January 28, 2025 • 50 mins
Adrianne Black has an incredible story along with a profound evolution. Her father was a former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, and she was raised as a frequent spokesperson for the white nationalist movement as a child. Her memoir “The Klansman’s Son” details the shift from spreading hate on TV to attending weekly Shabbat dinners. In today’s program, she’s joined at her alma mater the University of Chicago by her friend and National Jewish Book Award Winner Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg for a conversation spanning Black’s transgender identity, her relationship with her family, and how to stay progressively productive in the face of increasingly visible white supremacy.
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PHOTO: Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg and Adrianne Black at the University of Chicago in Fall 2024.
Learn more:
R. Derek Black, The Klansman’s Son: My Journey from White Nationalism to Antiracism: A Memoir
Danya Ruttenberg, On Repentance and Repair: Making Amends in an Unapologetic World
Live event programmed by Michael Green
Live event produced by Jesse Swanson
Live event stage managed by Rebecca Dose
Live event produced and mixed by Kyle Anderson
Production assistance by Bucky Emmerling, Hope Mignini, and Cody Kressman
Podcast edited and mixed by Alisa Rosenthal
Podcast story editing by Alexandra Quinn
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
ADRIANNE BLACK (00:00):
It's a book about responding to being given a title and choosing do you uphold it? Both of the words like being a Klansman's son and being a son were both titles that I was given that I felt like I had to uphold or lose care and respect and love in a way that was very explicit.
(00:01):
[Theme music plays]
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ALISA ROSENTHAL (00:03):
Hey all, thanks for tuning into a new season of Chicago Humanities Tapes, the audio extension of the live Chicago Humanities Spring and Fall Festivals. I’m your host Alisa Rosenthal, here to help you find the answers to humanity’s biggest questions by bringing you the best of the best of our live festivals. Each program on the podcast is thoughtfully curated – so you’ll hear from big name speakers along with smaller ones and local content that we just thought you’d love, plus some surprises from our 30+ year archive – and some of those are transferred from literal tape. We want to hear what you think! You can shape the future of the podcast by taking the short listener survey in the show notes.
Some quick housekeeping that’s super fun, the 2025 Chicago Humanities Spring Festival is right around the corner, with tickets on sale now for Journalists Ezra Klein, Chris Hayes, and Juan Williams, actress and internet phenomenon Dylan Mulvaney, experimental German synth and piano player Nils Frahm at the Salt Shed, and a concert in collaboration with the Art Institute of Chicago celebrating South African revolutionary musician Johnny Dyani. Plus, so much more that we’re about to announce. Head to chicagohumanities.org for ticket information and if you haven’t yet you can sign up for our email list so you’ll be the first to know when we drop more names for the rest of our Spring 2025 Festival.
Today, speaker Adrianne Black, whose story is just incredible. Black’s father was a former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, and she was a frequent spokesperson for the white nationalist movement as a child. Her memoir “The Klansman’s Son (00:05):
My Journey from White Nationalism to Antiracism” details the shift from spreading hate on TV to attending weekly Shabbat dinners. She’s joined at her alma mater the University of Chicago by her friend Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg:, National Jewish Book Award winner and contributor to The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, and NPR, for a conversation spanning Black’s relationship with her family, her transgender identity, and how to stay progressively productive in the face of increasingly visible white supremacy.
This is Adrianne Black and Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg, recorded live at the University of Chicago, on November 9th, 2024.
[Theme music plays]
[Audience applause]
RABBI DANYA RUTTENBERG (00:09):
Hello, everybody. So for those that don't know, I am a huge Adrianne Black fan.
ADRIANNE BLACK (00:10):
Likewise.
RABBI DANYA RUTTENBERG (00:11):
I wrote about her in my book Repentance and Repair, because she's truly an extraordinary person. Being raised by a grand wizard of the KKK, being outed in college as being kind of a rising white nationalist celebrity, and then having regular Shabbat dinner attendance be a turning point for your transformation towards anti-racism. I mean, I just would like everybody to just pause and appreciate the the human being that this is. Your story has been the subject of Washington Post profiles. It's been someone else wrote a book about you. You've done NPR interviews, why did you write your book?
ADRIANNE BLACK (00:12):
But before I answer also, that was very sweet. Thank you so much. And I have been a fan of Rabbi Danya for years and years, so this is a really exciting moment. I have the experience of regularly to this day and for many years now, getting notifications when, like psychology articles have some new theory of how persuasion works or ideological change. And then they'll like reference me to prove their theory. And some of times their theories are contradictory to to each other, and they sort of like talk about me as this sort of like case study or anecdote that is talks about like whatever it is that they believe about human nature and change and thought. And it's fine. You know, it's a fine way to be. But what I think motivated me to write was the thing that is been on my mind the entire week leading up to this event, because I realized it's I decided to write it right after the previous presidential election. And it was annoyance and anger, actually, that made me change, like I had spoken out for years at that point, but I thought that I did not want to speak personally. I did not want to, I wanted to contribute to what other people were doing, and I wanted to show up in spaces where I could sort of facilitate what they were doing. And it's still my motivation. But I realized that by doing that, I was somewhat abdicating the things that I felt the most passionate about, which which was this sort of anger at seeing cruelty and truly justification for inhumanity that I did not feel was condemned in the harshest, strongest ways. And I think that that is maybe an unexpected thing to say, particularly if you've read the book, because I believe it's one that's sort of trying to probe what it means. How do people come to their beliefs? Like, I spent the first third of it talking about the history of this movement that my family built. And I think it's quite empathetic. I think I'm trying to understand. I always try to understand people as they understand themselves. And I think to know someone, you sort of have to love them because that's the only path to knowing them, like one in the same. And so it's a book that's about that. It's about people knowing me. It's about me knowing my family and this movement that motivated me from the time that I was a ten year old. But the part about my story that felt like it was so often abused or misused was the loss of anger and condemnation. Because everything about my life that felt very meaningful was the moments when I felt close to and cared about other people and yet heard that I was harming them, knew that I was hurting them, knew that I was parsing my care into one basket, and yet justifying the ways that they were telling me that I was hurting them. And it did a lot of psychic damage to me. And it's what motivated me to go through years of what happened. It wasn't a thing where I thought I was going to become some different kind of activist or I was going to go to a different community. It felt like I was just going to lose everything that I every relationship I had my my sense of myself. But it felt necessary to do it. And the thing that motivated me all along, the thing that made me go to Shabbat dinners and have these sort of quiet conversations with people who were horrified and yet loved me, was the feeling of anger and condemnation at the harm that I caused. And so the thing that motivated me to say I have to write my own was the weeks after the previous presidential election because I was embedded in anti-racist activism. I was connected with lots of media people. I sort of had this relationship. I give speeches, I did all these sort of things, and it felt like in the weeks after that election, I suddenly started getting this feedback that I represented and had come from some kind of aberration or something that needed to be explained as a sort of a moment or needed to be understood in some sort of like human way, which, you know, all those things are true, but that the anger that they had felt no longer seemed relevant. And like I ended up spending the years, years since then, like writing a book, that essentially the thesis of it is that the heart of love is telling somebody when you know they're wrong, when you are angry at them, when you are harmed by them, when you are recoiling from them. That is exactly the same thing as caring about them. Like you can't those two things can't be separated. And I tried to write a book that that is essentially the thesis. It's like if you love and care about people, if you feel connected to them, you know, don't even think love because I think that sounds a little bit too much like your closest people. If you feel connected to them, you have a and you don't speak you don't tell them when you're outraged, when you are hurt, when your values are harmed by them, then you don't actually care. You don't actually love them. And I think you don't really stand up and love yourself. And I think it does a lot of damage to do that. And so if anything, I don't really want to be the apostle of tolerance, which is somebody called me. I don't view myself as the apostle of tolerance. I view itself as somebody who says if you are hurt and angry, you don't have the obligation to go walk up to a Nazi. But you do have the obligation to speak, to stand, to find your community and not accept that. And that's that's what I hope people take from it. And that's the part of my story that I felt was just lost constantly.
RABBI DANYA RUTTENBERG (00:13):
Thank you. The Talmud teaches there is no love without rebuke. And there is no peace without rebuke. So I feel like that really gets to the heart of this. I'm probably not the only person in the room with the recent presidential election on my mind, maybe. Should we be talking about de-radicalizing as our approach to encroaching fascism? Should we all be getting our dinner tables ready for the Nazis in and across our communities? Right. Like is is that the answer?
ADRIANNE BLACK (00:14):
I mean, no, no. My experience in Shabbat dinners, I would get invited to them. There were organizations that were founded and I don't mean this, you know, I think I went to some of the dinners they formed like some of the things they created were, you know, amazing spaces where people could talk. And it felt like a debate, but it also felt a little bit closer. And the and I still felt a bit used in that because there's a version of my experience that says, you know, if you invite a Nazi to dinner, they will see how kind you are and they will change and you will have done a great goodness in the world. And I think I don't really have to go much further than like, I don't believe that's how the world works. Like, I don't think that's how, I think it's almost like to look at my experience and say that that clearly must be what happened, it makes it sort of unbelievable because I can't imagine why that would ever happen. Like my experience, like I think maybe I was talking about a second ago was being in a community that I had gotten to know that I cared about, that found out that I kept myself from it, withheld all the white nationalist parts of me, I did not, I had shared with them who I thought I was to to their face, like who I thought I was like. And it was the version that I thought I was, but I didn't share, like who I presented myself in the world to be. I didn't share what I said. I didn't share the family I'd come from. I didn't share what I was committed to, what I expected to become a leader in. And so when they found that out, the response was outrage. The response was fear. The response was just years of debate about me on these public forums, about what to do about me, what to say about me. And the Shabbat dinners were, immediately after felt like, this is the only thing that was meaningful. Everybody else chased me away and I that was my sense of myself. And it took years to look back and say the Shabbat dinners were absolutely essential. I don't know what my life would look like had Matthew Stevenson and not invited me to his dinners. But the context is feels essentially like he was a dude who had my number because we shared a study guide. He was a person who shared like 30 friends in common. He was a person who had known me before. He was a person who knew I had dated somebody who was Jewish. He was a person who was very confused about how I presented myself in the world versus what he was reading on the website that my dad founded in my interviews and he knew I was personally kind. He knew I was friendly. He knew that he didn't feel scared of me. And it was this sort of decision that was incredibly selfless to invite me to his dinners. And most of his friends stopped coming when he invited me. But I think that it's pretty clear, if you think about that, that it's a lot easier to imagine what does it mean? What does it mean to engage with somebody? And to be clear, Matthew didn't engage like he made a point of don't talk to me about this at dinner, because everybody knows what I stand for in the world apparently. And he knew it was a space where this antisemitic ideology really was contradictory and my family would be outraged by it. He knew that he could sort of symbolically do that. But I think it's easier to sort of imagine what the selflessness means if you think about somebody who you're in community with, you have dozens of friends in common who you already have their number where you don't even know if they're going to come back again. But like you're inviting somebody who you know in that way and in a way that's that, he did invite a Nazi to dinner, but it was, you know, to hear him tell him we're very close friends. We both live in Baltimore like a 15 minute walk from each other now. And I still go to Shabbat dinners all the time, but like to hear him tell it, he was inviting a friend who is very confused about to dinner, and I think that's a hard decision to make. And I think people face hard decisions in their lives and sort of thinking about the psychic damage of not speaking, not inviting me would not necessarily have been him committing some immoral act. In fact, him and the other people who came to those dinners spent the years that I was coming to them convinced that they were the ones who are who are committing the immoral act because the campus was doing the thing that they knew they agreed with, which was make me feel uncomfortable. Stand up for the people who are afraid. Make sure that within your own community you do not say that it's fine if somebody makes anyone who you care about, feel unwelcome and feel afraid, if the rest of the world is going to be like that, they were not going to allow that. And they spent years inviting me to these dinners and like engaging talking to some people at the dinner started talking to me and I already wanted to figure out like, where's the contradiction? I didn't want to be somebody that all my friends were afraid of. And, you know, you can sort of see how that path led. But I think understanding the fact that they felt and were hearing from people for all those years that like you're welcoming somebody into a space that we are trying to make safe for all of us. And, you know, afterwards they get sort of held up and they have a lot of mixed feelings about being held up as like the people who did it when they felt and everybody else on the campus felt like the hostility, the condemnation, the middle fingers, the very clear, speaking of their values, when it did not feel comfortable to do it, like they all knew, that was what did it. And they were trying to participate in that in a way that felt much more personal because I was in their life already and they were just going to decide like, what to do about that.
RABBI DANYA RUTTENBERG (00:15):
Thank you. And I you know, to to put a finer point on it, you have said very explicitly that other people drawing the line and saying, no, this is unacceptable and and this is not okay. And and putting those social boundaries up is part of what also made you open to thinking in new ways, right? That it was it had to have been the both and. Right.
ADRIANNE BLACK (00:16):
I mean, there's the discussion, like if people care about, you know, you find yourself in a situation where you're trying to talk to somebody and you care about each other, but you are horrified by some parts of what they're doing in the world, which who would ever end up in that situation is, you know, the pieces that happened within that were the reason it was so hard. The reason why I think it took people who are coming to the dinners who are like not Jewish, not students of color, not feeling the wrath of the dehumanizing ideology that I had grown up in, like because they had to talk to me and understand what I argued in the way that I argued it, which is not something that I want to do. I don't want to talk to somebody who believes that, you know, I'm like less than human or something and try to understand, like, how would you argue this? Like, I can you can really see why I think that's like the essential way to think about when you're talking about like, you know, white people need to speak about racism and non-Jewish people need to speak about antisemitism. It's like sometimes that feels a little vague. But I think foundationally, it's like, I don't want to embody the arguments against my humanity to you, which is what happens if you're trying to change somebody's mind. If you care about each other and you can't prove that you understand what they have to say as well as they can. If you can't argue it as well as they can and still say it is horrible, it is wrong, I stand against it. I am I find it repulsive, like all these things where like I care about you so much. I understand your worldview as well as you do, and I find it repulsive is like that that is the space where you people change their minds. Like in you know, if you think about it that way, you sort of recognize why it's an enormous sacrifice, why it takes a very certain situation, a certain relationship to do that. And then thinking about anger, which is like the theme of of me in this world at this moment is holding the, I understand you and I find it repulsive part is very hard. Like it is very, very hard to do that in a community, in a space where you care about a person like. And I think that is one of the greatest things, sacrifices that I think I am experienced in my life. But I for me on my behalf.
RABBI DANYA RUTTENBERG (00:17):
It's it's such a gift and not not an obligation. A gift.
ADRIANNE BLACK (00:18):
I mean, it can't be an obligation. It has to be a choice. And I think when I say like it causes some psychic damage to say to not assert your values to somebody, I don't mean it in like, you know, if they had not invited me to dinner, if they had not debated me, they could have just joined the people who said like, this is horrible and this is awful and I condemn this. And they would have been consistent with themselves.
RABBI DANYA RUTTENBERG (00:19):
What about your parents? You resent them?
ADRIANNE BLACK (00:20):
I resent a lot of their choices. I have more fury at the way they raised me, focusing on their own self-image, their own desires, their own view of the world. And how much in it took me getting to become an adult to recognize how much they demanded conformity at their risk of essentially expulsion. Like I can't look back and it's partly gender experience transition in the world. And the fact that I, I don't think, I condemn their ideology 11 years ago and we maintain a relationship or at least maintained a relationship that was always tenuous, always hard. But they made a choice when I surprised them by doing that, that they wanted to stay in touch in some way. And they were the only people in the movement world I grew up in who I did stay in touch with. And yet gender seems like a bridge too far in some ways. And like I don't like to talk about current day relationships of people because I think privacy to figure that out is always there. But like it's a space that's still figuring out and it's writing the book thinking about that stuff is what made me recognize that raising your kids with the message that you you know what is right in the world. You know what is heroic, you know what is true. You know that the people who don't believe this are either misguided and need to learn the truth or if they have learned the truth, and it's very like religious sounding, it's like white nationalists believe that if you learn their ideology that, you know, you could never unknow it. Like it's like knowing it is like, you know, being revealed truth or something. And so therefore, everyone who's raised in it has been given the revealed truth. They don't use that phrase much like how they talk about it. And so if you grow up in this movement and you know their worldview as well as I did, and you choose to either disbelieve it or not act on it, you are going to be making a cowardly choice. You are going to be, making us not very proud. And they would essentially the reason I was very mixed up about this as an adolescent and a young adult and felt I'll still feel a lot of shame about my own choices, but like my upbringing and more resentful of now because they always made this clear thing about how they had come to their beliefs and so should I. I had to understand. I had to like justify and read and understand because you can't just believe this. It's an unpopular belief system. The mainstream media doesn't like it. You have to choose it for yourself. And then like growing up and looking back on that and realizing the message is
RABBI DANYA RUTTENBERG (00:21):
I'm so sorry. So what insights do you have for other people thinking through ideologies of their family of origin or other ideologies they've absorbed, how do you sort through when a belief that you've been raised with or that you've gotten or that you've absorbed in some way is is affirming, is or is toxic, is problematic. You've done so much work over the years to sort through and sift through and to understand, do you have some sort of heuristic that you might be able to share with us?
ADRIANNE BLACK (00:22):
I do a I, I mentioned earlier like I was, spent years ago, and I think there's just an important context in this. In some ways, I do view myself as like an interesting case study and I want what lessons can be taken from this experience in a way that I think comes from being like a ten year old who gave interviews. It's like I look at myself and I'm like, what are the life lessons we can all learn from this experience? And then then I go, you know, have a call with my best friend who's like, you know, you're not like a case study. You know, you're like, you know, And then we talking like, yeah, that's true. But I did spend years essentially before I had built before I learned how to build up a community, I condemned my family's beliefs. I knew they were wrong. I like gone through this experience. I had the feeling of like, I didn't want to be the person my friends were afraid of. And then I had to spend years, like, learning, you know, sitting with all the stuff that felt intellectual and need to, like, learn that race is not biological. And what does that mean? I need to learn about history. Like I had to do that. That's what took forever. It wasn't the feelings. It was the the learning. But then I got to the end of it and I felt like, well, I people I grew up getting hate mail in my email inbox from like millions of people telling me that I was deluded. And, you know, I was clearly indoctrinated and I had grown up in an extreme ideology and that I couldn't really believe this. And I felt offended because, you know, I thought I went to academic conferences held by white nationalists and talked to biology professors who were tenured, who could then talk about how white supremacist they were or antisemitic they were. And I'm like, well, I've spent all my teenage years like, learning why this turns out to be true and then to get to the end of that and say like, obviously it was all crazy, like it was all fake. It was all undeniably, ludicrously built on just a very facile world view. And I had believed it. So therefore, I believed it because I wanted to be a part of my community. I wanted to be cared about. I wanted to have all these relationships. I wanted to be somebody who could use my talents to sort of make the adults in my life a little less afraid of the world. And to come to that conclusion meant than I was for a minute I was like, well, how do I know what I ever believe? Like, it's all dependent on relationships, and I haven't lost that. I still think that the the act of persuasion, people changing their minds like facts are real. Like we have ways of knowing what is more or less rigorous in the world. But nobody, I don't think and maybe this is my most extreme belief at this point is like nobody has that comes to their belief system or upholds like the things they think are true about the world except through the relationships in their life. Like there's this mysterious relationship between what do we see in the world and what do we stand for and what do we believe is true, and who are the people we care about? And how do those things connect us to them? And it's like, you know, if you change that, there are things that you can imagine not believing anymore. And I think if you sort of think about your life experiences, you can know that changing your beliefs is not really that hard. Like if I believe that I know how wavelengths in the sky work and that's why the sky is blue, I could imagine believing something different. Like that's just a belief I have about the world and I don't expect to change it. But I could imagine it. And most things are like the most facts are like that. Values aren't, but like facts are like that. And I had this experience of like, changing all the facts and realizing that they had formed my identity. They had made me be somebody. If I called myself a white nationalist, that I had all these people who cared about me. If I didn't, I lost them all. And how could I just, you know, be sure about that? I wasn't like looking for community again. I was only looking for identity. And so I created the heuristic in my head about like, how can I know if I'm adopting a belief, if I'm thinking about something, if I am leaning into a political belief like whatever it is. And that measure was, is this something that allows me to imagine how I am connected to further and further groups of people? Because there's a it's a bit of a thought experiment because there's billions of people in the world, but you can sort of imagine the process of like, how am I related to connected to how do I care about some further circle of people who are not seemingly in my life, not seemingly someone I'm responsible for or who I love or care about, like whatever that is, and is this a belief that sort of allows me, at the very least, allows me to imagine how I'm more connected to other people? Or is it one that tells me why why it's okay that I'm not connected to them? Why I can sort of explain away why if I do anything that harms them, why it's actually okay that that I'm doing that or why they deserve it or, you know, there's a long list of things that people justify a lot of very convenient stuff in their life to try to feel safe and connected. And there's still a heuristic where you're open to it and willing to listen. People very frequently will tell you if you are hurting them and you don't have to go so far, you just have to work not so hard to like explain why it's fine that you're doing that or they're wrong or whatever it is. And most things that you believe, you know, some things don't speak to this too strongly. But like if it's in the back of my head, I can feel pretty confident about it anything that I'm thinking about or acting on or believing in, if it just doesn't foreclose the possibility of a relationship with a person who I don't quite know how I'm connected to, even if that always remains the thought experiment. It's a real like way to say, okay, yes, I, I can I can be intellectually free because I know where my how it aligns with my value.
RABBI DANYA RUTTENBERG (00:23):
Amen. Thank you. Yes. Tell me about the title of the book.
ADRIANNE BLACK (00:24):
Oh! Thank you. So this book came out several months ago. I have talked about it in a lot of places. I have not been I have not talked about the title. And, you know, to clarify, like, you know, it's been a lifelong thing, but it's been like the last few years and honestly, like the last week, I've been like very open
RABBI DANYA RUTTENBERG (00:25):
Amazing. I've said this to privately a couple of times. I think you, both as a combination of the experiences you have had but so much more because of the person that you are, have so much critical wisdom to offer us at this point in history. What what do we need to know? What do we need to be thinking about as a white Christian nationalism is taking over the government?
ADRIANNE BLACK (00:26):
I, I, I am cautious because I don't feel that I don't I'm not necessarily prognosticator like I have too much of my life I think has been around when I predict stuff and that gave me a lot of weird complexes as a teen and early 2012 like predict stuff and then people say, my God, you saw it. And what that was, is like things are much more consistent over time if you look at them, then, you know, the past can sort of lead you to understand what's going to happen usually. And where that leads me now, like my deep knowledge, is the far right. Like I and to clarify, like white nationalism thrives on the idea that it's marginal and it's never been marginal. It's always been, I grew up in a movement that I saw tens of thousands of people coming to marches for it who were not white nationalists. They were just people responding to its ideology, in the 90s, in the 2000s consistently over time. It's a movement that's small, inherently small and decentralized, and has 60 something years of history, but functions by sort of having concentric circles of attention where they their whole theory of change is that they're the people who get called extremists, but then they uphold an idea and they sort of work on messaging. They figure out ways that they can run political campaigns or help other people run political campaigns that tap into something that is just foundational. Like they grew up in the same society that all of us did. They live – you want to understand where they are. It's just the map of population in America. They live in every city and suburb and rural area in the country. It's who they are. It's where they come from. They thrive on the idea that people call them extremists, and then they can say like, look at me. I, you know, I go to Applebee's and I watch the same, you know, Avengers movie. And it because they are they are the same people as anyone. If anything, I think the only thing that like clarifies who becomes a part of the white nationalist movement is somebody who has a lot of trouble with like moral ambiguity. Like every single person who's ever come to the white nationalist movement is somebody who needs the world to be right or wrong. And they look at the same unequal world as we do as anybody does. They see the same inequality. They see wealth is predicted by what race people are born into. And some people become, you know, sort of activists who try to like change society. And they some people are, most people are kind of ambivalent about it. Most people just want their own life to be more comfortable and they want to sort of justify their own place in the world and not feel too bad about things. And then white nationalists are not comfortable with either of those, and they need the world to be right. They need the world to be true. They need that inequality to be exactly correct, like they need it to be justified by race or biology or something, because they can't live in a world that is like a social crime. They can't live in a world where everyone around them is living in, in totally unjust, unfair, unpredictable conditions based on randomness of laws in the 1700s. Like there's just not a world they can live in. It has to be correct. And that's what makes it white nationalists. But they use that to amplify their beliefs and that are much more passive in a lot of cases. And they have strategies. They've existed for decades. They're a part of the much wider right. Like I think it's important at this point to clarify that, like I grew up in the center of white nationalism, but that meant that I was like going to dinner with Trent Lott when he was like the Senate minority whip, like this world of the right was broad, like white nationalists exist within the right. Everyone within the right is sort of whether they reject them or not. I think one of the ways that you understand the connections between people is like, does somebody understand another person well enough to know they're not that? Like that makes them part of the same world like and like that's the existence of it. And so everybody on the right understands white nationalists' place and what their strategies are. And predictably, what's going to happen now is they always exist, but they respond to social and political conditions that are more accepting towards them. And so what happens is when you get more like leftist administration over a period of time, they're much more quiet. They focus on organizing and raising money. When you get a political moment that feels more conducive and welcoming to them, they sort of rise with the attention and you get more violent protests, you get more violent actions, you get more just outspoken public stuff. That's exactly what I would expect over the next year or two. And the personal response. That's the answer. Anybody who studies the far right can give you that answer. Like that's just how that works. And the personal answer that I feel like is the context of like this talk. Like I legitimately have given a lot of talks about this book. I've given a lot of talks in my life, and there's very few that I got quite as nervous about as this one. And the reason is because we're in Hyde Park. I moved to Hyde Park when I was afraid to tell – in 2016, before that election, when I was afraid to tell anybody about how I had grown up. Like there were people I lived I was roommates with who I didn't know for years before that that I had like, condemned this movement. It was here that I learned how to sort of redeem parts of my experience, like take something from it, contribute, find a way to sort of live a whole life. It was like all here was – I got here last night and I was walking around the streets and I was like, Wow. The days are exactly the same length. The weather is the same as it was when this happened before. And the streets look the same. The students – they can't be the same students, but like they look the same. And and I just had this sort of like, oh no. And I could feel in myself that the difference was last time I was very circumspect. I was very inhibited. I was very thoughtful about, I do not want to over speak. I do not want to – I turned down most invitations, like the the Obama Foundation here, invited me to give a speech and I said no, because I thought they were misunderstand – I was like, you know, I've done terrible things. You know, like, I don't think I should be speaking there. And they're like, okay. And and I feel, you know, less inhibited in that way. I feel more confident about myself. And I was noticing last night the last time I was like, I need to be I need to make sure that I'm like very cautious and careful everywhere. And and I realize this time I'm just furious. Like, I'm just, like, enraged. I'm really angry. And the reason for that is that I am quite terrified, though I am currently seeing – I'm worried about what I'm about to say, which I think is sounds like identity politics, but like – rich white people are quieter. And I know it's anecdotal and I know it's like, you know, who knows, like the world. But like, the difference is fewer university emails about, We know you and we love you and we will protect you. Fewer statements from wealthy people who run companies about like, This is not the country that I want. This is not this is I care for certain people like, more obsequiousness, more collaboration, more quietness, more willing to willingness to bend which is exactly I know this. I've seen it. I grew up with it. This is the foundational thing that white nationalists view. Like even if they don't say it, they do say it actually is like they always operate, they find people, they motivate people, they build a movement on people's fears. And that does not have to be just like fear of an other. It does not have to be fear, like any, racism is like very specific culturally in some ways, but in other ways you just give certain status to some people and to others and you tell them that it's because of the identity you've given them and they will go with that. They're like, That's what racism is. That's what antisemitism is. These things have long legacies of like class class structure that is based on an identity. But the other version of it is fear of retribution, fear of consequence, fear of something that I think I really want to ask people to like ask yourself, What are you afraid of? Because I think the thing that you need to be much more afraid of is losing your humanity, like you, if you if you get to a point in your life and you realize that you have justified, though, you have justified turning your back on people who you knew you were connected to, and yet you thought it was not politic, you thought it was not quite safe. You thought it was a little uncertain to, like, speak too much, do too much in that way because you didn't know what would happen to you. And it takes the form of a lot of justification. People rarely think, oh I'm just, you know, turning my back on the world. But there's that's my fear for now. It's like that I don't feel like we can count on people who have things to lose, to recognize what it means to be a humane person. And I know that's a big statement and I know we don't know, but it feels like the difference. It feels like the ambiance is silence and quietness. And if someone's quiet now, like a year from now, what are they? Like like don't, some people don't have a choice and others do. And to make a choice to look out for yourself in an ambiguous way is like we've seen that, that's happened. The other reason I'm nervous, which I know is going to sound hyperbolic and I thought about it and I'm like, Oh can I say this? Is like the reason that I've been thinking about this event is not this date and this event. And it's not just because I knew it would be right after the election, but today is November 9th. To people who are familiar with German history, November 9th is the day when so many things happen. Like November 9th is the day that Hitler attempted a coup in 1923 and failed and then wrote Mein Kampf afterwards. November 9th is the same date that Kristallnacht, like the pogroms on Jewish people across Germany, took place in 1938, I think. And then, you know, it's also weirdly the date that the Berlin Wall fell. But in Germany, November 9th is this day of memory. It's a day of fate. And today is the day like, you know, we're at the 101st anniversary of Hitler's attempted coup. You know, it's I'm not trying to say like, you know, I don't think this is Germany in the 30s. I think this is like America in the 1920s. If we want to really draw a real parallel. But like America in the 1920s was a terrifying place and the possibilities are endless. And the only way that I feel like I know how to respond is just the sort of natural one that is coming up for me kind of unexpectedly, which is anger, not fear, but anger.
RABBI DANYA RUTTENBERG (00:27):
Thank you. Remember, the first rule of resisting authoritarianism is do not comply in advance. I think this is a great point point to pause. The heuristic, right? The the the framework that we should use to test our beliefs is how much does it connect us to other people? How much does it draw us closer to those with whom we are not already connected? The way we bring other people closer is through community. And as my friend Jaclyn Friedman says, the answer to despair is community. Everybody please say thank you, a big thank you to Adrianne Black.
ADRIANNE BLACK (00:28):
Thank you so much.
RABBI DANYA RUTTENBERG (00:29):
Thank you very much for being here.
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ALISA ROSENTHAL (00:33):
For more information on Adrianne Black and Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg, as well as links to their works, head to chicagohumanities.org or check the show notes.
Chicago Humanities Tapes is produced and hosted by me, Alisa Rosenthal, with help from the great staff over at Chicago Humanities who are producing the live events and making them sound fantastic. Want to hear more? The best way to support our programming is to leave a rating and review, hit subscribe to be notified about new episodes, and check our backlog for a gem you might’ve missed. We’ll be back in two weeks with another new episode for you. Thanks for listening, and as always, stay human.
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It's a book about responding to being given a title and choosing do you uphold it? Both of the words like being a Klansman's son and being a son were both titles that I was given that I felt like I had to uphold or lose care and respect and love in a way that was very explicit.
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ALISA ROSENTHAL (00:03):
Hey all, thanks for tuning into a new season of Chicago Humanities Tapes, the audio extension of the live Chicago Humanities Spring and Fall Festivals. I’m your host Alisa Rosenthal, here to help you find the answers to humanity’s biggest questions by bringing you the best of the best of our live festivals. Each program on the podcast is thoughtfully curated – so you’ll hear from big name speakers along with smaller ones and local content that we just thought you’d love, plus some surprises from our 30+ year archive – and some of those are transferred from literal tape. We want to hear what you think! You can shape the future of the podcast by taking the short listener survey in the show notes.
Some quick housekeeping that’s super fun, the 2025 Chicago Humanities Spring Festival is right around the corner, with tickets on sale now for Journalists Ezra Klein, Chris Hayes, and Juan Williams, actress and internet phenomenon Dylan Mulvaney, experimental German synth and piano player Nils Frahm at the Salt Shed, and a concert in collaboration with the Art Institute of Chicago celebrating South African revolutionary musician Johnny Dyani. Plus, so much more that we’re about to announce. Head to chicagohumanities.org for ticket information and if you haven’t yet you can sign up for our email list so you’ll be the first to know when we drop more names for the rest of our Spring 2025 Festival.
Today, speaker Adrianne Black, whose story is just incredible. Black’s father was a former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, and she was a frequent spokesperson for the white nationalist movement as a child. Her memoir “The Klansman’s Son (00:05):
My Journey from White Nationalism to Antiracism” details the shift from spreading hate on TV to attending weekly Shabbat dinners. She’s joined at her alma mater the University of Chicago by her friend Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg:, National Jewish Book Award winner and contributor to The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, and NPR, for a conversation spanning Black’s relationship with her family, her transgender identity, and how to stay progressively productive in the face of increasingly visible white supremacy.
This is Adrianne Black and Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg, recorded live at the University of Chicago, on November 9th, 2024.
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RABBI DANYA RUTTENBERG (00:09):
Hello, everybody. So for those that don't know, I am a huge Adrianne Black fan.
ADRIANNE BLACK (00:10):
Likewise.
RABBI DANYA RUTTENBERG (00:11):
I wrote about her in my book Repentance and Repair, because she's truly an extraordinary person. Being raised by a grand wizard of the KKK, being outed in college as being kind of a rising white nationalist celebrity, and then having regular Shabbat dinner attendance be a turning point for your transformation towards anti-racism. I mean, I just would like everybody to just pause and appreciate the the human being that this is. Your story has been the subject of Washington Post profiles. It's been someone else wrote a book about you. You've done NPR interviews, why did you write your book?
ADRIANNE BLACK (00:12):
But before I answer also, that was very sweet. Thank you so much. And I have been a fan of Rabbi Danya for years and years, so this is a really exciting moment. I have the experience of regularly to this day and for many years now, getting notifications when, like psychology articles have some new theory of how persuasion works or ideological change. And then they'll like reference me to prove their theory. And some of times their theories are contradictory to to each other, and they sort of like talk about me as this sort of like case study or anecdote that is talks about like whatever it is that they believe about human nature and change and thought. And it's fine. You know, it's a fine way to be. But what I think motivated me to write was the thing that is been on my mind the entire week leading up to this event, because I realized it's I decided to write it right after the previous presidential election. And it was annoyance and anger, actually, that made me change, like I had spoken out for years at that point, but I thought that I did not want to speak personally. I did not want to, I wanted to contribute to what other people were doing, and I wanted to show up in spaces where I could sort of facilitate what they were doing. And it's still my motivation. But I realized that by doing that, I was somewhat abdicating the things that I felt the most passionate about, which which was this sort of anger at seeing cruelty and truly justification for inhumanity that I did not feel was condemned in the harshest, strongest ways. And I think that that is maybe an unexpected thing to say, particularly if you've read the book, because I believe it's one that's sort of trying to probe what it means. How do people come to their beliefs? Like, I spent the first third of it talking about the history of this movement that my family built. And I think it's quite empathetic. I think I'm trying to understand. I always try to understand people as they understand themselves. And I think to know someone, you sort of have to love them because that's the only path to knowing them, like one in the same. And so it's a book that's about that. It's about people knowing me. It's about me knowing my family and this movement that motivated me from the time that I was a ten year old. But the part about my story that felt like it was so often abused or misused was the loss of anger and condemnation. Because everything about my life that felt very meaningful was the moments when I felt close to and cared about other people and yet heard that I was harming them, knew that I was hurting them, knew that I was parsing my care into one basket, and yet justifying the ways that they were telling me that I was hurting them. And it did a lot of psychic damage to me. And it's what motivated me to go through years of what happened. It wasn't a thing where I thought I was going to become some different kind of activist or I was going to go to a different community. It felt like I was just going to lose everything that I every relationship I had my my sense of myself. But it felt necessary to do it. And the thing that motivated me all along, the thing that made me go to Shabbat dinners and have these sort of quiet conversations with people who were horrified and yet loved me, was the feeling of anger and condemnation at the harm that I caused. And so the thing that motivated me to say I have to write my own was the weeks after the previous presidential election because I was embedded in anti-racist activism. I was connected with lots of media people. I sort of had this relationship. I give speeches, I did all these sort of things, and it felt like in the weeks after that election, I suddenly started getting this feedback that I represented and had come from some kind of aberration or something that needed to be explained as a sort of a moment or needed to be understood in some sort of like human way, which, you know, all those things are true, but that the anger that they had felt no longer seemed relevant. And like I ended up spending the years, years since then, like writing a book, that essentially the thesis of it is that the heart of love is telling somebody when you know they're wrong, when you are angry at them, when you are harmed by them, when you are recoiling from them. That is exactly the same thing as caring about them. Like you can't those two things can't be separated. And I tried to write a book that that is essentially the thesis. It's like if you love and care about people, if you feel connected to them, you know, don't even think love because I think that sounds a little bit too much like your closest people. If you feel connected to them, you have a and you don't speak you don't tell them when you're outraged, when you are hurt, when your values are harmed by them, then you don't actually care. You don't actually love them. And I think you don't really stand up and love yourself. And I think it does a lot of damage to do that. And so if anything, I don't really want to be the apostle of tolerance, which is somebody called me. I don't view myself as the apostle of tolerance. I view itself as somebody who says if you are hurt and angry, you don't have the obligation to go walk up to a Nazi. But you do have the obligation to speak, to stand, to find your community and not accept that. And that's that's what I hope people take from it. And that's the part of my story that I felt was just lost constantly.
RABBI DANYA RUTTENBERG (00:13):
Thank you. The Talmud teaches there is no love without rebuke. And there is no peace without rebuke. So I feel like that really gets to the heart of this. I'm probably not the only person in the room with the recent presidential election on my mind, maybe. Should we be talking about de-radicalizing as our approach to encroaching fascism? Should we all be getting our dinner tables ready for the Nazis in and across our communities? Right. Like is is that the answer?
ADRIANNE BLACK (00:14):
I mean, no, no. My experience in Shabbat dinners, I would get invited to them. There were organizations that were founded and I don't mean this, you know, I think I went to some of the dinners they formed like some of the things they created were, you know, amazing spaces where people could talk. And it felt like a debate, but it also felt a little bit closer. And the and I still felt a bit used in that because there's a version of my experience that says, you know, if you invite a Nazi to dinner, they will see how kind you are and they will change and you will have done a great goodness in the world. And I think I don't really have to go much further than like, I don't believe that's how the world works. Like, I don't think that's how, I think it's almost like to look at my experience and say that that clearly must be what happened, it makes it sort of unbelievable because I can't imagine why that would ever happen. Like my experience, like I think maybe I was talking about a second ago was being in a community that I had gotten to know that I cared about, that found out that I kept myself from it, withheld all the white nationalist parts of me, I did not, I had shared with them who I thought I was to to their face, like who I thought I was like. And it was the version that I thought I was, but I didn't share, like who I presented myself in the world to be. I didn't share what I said. I didn't share the family I'd come from. I didn't share what I was committed to, what I expected to become a leader in. And so when they found that out, the response was outrage. The response was fear. The response was just years of debate about me on these public forums, about what to do about me, what to say about me. And the Shabbat dinners were, immediately after felt like, this is the only thing that was meaningful. Everybody else chased me away and I that was my sense of myself. And it took years to look back and say the Shabbat dinners were absolutely essential. I don't know what my life would look like had Matthew Stevenson and not invited me to his dinners. But the context is feels essentially like he was a dude who had my number because we shared a study guide. He was a person who shared like 30 friends in common. He was a person who had known me before. He was a person who knew I had dated somebody who was Jewish. He was a person who was very confused about how I presented myself in the world versus what he was reading on the website that my dad founded in my interviews and he knew I was personally kind. He knew I was friendly. He knew that he didn't feel scared of me. And it was this sort of decision that was incredibly selfless to invite me to his dinners. And most of his friends stopped coming when he invited me. But I think that it's pretty clear, if you think about that, that it's a lot easier to imagine what does it mean? What does it mean to engage with somebody? And to be clear, Matthew didn't engage like he made a point of don't talk to me about this at dinner, because everybody knows what I stand for in the world apparently. And he knew it was a space where this antisemitic ideology really was contradictory and my family would be outraged by it. He knew that he could sort of symbolically do that. But I think it's easier to sort of imagine what the selflessness means if you think about somebody who you're in community with, you have dozens of friends in common who you already have their number where you don't even know if they're going to come back again. But like you're inviting somebody who you know in that way and in a way that's that, he did invite a Nazi to dinner, but it was, you know, to hear him tell him we're very close friends. We both live in Baltimore like a 15 minute walk from each other now. And I still go to Shabbat dinners all the time, but like to hear him tell it, he was inviting a friend who is very confused about to dinner, and I think that's a hard decision to make. And I think people face hard decisions in their lives and sort of thinking about the psychic damage of not speaking, not inviting me would not necessarily have been him committing some immoral act. In fact, him and the other people who came to those dinners spent the years that I was coming to them convinced that they were the ones who are who are committing the immoral act because the campus was doing the thing that they knew they agreed with, which was make me feel uncomfortable. Stand up for the people who are afraid. Make sure that within your own community you do not say that it's fine if somebody makes anyone who you care about, feel unwelcome and feel afraid, if the rest of the world is going to be like that, they were not going to allow that. And they spent years inviting me to these dinners and like engaging talking to some people at the dinner started talking to me and I already wanted to figure out like, where's the contradiction? I didn't want to be somebody that all my friends were afraid of. And, you know, you can sort of see how that path led. But I think understanding the fact that they felt and were hearing from people for all those years that like you're welcoming somebody into a space that we are trying to make safe for all of us. And, you know, afterwards they get sort of held up and they have a lot of mixed feelings about being held up as like the people who did it when they felt and everybody else on the campus felt like the hostility, the condemnation, the middle fingers, the very clear, speaking of their values, when it did not feel comfortable to do it, like they all knew, that was what did it. And they were trying to participate in that in a way that felt much more personal because I was in their life already and they were just going to decide like, what to do about that.
RABBI DANYA RUTTENBERG (00:15):
Thank you. And I you know, to to put a finer point on it, you have said very explicitly that other people drawing the line and saying, no, this is unacceptable and and this is not okay. And and putting those social boundaries up is part of what also made you open to thinking in new ways, right? That it was it had to have been the both and. Right.
ADRIANNE BLACK (00:16):
I mean, there's the discussion, like if people care about, you know, you find yourself in a situation where you're trying to talk to somebody and you care about each other, but you are horrified by some parts of what they're doing in the world, which who would ever end up in that situation is, you know, the pieces that happened within that were the reason it was so hard. The reason why I think it took people who are coming to the dinners who are like not Jewish, not students of color, not feeling the wrath of the dehumanizing ideology that I had grown up in, like because they had to talk to me and understand what I argued in the way that I argued it, which is not something that I want to do. I don't want to talk to somebody who believes that, you know, I'm like less than human or something and try to understand, like, how would you argue this? Like, I can you can really see why I think that's like the essential way to think about when you're talking about like, you know, white people need to speak about racism and non-Jewish people need to speak about antisemitism. It's like sometimes that feels a little vague. But I think foundationally, it's like, I don't want to embody the arguments against my humanity to you, which is what happens if you're trying to change somebody's mind. If you care about each other and you can't prove that you understand what they have to say as well as they can. If you can't argue it as well as they can and still say it is horrible, it is wrong, I stand against it. I am I find it repulsive, like all these things where like I care about you so much. I understand your worldview as well as you do, and I find it repulsive is like that that is the space where you people change their minds. Like in you know, if you think about it that way, you sort of recognize why it's an enormous sacrifice, why it takes a very certain situation, a certain relationship to do that. And then thinking about anger, which is like the theme of of me in this world at this moment is holding the, I understand you and I find it repulsive part is very hard. Like it is very, very hard to do that in a community, in a space where you care about a person like. And I think that is one of the greatest things, sacrifices that I think I am experienced in my life. But I for me on my behalf.
RABBI DANYA RUTTENBERG (00:17):
It's it's such a gift and not not an obligation. A gift.
ADRIANNE BLACK (00:18):
I mean, it can't be an obligation. It has to be a choice. And I think when I say like it causes some psychic damage to say to not assert your values to somebody, I don't mean it in like, you know, if they had not invited me to dinner, if they had not debated me, they could have just joined the people who said like, this is horrible and this is awful and I condemn this. And they would have been consistent with themselves.
RABBI DANYA RUTTENBERG (00:19):
What about your parents? You resent them?
ADRIANNE BLACK (00:20):
I resent a lot of their choices. I have more fury at the way they raised me, focusing on their own self-image, their own desires, their own view of the world. And how much in it took me getting to become an adult to recognize how much they demanded conformity at their risk of essentially expulsion. Like I can't look back and it's partly gender experience transition in the world. And the fact that I, I don't think, I condemn their ideology 11 years ago and we maintain a relationship or at least maintained a relationship that was always tenuous, always hard. But they made a choice when I surprised them by doing that, that they wanted to stay in touch in some way. And they were the only people in the movement world I grew up in who I did stay in touch with. And yet gender seems like a bridge too far in some ways. And like I don't like to talk about current day relationships of people because I think privacy to figure that out is always there. But like it's a space that's still figuring out and it's writing the book thinking about that stuff is what made me recognize that raising your kids with the message that you you know what is right in the world. You know what is heroic, you know what is true. You know that the people who don't believe this are either misguided and need to learn the truth or if they have learned the truth, and it's very like religious sounding, it's like white nationalists believe that if you learn their ideology that, you know, you could never unknow it. Like it's like knowing it is like, you know, being revealed truth or something. And so therefore, everyone who's raised in it has been given the revealed truth. They don't use that phrase much like how they talk about it. And so if you grow up in this movement and you know their worldview as well as I did, and you choose to either disbelieve it or not act on it, you are going to be making a cowardly choice. You are going to be, making us not very proud. And they would essentially the reason I was very mixed up about this as an adolescent and a young adult and felt I'll still feel a lot of shame about my own choices, but like my upbringing and more resentful of now because they always made this clear thing about how they had come to their beliefs and so should I. I had to understand. I had to like justify and read and understand because you can't just believe this. It's an unpopular belief system. The mainstream media doesn't like it. You have to choose it for yourself. And then like growing up and looking back on that and realizing the message is
RABBI DANYA RUTTENBERG (00:21):
I'm so sorry. So what insights do you have for other people thinking through ideologies of their family of origin or other ideologies they've absorbed, how do you sort through when a belief that you've been raised with or that you've gotten or that you've absorbed in some way is is affirming, is or is toxic, is problematic. You've done so much work over the years to sort through and sift through and to understand, do you have some sort of heuristic that you might be able to share with us?
ADRIANNE BLACK (00:22):
I do a I, I mentioned earlier like I was, spent years ago, and I think there's just an important context in this. In some ways, I do view myself as like an interesting case study and I want what lessons can be taken from this experience in a way that I think comes from being like a ten year old who gave interviews. It's like I look at myself and I'm like, what are the life lessons we can all learn from this experience? And then then I go, you know, have a call with my best friend who's like, you know, you're not like a case study. You know, you're like, you know, And then we talking like, yeah, that's true. But I did spend years essentially before I had built before I learned how to build up a community, I condemned my family's beliefs. I knew they were wrong. I like gone through this experience. I had the feeling of like, I didn't want to be the person my friends were afraid of. And then I had to spend years, like, learning, you know, sitting with all the stuff that felt intellectual and need to, like, learn that race is not biological. And what does that mean? I need to learn about history. Like I had to do that. That's what took forever. It wasn't the feelings. It was the the learning. But then I got to the end of it and I felt like, well, I people I grew up getting hate mail in my email inbox from like millions of people telling me that I was deluded. And, you know, I was clearly indoctrinated and I had grown up in an extreme ideology and that I couldn't really believe this. And I felt offended because, you know, I thought I went to academic conferences held by white nationalists and talked to biology professors who were tenured, who could then talk about how white supremacist they were or antisemitic they were. And I'm like, well, I've spent all my teenage years like, learning why this turns out to be true and then to get to the end of that and say like, obviously it was all crazy, like it was all fake. It was all undeniably, ludicrously built on just a very facile world view. And I had believed it. So therefore, I believed it because I wanted to be a part of my community. I wanted to be cared about. I wanted to have all these relationships. I wanted to be somebody who could use my talents to sort of make the adults in my life a little less afraid of the world. And to come to that conclusion meant than I was for a minute I was like, well, how do I know what I ever believe? Like, it's all dependent on relationships, and I haven't lost that. I still think that the the act of persuasion, people changing their minds like facts are real. Like we have ways of knowing what is more or less rigorous in the world. But nobody, I don't think and maybe this is my most extreme belief at this point is like nobody has that comes to their belief system or upholds like the things they think are true about the world except through the relationships in their life. Like there's this mysterious relationship between what do we see in the world and what do we stand for and what do we believe is true, and who are the people we care about? And how do those things connect us to them? And it's like, you know, if you change that, there are things that you can imagine not believing anymore. And I think if you sort of think about your life experiences, you can know that changing your beliefs is not really that hard. Like if I believe that I know how wavelengths in the sky work and that's why the sky is blue, I could imagine believing something different. Like that's just a belief I have about the world and I don't expect to change it. But I could imagine it. And most things are like the most facts are like that. Values aren't, but like facts are like that. And I had this experience of like, changing all the facts and realizing that they had formed my identity. They had made me be somebody. If I called myself a white nationalist, that I had all these people who cared about me. If I didn't, I lost them all. And how could I just, you know, be sure about that? I wasn't like looking for community again. I was only looking for identity. And so I created the heuristic in my head about like, how can I know if I'm adopting a belief, if I'm thinking about something, if I am leaning into a political belief like whatever it is. And that measure was, is this something that allows me to imagine how I am connected to further and further groups of people? Because there's a it's a bit of a thought experiment because there's billions of people in the world, but you can sort of imagine the process of like, how am I related to connected to how do I care about some further circle of people who are not seemingly in my life, not seemingly someone I'm responsible for or who I love or care about, like whatever that is, and is this a belief that sort of allows me, at the very least, allows me to imagine how I'm more connected to other people? Or is it one that tells me why why it's okay that I'm not connected to them? Why I can sort of explain away why if I do anything that harms them, why it's actually okay that that I'm doing that or why they deserve it or, you know, there's a long list of things that people justify a lot of very convenient stuff in their life to try to feel safe and connected. And there's still a heuristic where you're open to it and willing to listen. People very frequently will tell you if you are hurting them and you don't have to go so far, you just have to work not so hard to like explain why it's fine that you're doing that or they're wrong or whatever it is. And most things that you believe, you know, some things don't speak to this too strongly. But like if it's in the back of my head, I can feel pretty confident about it anything that I'm thinking about or acting on or believing in, if it just doesn't foreclose the possibility of a relationship with a person who I don't quite know how I'm connected to, even if that always remains the thought experiment. It's a real like way to say, okay, yes, I, I can I can be intellectually free because I know where my how it aligns with my value.
RABBI DANYA RUTTENBERG (00:23):
Amen. Thank you. Yes. Tell me about the title of the book.
ADRIANNE BLACK (00:24):
Oh! Thank you. So this book came out several months ago. I have talked about it in a lot of places. I have not been I have not talked about the title. And, you know, to clarify, like, you know, it's been a lifelong thing, but it's been like the last few years and honestly, like the last week, I've been like very open
RABBI DANYA RUTTENBERG (00:25):
Amazing. I've said this to privately a couple of times. I think you, both as a combination of the experiences you have had but so much more because of the person that you are, have so much critical wisdom to offer us at this point in history. What what do we need to know? What do we need to be thinking about as a white Christian nationalism is taking over the government?
ADRIANNE BLACK (00:26):
I, I, I am cautious because I don't feel that I don't I'm not necessarily prognosticator like I have too much of my life I think has been around when I predict stuff and that gave me a lot of weird complexes as a teen and early 2012 like predict stuff and then people say, my God, you saw it. And what that was, is like things are much more consistent over time if you look at them, then, you know, the past can sort of lead you to understand what's going to happen usually. And where that leads me now, like my deep knowledge, is the far right. Like I and to clarify, like white nationalism thrives on the idea that it's marginal and it's never been marginal. It's always been, I grew up in a movement that I saw tens of thousands of people coming to marches for it who were not white nationalists. They were just people responding to its ideology, in the 90s, in the 2000s consistently over time. It's a movement that's small, inherently small and decentralized, and has 60 something years of history, but functions by sort of having concentric circles of attention where they their whole theory of change is that they're the people who get called extremists, but then they uphold an idea and they sort of work on messaging. They figure out ways that they can run political campaigns or help other people run political campaigns that tap into something that is just foundational. Like they grew up in the same society that all of us did. They live – you want to understand where they are. It's just the map of population in America. They live in every city and suburb and rural area in the country. It's who they are. It's where they come from. They thrive on the idea that people call them extremists, and then they can say like, look at me. I, you know, I go to Applebee's and I watch the same, you know, Avengers movie. And it because they are they are the same people as anyone. If anything, I think the only thing that like clarifies who becomes a part of the white nationalist movement is somebody who has a lot of trouble with like moral ambiguity. Like every single person who's ever come to the white nationalist movement is somebody who needs the world to be right or wrong. And they look at the same unequal world as we do as anybody does. They see the same inequality. They see wealth is predicted by what race people are born into. And some people become, you know, sort of activists who try to like change society. And they some people are, most people are kind of ambivalent about it. Most people just want their own life to be more comfortable and they want to sort of justify their own place in the world and not feel too bad about things. And then white nationalists are not comfortable with either of those, and they need the world to be right. They need the world to be true. They need that inequality to be exactly correct, like they need it to be justified by race or biology or something, because they can't live in a world that is like a social crime. They can't live in a world where everyone around them is living in, in totally unjust, unfair, unpredictable conditions based on randomness of laws in the 1700s. Like there's just not a world they can live in. It has to be correct. And that's what makes it white nationalists. But they use that to amplify their beliefs and that are much more passive in a lot of cases. And they have strategies. They've existed for decades. They're a part of the much wider right. Like I think it's important at this point to clarify that, like I grew up in the center of white nationalism, but that meant that I was like going to dinner with Trent Lott when he was like the Senate minority whip, like this world of the right was broad, like white nationalists exist within the right. Everyone within the right is sort of whether they reject them or not. I think one of the ways that you understand the connections between people is like, does somebody understand another person well enough to know they're not that? Like that makes them part of the same world like and like that's the existence of it. And so everybody on the right understands white nationalists' place and what their strategies are. And predictably, what's going to happen now is they always exist, but they respond to social and political conditions that are more accepting towards them. And so what happens is when you get more like leftist administration over a period of time, they're much more quiet. They focus on organizing and raising money. When you get a political moment that feels more conducive and welcoming to them, they sort of rise with the attention and you get more violent protests, you get more violent actions, you get more just outspoken public stuff. That's exactly what I would expect over the next year or two. And the personal response. That's the answer. Anybody who studies the far right can give you that answer. Like that's just how that works. And the personal answer that I feel like is the context of like this talk. Like I legitimately have given a lot of talks about this book. I've given a lot of talks in my life, and there's very few that I got quite as nervous about as this one. And the reason is because we're in Hyde Park. I moved to Hyde Park when I was afraid to tell – in 2016, before that election, when I was afraid to tell anybody about how I had grown up. Like there were people I lived I was roommates with who I didn't know for years before that that I had like, condemned this movement. It was here that I learned how to sort of redeem parts of my experience, like take something from it, contribute, find a way to sort of live a whole life. It was like all here was – I got here last night and I was walking around the streets and I was like, Wow. The days are exactly the same length. The weather is the same as it was when this happened before. And the streets look the same. The students – they can't be the same students, but like they look the same. And and I just had this sort of like, oh no. And I could feel in myself that the difference was last time I was very circumspect. I was very inhibited. I was very thoughtful about, I do not want to over speak. I do not want to – I turned down most invitations, like the the Obama Foundation here, invited me to give a speech and I said no, because I thought they were misunderstand – I was like, you know, I've done terrible things. You know, like, I don't think I should be speaking there. And they're like, okay. And and I feel, you know, less inhibited in that way. I feel more confident about myself. And I was noticing last night the last time I was like, I need to be I need to make sure that I'm like very cautious and careful everywhere. And and I realize this time I'm just furious. Like, I'm just, like, enraged. I'm really angry. And the reason for that is that I am quite terrified, though I am currently seeing – I'm worried about what I'm about to say, which I think is sounds like identity politics, but like – rich white people are quieter. And I know it's anecdotal and I know it's like, you know, who knows, like the world. But like, the difference is fewer university emails about, We know you and we love you and we will protect you. Fewer statements from wealthy people who run companies about like, This is not the country that I want. This is not this is I care for certain people like, more obsequiousness, more collaboration, more quietness, more willing to willingness to bend which is exactly I know this. I've seen it. I grew up with it. This is the foundational thing that white nationalists view. Like even if they don't say it, they do say it actually is like they always operate, they find people, they motivate people, they build a movement on people's fears. And that does not have to be just like fear of an other. It does not have to be fear, like any, racism is like very specific culturally in some ways, but in other ways you just give certain status to some people and to others and you tell them that it's because of the identity you've given them and they will go with that. They're like, That's what racism is. That's what antisemitism is. These things have long legacies of like class class structure that is based on an identity. But the other version of it is fear of retribution, fear of consequence, fear of something that I think I really want to ask people to like ask yourself, What are you afraid of? Because I think the thing that you need to be much more afraid of is losing your humanity, like you, if you if you get to a point in your life and you realize that you have justified, though, you have justified turning your back on people who you knew you were connected to, and yet you thought it was not politic, you thought it was not quite safe. You thought it was a little uncertain to, like, speak too much, do too much in that way because you didn't know what would happen to you. And it takes the form of a lot of justification. People rarely think, oh I'm just, you know, turning my back on the world. But there's that's my fear for now. It's like that I don't feel like we can count on people who have things to lose, to recognize what it means to be a humane person. And I know that's a big statement and I know we don't know, but it feels like the difference. It feels like the ambiance is silence and quietness. And if someone's quiet now, like a year from now, what are they? Like like don't, some people don't have a choice and others do. And to make a choice to look out for yourself in an ambiguous way is like we've seen that, that's happened. The other reason I'm nervous, which I know is going to sound hyperbolic and I thought about it and I'm like, Oh can I say this? Is like the reason that I've been thinking about this event is not this date and this event. And it's not just because I knew it would be right after the election, but today is November 9th. To people who are familiar with German history, November 9th is the day when so many things happen. Like November 9th is the day that Hitler attempted a coup in 1923 and failed and then wrote Mein Kampf afterwards. November 9th is the same date that Kristallnacht, like the pogroms on Jewish people across Germany, took place in 1938, I think. And then, you know, it's also weirdly the date that the Berlin Wall fell. But in Germany, November 9th is this day of memory. It's a day of fate. And today is the day like, you know, we're at the 101st anniversary of Hitler's attempted coup. You know, it's I'm not trying to say like, you know, I don't think this is Germany in the 30s. I think this is like America in the 1920s. If we want to really draw a real parallel. But like America in the 1920s was a terrifying place and the possibilities are endless. And the only way that I feel like I know how to respond is just the sort of natural one that is coming up for me kind of unexpectedly, which is anger, not fear, but anger.
RABBI DANYA RUTTENBERG (00:27):
Thank you. Remember, the first rule of resisting authoritarianism is do not comply in advance. I think this is a great point point to pause. The heuristic, right? The the the framework that we should use to test our beliefs is how much does it connect us to other people? How much does it draw us closer to those with whom we are not already connected? The way we bring other people closer is through community. And as my friend Jaclyn Friedman says, the answer to despair is community. Everybody please say thank you, a big thank you to Adrianne Black.
ADRIANNE BLACK (00:28):
Thank you so much.
RABBI DANYA RUTTENBERG (00:29):
Thank you very much for being here.
[Audience applause]
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ALISA ROSENTHAL (00:33):
For more information on Adrianne Black and Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg, as well as links to their works, head to chicagohumanities.org or check the show notes.
Chicago Humanities Tapes is produced and hosted by me, Alisa Rosenthal, with help from the great staff over at Chicago Humanities who are producing the live events and making them sound fantastic. Want to hear more? The best way to support our programming is to leave a rating and review, hit subscribe to be notified about new episodes, and check our backlog for a gem you might’ve missed. We’ll be back in two weeks with another new episode for you. Thanks for listening, and as always, stay human.
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