Derek Black | |
---|---|
Born | 1989 (age 34–35) |
Alma mater | New College of Florida |
Relatives | Don Black (father) |
Derek Black is an American former white supremacist and memoirist. They [lower-alpha 1] are the child of Don Black, founder of the Stormfront online community, and godchild of former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard David Duke. Derek Black publicly renounced white nationalism and chronicled their personal journey away from their family's beliefs. [2]
Derek Black was born in 1989 and grew up in West Palm Beach, Florida. They attended public school until third grade, when their parents took them out of school because their black teacher said the word "ain't". [3] They were homeschooled and their education was centered on their family's beliefs. [4] Homeschooling gave Derek and their father the chance to become closer. Don Black was able to take Derek with him to conferences, getting them more involved with their family beliefs.[ citation needed ]
At 10 years old, Derek Black began learning web coding, which later helped them create a page on the Stormfront site for children with similar ideas to theirs. [5] They started a dedicated Lord of the Rings section on the site. [6] They would receive critical emails and death threats, [7] but their father would tell them not to look at the messages, and Derek has said that they were not bothered by what critics were sending them. [3] From 2010 to 2013, they and their father hosted a radio show, the Don and Derek Black show, on Florida-based radio station WPBR/1340 AM, a white nationalist radio show covering national and local news.
After finishing high school, they enrolled in a community college and decided to run for a seat on the Republican executive committee. At 19 years old, they won the seat – one of 111 seats – with about 60 percent of the vote. [7] The committee refused to seat them because they failed to take their oath.[ citation needed ]
They later decided that they had an interest in studying medieval European history, so in 2010, they went to the New College of Florida in Sarasota. The college was about a four-hour drive across the state and it was Derek's first time away from their home. They say of their first semesters: "I'd get up in the morning, and call into my dad's radio show ... and talk about the news ... and then go to class and hang out with people who were often strong social justice advocates, and trying to live both of those lives was terrifying because I knew that one day somebody was going to type my name into Google." [7]
Until leaving home, Derek Black's worldview had developed within the insular world of white nationalism where there was never doubt about what whiteness meant in the U.S. [3] Derek grew up strongly believing – and promoting –the idea that America was a place reserved for white Europeans and sooner or later everybody else would have to leave. As a white nationalist, Derek did not believe that the white race was above all others but instead thought that the white race should not be surrounded by others.[ citation needed ] They were known for their suspicion of other races, the U.S. government, tap water, and pop culture. At age 10, they stated: "it is a shame how many White minds are wasted in that system". [3] They told peers at New College that they were pro-choice on abortion, against the death penalty, and did not support the KKK or Nazism or white supremacy. [3] Instead, Derek emphasized that there was a difference between white nationalism and white supremacy, saying their only concern was with "massive immigration and forced integration" and how it would lead to white genocide. [3] They said they respected rights of all races but felt that they would be better off in their own homelands, not living together.
Once their beliefs – and ongoing participation in promoting them – became public knowledge at college, they were ostracized by most of the community. [7] In May 2013, Derek Black started to befriend several Jewish people on campus, and gradually realized that their own beliefs were wrong after attending multiple Friday night dinners with Jewish friends. [8]
They recalled of these dinners:
I would say, "This is what I believe about I.Q. differences, I have 12 different studies that have been published over the years, here’s the journal that's put this stuff together, I believe that this is true, that race predicts I.Q. and that there were I.Q. differences in races." And they would come back with 150 more recent, more well researched studies and explain to me how statistics works and we would go back and forth until I would come to the end of that argument and I'd say, Yes that makes sense, that does not hold together and I'll remove that from my ideological toolbox but everything else is still there. And we did that over a year or two on one thing after another until I got to a point where I didn’t believe it anymore. [7]
In 2013, Derek wrote a public statement to the Southern Poverty Law Center, publicly renouncing their views. In a 2017 interview, they said: "I wanted them to know that I understood what we believed, and I was systematically disbelieving each point." [7] Derek was very hesitant to "drive a wedge" in the relationship between themself and their family, especially their father.
When Don Black learned of Derek's renunciation of his beliefs, he began to distance himself from Derek, not being sure whether to defend them or to shun them completely. Derek tried to convince their father to re-examine his beliefs, but failed. [3]
In May 2024, Derek released a memoir titled The Klansman's Son: My Journey from White Nationalism to Antiracism. In the book, Derek came out as transgender, using they/them and she/her pronouns. [1]
Derek Black's mother, Chloe Black, is an executive assistant for the founder of the Florida Crystals company and owns a real estate business in Latin American countries. [9] She has also served as spokeswoman for a charter school, Glades Academy in Pahokee, Florida, financed by Florida Crystals with the aim of lifting minority children out of poverty. [10] Before her marriage to Don Black, she was married to David Duke. [11]
Derek Black's father, Don Black, who founded the website Stormfront, remains a white supremacist. [5] He was also a Grand Wizard in the Ku Klux Klan, and a member of the American Nazi Party in the 1970s (for a time, the ANP was known as the National Socialist White Peoples' Party). In 1981, he was convicted of attempting an overthrow of the government of the island country of Dominica using firearms and served three years in jail, from 1981 to 1984.
White supremacy is the belief that white people are superior to those of other races and thus should dominate them. The belief favors the maintenance and defense of any power and privilege held by white people. White supremacy has roots in the now-discredited doctrine of scientific racism and was a key justification for European colonialism.
Black supremacy or black supremacism is a racial supremacist belief which maintains that black people are inherently superior to people of other races.
White nationalism is a type of racial nationalism or pan-nationalism which espouses the belief that white people are a race and seeks to develop and maintain a white racial and national identity. Many of its proponents identify with the concept of a white ethnostate.
White pride and white power are expressions primarily used by white separatist, white nationalist, fascist, neo-Nazi, and white supremacist organizations in order to signal racist or racialist viewpoints. It is also a slogan used by the prominent post-Ku Klux Klan group Stormfront and a term used to make racist/racialist viewpoints more palatable to the general public who may associate historical abuses with the terms white nationalist, neo-Nazi, and white supremacist.
Black separatism is a separatist political movement that seeks separate economic and cultural development for those of African descent in societies, particularly in the United States. Black separatism stems from the idea of racial solidarity, and it also implies that black people should organize themselves on the basis of their common skin color, their race, culture, and African heritage. There were a total of 255 black separatist groups recorded in the United States as of 2019.
Stephen Donald Black is an American white supremacist. He is the founder and webmaster of the neo-Nazi, Holocaust denial, and homophobic website Stormfront. He was a Grand Wizard in the Ku Klux Klan and a member of the American Nazi Party in the 1970s, though at the time he was a member it was known as the "National Socialist White Peoples' Party". He was convicted in 1981 of attempting an armed overthrow of the government in the island of Dominica in violation of the U.S. Neutrality Act.
American Renaissance is a white supremacist website and former monthly magazine publication founded and edited by Jared Taylor. It is published by the New Century Foundation.
Samuel Jared Taylor is an American white supremacist and editor of American Renaissance, an online magazine espousing such opinions, which was founded by Taylor in 1990.
The National Association for the Advancement of White People (NAAWP) is a white supremacist organization established in 1979 by former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard David Duke, deriving its name from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. It is considered a racist hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Jamie Kelso is an American white supremacist and former Church of Scientology member of the Sea Org. He hosts [has hosted] daily web radio programs, including The Jamie Kelso Show on the Voice of Reason Broadcast Network, and is a senior moderator of the white supremacist Stormfront website, where he uses the name Charles A. Lindberg. Kelso became a moderator at Stormfront in 2002 and was instrumental in its rapid growth, partially by encouraging senior figures in the white supremacist movement to post.
Stormfront is a neo-Nazi Internet forum, and the Web's first major racial hate site. The site is focused on propagating white nationalism, Nazism, antisemitism and Islamophobia, as well as antifeminism, homophobia, transphobia, Holocaust denial, and white supremacy.
Kinism is the belief that the divinely ordained social order is tribal and familial as opposed to imperial and propositional. The term is often used to refer to a "movement of anti-immigrant, 'Southern heritage' separatists who splintered off from Christian Reconstructionism to advocate that God's intended order is 'loving one's own kind' by separating people along 'tribal and ethnic' lines to live in large, extended-family groups."
Richard Bertrand Spencer is an American political commentator mostly known for his neo-Nazi, antisemitic and white supremacist views. Spencer claimed to have coined the term "alt-right" and was the most prominent advocate of the alt-right movement from its earliest days. He advocates for the reconstitution of the European Union into a white racial empire, which he believes will replace the diverse European ethnic identities with one homogeneous "White identity".
The white genocide, white extinction, or white replacement conspiracy theory is a white nationalist conspiracy theory that claims there is a deliberate plot to cause the extinction of white people through forced assimilation, mass immigration, and/or violent genocide. It purports that this goal is advanced through the promotion of miscegenation, interracial marriage, mass non-white immigration, racial integration, low fertility rates, abortion, pornography, LGBT identities, governmental land-confiscation from whites, organised violence, and eliminationism in majority white countries. Under some theories, Black people, Hispanics, and Muslims are blamed for the secret plot, but usually as more fertile immigrants, invaders, or violent aggressors, rather than as the masterminds. A related, but distinct, conspiracy theory is the Great Replacement theory.
The alt-right is a far-right, white nationalist movement. A largely online phenomenon, the alt-right originated in the United States during the late 2000s before increasing in popularity and establishing a presence in other countries during the mid-2010s, and has been declining since 2017. The term is ill-defined and has been used in different ways by academics, journalists, media commentators, and alt-right members themselves.
In white supremacist circles, a ghost skin is a white supremacist who refrains from openly displaying their racist beliefs for the purpose of blending into wider society and surreptitiously furthering their agenda. The term has been used in particular to refer to the entryism of racist activists in law enforcement.
A White ethnostate is a proposed type of state in which residence or citizenship would be limited to Whites, and non-Whites and any other groups not seen as White would be excluded from citizenship. Native populations would also be excluded from citizenship, such as the indigenous peoples of the United States.
Lana Jennifer Lokteff is an American far-right, antisemitic conspiracy theorist and white supremacist, who is part of the alt-right movement. She became a prominent YouTube personality before being banned. She is the host of Radio 3Fourteen.
Jack Donovan is an American far-right writer and activist. A self-described masculinist, Donovan was an influential figure in the alt-right until he disavowed the movement in 2017. He has at various times advocated male supremacy, white nationalism, fascism, and the political disenfranchisement of women. He led a chapter of the Wolves of Vinland, a Norse neopagan organization and SPLC-designated hate group, from 2014 to 2018.
Black, who uses they/them and she/her pronouns