Why are some Black conservatives drawn to Nick Fuentes? |
Far-right activist Nick Fuentes continues to gain momentum.
The openly racist and antisemitic podcaster has emerged as an influential figure on the American political right. Recent profiles in The Atlantic and The New York Times have elevated the 27-year-old into practically a household name.
But as a scholar of the American right, I’ve been fascinated by one aspect of Fuentes’ rise: the way some Black podcast hosts and political influencers have been receptive to some of his views.
“Isn’t that amazing?” Black pastor and radio host Jesse Lee Peterson gushed after hosting Fuentes on his show in 2023. “Finally, a white man standing up for what is right. And you heard him say it – he hate no one.”
At first blush, this might sound counterintuitive. Fuentes champions a racist vision of national populism. He has promoted the idea that the country’s identity depends on preserving its white majority. In the past, he’s defended Jim Crow, the segregationist legal regime that governed the South from the late-19th century to the 1960s, arguing that segregation was better for both Black and white Americans. He’s openly disavowed miscegenation, and castigated Vice President JD Vance for marrying an Indian woman and fathering mixed-race children.
Black people and white nationalists, however, have joined forces in the past. And a number of cultural and political shifts have broadened Fuentes’ appeal to Americans of all races.
In the 20th century, Black and white nationalists were able to find common ground on the topic of racial separatism.
Marcus Garvey, a leading proponent of the back-to-Africa movement in the 1920s, and Elijah Muhammad, the former leader of the Nation of Islam, saw white nationalists as kindred spirits.
Garvey envisaged a new nation built by the descendants of African slaves. To him, the ostensible racism of the Ku Klux Klan helped drive home his message that the U.S. would never be a place that could incorporate Black people as equals. In 1922, he met with Edward Young Clarke, the Klan’s acting leader. Garvey later explained how the two shared the same vision: Clarke “believes America to be a white man’s country, and also states that the Negro should have a country of his own in Africa.”
Meanwhile, Muhammad