Growing Up Racist: How Young White Supremacists Are Taught to Hate (2024)

My decade of political activism on behalf of White nationalism began in October 1999, when I was ten. I gave my first public interview to the salacious daytime talk show The Jenny Jones Show. It was a trip of firsts: one of the first times I left my home state of Florida; my first trip to Chicago; and my first time in the North at all. It was the first time I rode in a limo, when they picked us up and dropped us off at our hotel.

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At that hotel, on the morning before we headed to the studio for filming, I got to order my first pay-per-view movie (the remake of The Mummy with Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weisz). At the studio, it was my first experience in a greenroom. It was my first time in the public eye, my first time out front, and my first time claiming publicly my intention to lead White nationalism into its next generation.

The experience was genuinely fun. It was also terrifying, and it taught me terrible lessons.

The Jenny Jones Show was a nationally syndicated daytime talk show filmed in the same studios in the NBC Tower in Chicago as its rival The Jerry Springer Show. Jenny and Jerry—and Geraldo and Maury and others like them—often brought on unsophisticated guests to face a shouting and brawling live audience, to great commercial success; The Jerry Springer Show, by far the leader of the genre, ended that season with ratings just behind Oprah.

The episode they invited me and my dad for was titled “Hateful Websites on the Internet” and ran on October 4, 1999. Several years before, David Duke, my dad’s oldest friend, had negotiated to appear on The Jerry Springer Show in a one-on-one interview, away from the jeering audience. Thanks to that negotiation, David was able to speak to Springer’s huge viewership without having to face the demeaning taunts of the studio audience. For my first interview, my dad negotiated something similar, allowing me to give a one-on-one interview offstage. In addition, the producers also offered to pay for a trip to DisneyQuest, the virtual reality amusem*nt park that had recently opened downtown.

My dad asked me over and over, even up to the day of filming, if I was sure I wanted to give the interview. I felt listened to and respected, and I felt like I was fully consenting to my participation. I believed in the cause, as much as a curious child can believe in any ideology, and I was excited to begin advancing it myself. A month earlier, I had created a kids’ page on Stormfront, the website my dad had founded. I had already seen reporters coming to the house to interview my dad, and I’d become familiar with the hostile way they wrote about us as “hateful.”

When we arrived at the set, my dad went out with the other guests, including other White power leaders and two daughters of Fred Phelps, the founder of the Westboro Baptist Church, a group known for picketing the funerals of soldiers and queer people. The studio was built in the middle of a large open room, so the crew, the guests who hadn’t gone on yet, the kids of the Westboro family, and I could stay in the greenroom or walk all around the set. I watched the lighting crew and cinematographers, while I heard the echoes of the angry crowd through the thin prop walls. The crew were friendly and asked me if I needed anything while I hung out with them behind the scenes. I refused the makeup artist’s offers several times, because I didn’t think makeup was for boys. I remember her explaining that it wouldn’t be visible, and was only meant to keep the glare of the stage lights from shining off my face. I held firm, committed to upholding my sense of gender norms, and she relented.

When the time for my interview came, the crew turned on fog machines that produced a dramatic cloud around the stool the producers led me to. I was near the corner of the stage, behind two panels they slid open to reveal me there. Jenny Jones implied my separate interview was a last-minute decision: “He didn’t want to come on the show, and we’ll see, uh, he’s backstage, he is ten years old, his name is Derek. You’ve been listening to us back there, Derek? Okay, you—you want to go out there in the audience? Sit next to your dad? You’re welcome to.”

Watching the interview now is an almost unbearably mortifying experience. It feels like I am watching it simultaneously through my eyes both then and now, from two different vantages and two different worlds. I tried to present my family’s cause with as much care and responsibility as I could muster. I had told the pre-show B-roll interviewers the night before, “I designed the website for White children. Most people think that my father has taught me to hate other races. He’s just taught me to be proud of my heritage and to be proud of my race. Since I designed my website, I’ve had virtually no problems except for—except for hateful and vile emails.” Jenny asked me how I decided to create the kids’ page of my dad’s website, and I recounted, “There was a newspaper article with another racist kids’ page on—that I saw in the newspaper, and I wanted—wanted to make another one to have other—to have kids have another way of being able to see ideas and other opinions.”

I knew immediately I had messed up by using the word “racist.” My family was strict about messaging, and nothing was more fundamental than their position that “racist” was a word only our enemies used to describe us. Jenny asked me what ideas and opinions I was hoping to send, and I told her, “I’m sending a message to be proud of your her—”—momentarily forgetting the word “heritage”—“history and your ancestry, just to be proud of all the things that your ancestors have done, because the news media and schools never say any of it.”

Finally, Jenny asked me again if I wanted to go out in front of the live audience, and I shook my head with a look of fear. “No,” I responded, “I’ve been hearing all the audience. They boo—they boo when you come on, they boo when you’re talking.” She responded, “You understand why, though?” and I responded, “Yes.” I knew immediately I’d made another messaging mistake. She got up. “I’m going to go back and talk to your dad,” she said, and I tried to add quickly, before she was gone and I lost my chance, “They don’t understand us.”

Looking back now, it’s overwhelming to watch the moment I first plunged into public activism for White nationalism, on behalf of my family and the community that raised me. I remember feeling mature and capable. I had answered affirmatively every time my dad checked in along the way, making sure I wanted to join him on this show. All the years that have cascaded down since then were on display in that moment. Even all this time later, I can’t help being shocked to hear myself slip up and use the forbidden word “racist” in my first-ever interview. When my family gathered back home in Florida to watch the broadcast, they were disappointed to hear it and gave me feedback to remember to be careful not to use the enemy’s wording, but instead to use the word “racialist” to describe our “pro-White” movement. The next decade trained me in how to stay on message. There’s a part of me that still leaps to the fore unbidden when I watch it, wanting to coach that kid through their first interview. Or to tell them not to do it at all.

Once I overcome the twinge from watching my younger self spout talking points of a movement I’ve now spent nearly as much time opposing as I had supporting it, my next feeling is empathy. It’s hard to listen to my younger self call out, “They don’t understand us,” to the back of Jenny Jones as she walked away. I loved my family. I wanted to stand up for them, and that day I felt like I had.

After filming wrapped, my dad came backstage, and we met again in the greenroom. We barely had time to talk about our two interviews because we needed to be ushered out of the studio by security. In the limo, he said repeatedly that he never wanted to do a daytime talk show like this again, and that he couldn’t believe they had put him on the same show as the Westboro Baptist Church. They had risen to national prominence for their hom*ophobic protests of the funeral of Matthew Shepard, a gay college student in Wyoming who had been brutally tortured and murdered the year before.

I remember feeling relieved that we could draw a line between our community and other communities people collectively called “hate.” I appreciated how he felt so totally unconnected to them. In part that was because of their religious conviction, which he didn’t share, and their vitriol toward queer people, which he just didn’t think was a pressing social issue. That’s not to say he privately respected or empathized with gay people any more than he did Black people or Jews. Instead, he was committed to seeing himself as maintaining the higher ground, not seeing himself as cruel, gratuitous, ignorant, or—as the show was trying to paint us by including us in the larger group—hateful. He didn’t agree with hom*ophobic slurs, in the same way that he opposed his own people using racial slurs. In an interview nearly fifteen years earlier, he had once complained about “drunk people” making it into KKK rallies where he was speaking and shouting the n-word. He wouldn’t go out of his way to attack or condemn or verbally harass anyone, and he’d say that was wrong, but he’d also say it wasn’t his responsibility to defend or protect anyone but his “own” people.

The question of how expansive the circle of my “own” people could be stuck with me, but I rarely voiced it. I didn’t like excluding people from my life before I knew them. Thinking about that limo ride, talking with him about our interviews and what we were accomplishing, it’s ironic to think that I’ve now given antiracist talks on polarization right alongside kids from Westboro who were backstage with me that day. It turned out the distinction between us wasn’t absolved by our rhetoric.

It took years before i felt comfortable revisiting that experience and that first trip to Chicago. After I condemned White nationalism in 2013 at the end of my college years, I moved to the city in my mid-twenties to attend graduate school for a history PhD at the University of Chicago. For the first few years there, I didn’t look up where my dad and I had gone on that first trip. It was a part of my life that I was still trying to leave behind.

When I finally did look up where we’d been, I had lived in Chicago for several years already. I had built memories with friends throughout the city, and it was odd to learn that the NBC Tower on the riverfront in downtown had loomed over me every time we’d gone downtown to walk the Magnificent Mile, Chicago’s fancy shopping strip. It was a block from the theater where we’d seen movies that the small cinema in Hyde Park wasn’t playing. The virtual reality theme park DisneyQuest had been short-lived—Disney closed it less than two years after we visited—but it was in a building near a couple coffee shops where I wrote several of my grad school papers.

When I look at these early moments, it makes me want to break through the glass and tell my dad to stop this immediately. No matter how many times he asked if I was confident that I wanted to do the show, and no matter how many times I told him that I did, and meant it, I can’t imagine how he couldn’t realize just how little I knew what it meant to give up my privacy and to make a name for myself in our cause. My path wasn’t set in stone then, or for many of the years that came after, but it felt like it was from the moment Jenny Jones walked up to my interview chair.

Appearing on that show was the beginning of a life that increasingly boxed me in over the next decade. As I became more entrenched in the White nationalist movement, I gained more power to cause more harm to people and society in ways I came to deeply regret. Each additional interview, each choice to go deeper and become a more involved leader of the movement that my parents had helped create, constricted the possibilities I saw for myself. A decade later, when I arrived at college, I had become an internationally recognized leader of the White nationalist movement. I had won local public office and had given interviews to newspapers and television shows around the world. I had created and run a White nationalist radio broadcast for years. I had become so confident in my beliefs in our family’s ideology and movement that I knew my future was to help lead it. I couldn’t yet imagine any other path.

Researching this book, I set out to find the dates and milestones of my life and of the generations of White nationalists that came before me to figure out how we got here, and what takeaways there might be to help the fight for antiracism. I expected to find, and indeed found, the glossy public face of a movement I had grown up in, but I also found a personal record in the archives that was more revealing than I expected. In college, I learned from history professors to read ancient and medieval letters with caution because the writers, the recipients, and broader society understood that letters would be saved and read by the public—unlike modern correspondence, which carries some assumption of privacy and intimacy. Given my life experience, that assumption of privacy seemed absurd. One of the earliest and most consistent pieces of advice that my dad ever gave me was, “Never say anything that you wouldn’t be willing to see published in the New York Times the next day.”

I always knew my interviews would be public, of course, but part of having a public life also meant remembering that even “private” correspondence might one day be published widely. Letters, texts, emails, and private conversations were still no place to let down our guard. We all became our message.

Several years ago, I worked at the Facebook headquarters in Menlo Park, California, focusing on helping people build relationships and community across identity divides. One day, while sitting around a table, a coworker who became a friend said she thought it was funny that I mentioned guarding my privacy so often while I also participated in so much publicity both before and after leaving White nationalism. I understood the irony, but I responded that it was pockets of privacy—no matter how fleeting or how briefly that I believed they’d last—that allowed me to lower my mental guard to hear things that challenged my core beliefs.

My now wife, Allison, factored high in those moments. She was the person on the other side in many of those pockets of privacy and, therefore, trust. When I told her I thought writing a book would be a good way to get my thoughts in order, she reminded me that privately journaling was always an available option for me. It reminded me of my friend at Facebook, perplexed about how I parsed my privacy with my public speaking and appearances. I hope this book bridges the gap between the veil of a “public profile” that makes me the medium of my message, with the intimacy that’s possible in a personal relationship. By going back through my experiences of community, legacy, and family, I hope to show the ways that these things have not only shaped me, but also drive change from the largest social movements to the smallest individual relationships. I’m not telling their stories to justify them or seek redemption. While I believe it is essential to understand the White nationalist movement to counter its continued influence on our society, I am motivated to tell this story by more personal reasons as well. I am telling it because it is my story, as much as I have tried to run away from it, and I can’t share what I’ve learned without sharing the context in which I learned it and how it felt.

When I started writing this book, I thought that my dad’s maxim would mean that I wouldn’t have records of my private thoughts. As I read through the archives, I realized what he had actually shown me was how to speak our thoughts and feelings where no one would recognize how personal they were, to translate them into forms that could and did appear on the cover of the New York Times. Our diaries were easy to find in databases of old newspapers, or in my scared face on The Jenny Jones Show. Some personal records could fade or be lost, but ours were reprinted, archived meticulously, and immortalized. My dad’s records go back to the 1960s, when he joined a movement that was still nascent. His history and choices shaped mine, setting a course for my life that I’m still working to correct. This book is a part of that.

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Excerpted from The Klansman’s Son: My Journey from White Nationalism to Antiracism by R. Derek Black. Copyright © 2024. Available from Abrams Books.