Liberal Florida College Helped KKK Leader's Kid Reject Racism, Recognize Trans Identity Too
Weird MAGAs: 'Thank God DeSantis nipped that in the bud!'
R. Derek Black has been through a hell of a journey since the time they appeared on the Jenny Jones show back in 1999 at age 10 to advocate White Power as a fun thing for kids. Black’s father Don Black was a big pointed wig in the Ku Klux Klan and founded the racist website Stormfront, which he still operates whenever it isn’t being kicked out by another internet hosting company.
The younger Black spent years serving as dad’s youth Gauleiter for white nationalism, repeating all the gross clichés about how it’s not about hating anyone, just pride in white heritage, you see, as long as there’s no one else around to get in the way of all the glorious whiteness.
Young Black’s personal rebellion against racism came after they began attending New College of Florida in 2010, long before Ron DeSantis trashed the place. Since last year, DeSantis’s chosen rightwing creep Christopher Rufo has been doing DeSantis’s bidding to turn New College into an anti-woke zombie version of the freethinking, intellectually rigorous LGBTQ+ friendly hippie weed den it had been.
While at New College, some fellow students ostracized Black for those racist beliefs — with good reason! — but the welcoming, open, and intellectually rigorous values of the school led Black to question and ultimately reject racism, leading to a career as an anti-racist, and as a mentor to people wanting to leave hate groups. Black told that story to author Eli Saslow in the 2019 book Rising Out of Hatred: The Awakening of a Former White Nationalist (link gives Yr Wonkette a small subsidy).
As if that weren’t enough of a life’s journey for somebody who’s now just 35, Black has a new memoir coming out soon — The Klansman’s Son: My Journey from White Nationalism to Antiracism: A Memoir — in which they come out as very happily transgender, crediting their experience at New College with helping them become comfortable with “gender confusion” at the same time they were saying the hell with racism too.
The usually terrible Daily Mail tabloid actually has a pretty good, mostly not sensational preview of the book, which will be released next week. Both that piece and another at the New York Post even manage to use Black’s preferred they/them pronouns without being snotty about it. Baby steps. From the Mail story, British punctuation and all:
'[New College's] culture and the people I met there helped me accept that I fit under the trans umbrella,' Black says.
Black reveals their ideological evolution continued when they started dating a Jewish woman, despite the fact that the Black family were 'some of the most famous antisemitic activists in the country.'
Through long, often challenging conversations with Allison Gornik - Black's now-wife - they started to take their first tentative steps away from the neo-Nazi movement. And in 2013, Black wrote a letter renouncing white nationalism.
Black recounts that even while playing Young Confederate Racist Creep, they secretly thought it was kind of neat when they’d be mistaken for a girl, what with their long hair at the time:
“I liked the gender confusion, except in public bathrooms, where adult men always took it upon themselves to compliment my looks before telling me I was in the wrong room,” Black said.
“After puberty started, I kept my hair long, but I was able to use the bathrooms in peace, and was relieved to stop getting the inappropriate comments.”
Black credits Gornik, who they married in 2020, with giving them the courage to escape their upbringing:
“It’s impossible for me to imagine my own life story without her intervention. She showed me that I could love other people fully and unafraid, and I showed her how wide the world is and that we could experience all of it together.”
Part of Black’s motivation for coming out as trans now is to try to bring some sanity to Florida, where thanks to DeSantis and his thugs in the state lege, trans folks’ rights “are now under vicious, loud attack”:
“I can’t imagine how horrible it would have been to grow up in the current political environment as a child who, until puberty, was quite happy about being often perceived as a girl, and who then hid that part of myself,” they wrote.
Black’s memoir will be published May 14, and as of yet, we haven’t heard of any plans to ban it in Florida schools. Let’s hope enough people read it to get the point that far-right politics isn’t healthy for anyone — and that book banning and Nazi beliefs go hand in glove.
[WBUR / Daily Mail / NY Post / Sarasota Magazine]
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I recently read Sarah McCammon's book The Exvangelicals, a part memoir, part journalism look at people who have left the evangelical fold. There are lots of reasons why people leave, but one reason I found interesting is the people who went to college or got jobs in the real world and discovered that the people they've been told to hate all their lives and would try to tempt them to do bad thing aren't actually all that bad. It seems like this is basically what happened to Black also. And of course that's why the right hates American universities - the "indoctrination" is just "seeing people living normal, happy lives."
I've known about Derek for years, and am very happy for them to learn they've not only found a wonderful spouse but have the incredible courage to bring their full story to a wider audience. Their father's adherents and associated monsters have been gunning for Derek for years.