Welcome to DU! The truly grassroots left-of-center political community where regular people, not algorithms, drive the discussions and set the standards. Join the community: Create a free account Support DU (and get rid of ads!): Become a Star Member Latest Breaking News Editorials & Other Articles General Discussion The DU Lounge All Forums Issue Forums Culture Forums Alliance Forums Region Forums Support Forums Help & Search

WhiteTara

(30,222 posts)
Tue May 28, 2024, 12:35 PM May 2024

Ex-KKK leader's child comes out as transgender in new memoir

https://www.yahoo.com/news/ex-kkk-leader-child-comes-140000400.html

R. Derek Black’s coming out story is complicated.

As a child, Black came out to the world as a white nationalist on the syndicated daytime talk program “The Jenny Jones Show” in 1999. Then, while trying to hide their white nationalist credentials as a college student roughly a decade later, Black was outed in a student-run online forum. In 2013, Black came out yet again: In an article published by the Southern Poverty Law Center, Black condemned white supremacy and their famous family’s ideology and came out as an antiracist.

Now, in the memoir “The Klansman’s Son,” the 35-year-old child of former Ku Klux Klan leader Don Black and a close family friend of the notorious former KKK grand wizard David Duke is coming out as transgender.
“You can sort of bury these things, and for a lot of my teenage years, it was often feeling like it wanted to burst through,” Black, who uses they/them and she/her pronouns, told NBC News. “But it was also something that I just didn’t talk about with almost anybody.”

snip

As a college student, they continued to host their morning neo-Nazi radio show, “The Derek Black Show,” in secrecy from their peers. Simultaneously, Black formed close friendships with the same groups of people they regularly targeted on the radio: Jewish people and people of color.

“It just became intolerable,” they said. “I couldn’t manage this sort of split that was going on, and I couldn’t even imagine coming back to campus and having to keep doing it, wondering when the shoe is going to drop, when people were going to find out about me.”

Latest Discussions»Issue Forums»LGBT Civil Rights and Activism»Ex-KKK leader's child com...