns out that white nationalists, under the guise of Don Black, his father,
and Richard Spencer and many others are focusing on these conversations with white liberals
who are feeling like the truth of Hispanic immigration is a threat to America's competitiveness
in the world, to its limited social resources.
Lindsey Graham did have a conversation nationally just a few years ago among other Republicans
about whether we should repeal birthright citizenship in the 14th Amendment in this
country.
The basic argument that Derek makes is that a lot of white nationalists are using to organize,
to come out of the shadows, are the same basic debates that we're having in our political
culture about demographic change in this country, about crime and safety, about education and
achievement gaps.
Alright, this is fascinating and this also, I think, it is of particular interest to me,
obviously, because this is where I start to intersect with these people online and on
YouTube.
I start to see them and we talk about alt-right and we talk about alt-lite.
I'd like to talk about that when we return because we see more- Charles Murray has been
on YouTube more, I would say, in the past 18 months than he had been in the media over
the past 10 years.
We need to discuss that.
I am Sam Seder.
This is Ring of Fire Radio.
We'll be back in just a moment.