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The Klansman's Son

My Journey from White Nationalism to Antiracism: A Memoir

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1 of 1 copy available
1 of 1 copy available
From the former heir-apparent to white nationalism, The Klansman's Son is an astonishing memoir of a childhood built on fear, of breaking from a community of hate.

When coded language and creeping authoritarianism spread the ideas of white nationalists, this is an essential book with a powerful voice.
Derek Black was raised to take over the white nationalist movement in the United States. Their father, Don Black, was a former Grand Wizard in the Ku Klux Klan and started Stormfront, the internet's first white supremacist website—Derek built the kids' page. David Duke, was also their close family friend and mentor. Racist hatred, though often wrapped up in respectability, was all Derek knew.
Then, while in college in 2013, Derek publicly renounced white nationalism and apologized for their actions and the suffering that they had caused. The majority of their family stopped speaking to them, and they disappeared into academia, convinced that they had done so much harm that there was no place for them in public life.
But in 2016, as they watched the rise of Donald Trump, they immediately recognized what they were hearing—the spread and mainstreaming of the hate they had helped cultivate—and they knew that they couldn't stay silent.
This is a thoughtful, insightful, and moving account of a singular life, with important lessons for our troubled times. Derek can trace a uniquely insider account of the rise of white nationalism, and how a child indoctrinated with hate can become an anti-racist adult. Few understand the ideology, motivations, or tactics of the white nationalist movement like Derek, and few have ever made so profound a change.
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    • Kirkus

      March 15, 2024
      A redemption story of rising from the mire of white nationalism. A native of Florida, Black grew up in a household headed by the founder of Stormfront, an online meeting place of Nazis, the KKK, and other exponents of white nationalism. The elder Black was a man of some nuance: He rejected the term white supremacy, in the apparent belief, according to his son, that the desired establishment of a whites-only nation "removes any possibility of White dominance of other races." A close confidant of David Duke, he was also "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." The numbers in his day may have been small, but the younger Black warns that today "white supremacy is everywhere, and has to some extent touched every household with its insidious implication that White people have somehow earned their spot at the top of the social pecking order. It is the social system that leads to the manifold ways that our society denies rights and resources to people who aren't White." It didn't help that when Trump became president, the supremacists and nationalists came out of the woodwork in droves, pushing the idea that immigrants were part of a concerted move to "replace" white people in a form of "genocide." The author's process of severing their white nationalist ties was slow, aided by their encounters at the New College in Sarasota, a haven of progressivism--now under assault by Florida's governor--where they made friends with Jewish, Black, Latine, and Asian students. Ultimately, they were able to break away from their father's bigotry--and in ways that will surprise some readers. Of interest to students of cults, to say nothing of contemporary politics.

      COPYRIGHT(2024) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

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  • English

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