When R. Derek Black was a child, they were considered the heir to the white nationalist movement in America. Their father, Don, a former Grand Wizard in the Ku Klux Klan, had created Stormfront, the legacy white supremacist website; Derek ran Stormfront’s corollary site for children, co-hosted a white nationalist radio show with their father, spoke at white nationalist conferences, and successfully won a Republican committee seat in Palm Beach County, Florida. Derek’s mother had been married to David Duke; Duke was Derek’s godfather.

But Derek’s life changed when they enrolled in New College of Florida. The Sarasota school is now known for its 2023 conservative political takeover by Christopher Rufo—a takeover Black lamented in a previous interview with Slate. But for most of its history, New College was a progressive haven. Black, while attending, lived a double life until they were outed on a studentwide email thread; what followed was a remarkable and successful student-led effort to convert Black, as documented in the 2018 book Rising Out of Hatred by the journalist Eli Saslow. In 2013, Black publicly renounced their former ideology and now speaks out publicly against it, while also pursuing a doctoral degree at the University of Chicago researching proto-racism in early medieval intellectual history.

This singular life story is now the subject of Black’s memoir. The Klansman’s Son: My Journey From White Nationalism to Antiracism, which covers their childhood in the movement, their ideological transformation, the fallout, and their political awakening with the rise of Donald Trump, came out on Tuesday. Slate spoke with Black, who is transgender and now uses they/she pronouns, about their ideological journey, how they are thinking about student-led activism, the recent protest movement—and how they understand this moment in American politics, when the war in Gaza has realigned people on the left and the right. This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Slate: How did you decide to write this book now, and why?

R. Derek Black: I thought about it for the first time shortly after the Trump election [in 2016]. About three years before that, I had written this public statement condemning my family, and I genuinely thought that would be the last time that I spoke publicly about anything. I was very happy that I had been able to find some kind of niche in academia in medieval history. And after wrestling with how much harm I had caused, I didn’t even understand how it could be an ethical choice to speak out publicly. But watching the Trump campaign, it started feeling sort of cowardly to not be speaking out, as opposed to a moral choice.

People asked me to write a book, and I chose not to. It didn’t feel right—I didn’t have enough context or distance from my family or the movement they built. And I didn’t understand how to think about the Trump movement in relation to white nationalism.

But after Biden won, I decided that this was the time. I had a strong sense that the far-right movement would likely surge, because that’s just historically how that works. And that’s what I would have been doing, had I been in the midst of it still; it just would have made sense as a strategy. With Jan. 6, once again, I had people interested in [a book]. Since January of 2021, I’ve been working on it.

How is your book different from the 2018 story of your conversion that’s told in Eli Saslow’s Rising Out of Hatred?

When I first started writing this one, I wrote it as 13 essays about how people change their minds. My big understanding of my life is that our beliefs that are really core to us are the same thing as the community of people we care about. If we want to try to persuade somebody, the question is, then, who is the community of people they care about? How do they see themselves as being loyal and beholden to those people? Somebody changing........

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