Pushing the Rock

One of the two main people who argued with Black at college was Matthew Stevenson, a middle-of-the-road Republican and kippah-wearing Jew. Stevenson invited Black to share his Shabbat dinner. He combed through Black’s posts on Stormfront, realizing that Black had little sense of the world outside the far right.

Black was still broadcasting on white nationalist radio at the time and still peddling the myth that whites were suffering a genocide. This was an engaged, left-leaning campus; students called strikes to demand Black’s expulsion.

In The Klansman’s Son, the memoir she published last year, Black describes those willing to deprogram her as having manifested an almost superhuman patience. It took her three years to abandon her worldview. Each Friday, Black was still coming to Stevenson’s room, hungry for friendship but in no hurry to back down:

The thing I dug my heels in was an argument that my family’s ideology was oriented towards hatred. They didn’t go around saying, they wanted to harm people. It took me a long time to get to the point of accepting that they were in fact rooting their whole identity in contempt of other people.

The dinners, Stevenson told friends, were a challenge to Black’s ideology. To one friend who complained that Black wasn’t changing quickly enough, Stevenson wrote, “It’s our job to push the rock, not necessarily to move the rock. That’s the only part we can control.”

Allison Gornik joined the Shabbat dinners. She had initially boycotted them when Black was asked and only returned later and reluctantly. She confronted Black, saying that fascism was “harmful and illogical and twisted.” She collected articles about institutional racism and challenged Black’s junk statistics about race and crime.

A Collective Project

While the dinners were going on, a regular poster on the Stormfront website called Wade Michael Page attacked a Sikh temple in Wisconsin, killing six people. Black believed she had contributed to those deaths.

Until then, her position had been that racist ideas were a provocation without consequences, but she was starting to see the link between violent rhetoric and actual suffering. In 2013, Black wrote to the Southern Poverty Law Center renouncing fascism. Since that time, she has opposed fascism and the far right, giving interviews to radio, television, and the press. She has more recently come out as trans.

In the stories of most former fascists, we are invited to praise the individual who renounces evil through some quality of goodness that belongs to them and them alone. We don’t hear about the intermediaries who helped them. We do not see their frustration with arguments that ended most often in failure. While their work might be needed, it is rarely rewarding.

Black is unusual among former fascists in that she is willing to credit her friends for her deradicalization. Stevenson’s dinners, she recalls,

were a lot more popular before I was coming. He was more conservative than other people on campus, already was a bit isolated. It took a social toll. The line was more that he was white, he didn’t really get the toll that racism took. Then he would have to explain, and say he had a deep belief in human dignity and thought people could change. But it’s not comfortable having to explain all that.

For Gornick too, the role of helper was a burden. At one point, “Allison made this firm request. She wanted to avoid being seen socially with me, not in a small residential college.” Gornick and Stevenson wanted Black to change, but the longer she held her ground, the more her friends had to consider the risk that all their work would be in vain:

They were thinking if years from now, the person they hung out in college would carry on being a white nationalist leader, they’d believe they made the wrong choice by socializing with me and making me more comfortable during our time at college, seeming to tolerate my hurtful beliefs.

Ready to Listen?

For several years now, Black has been touring around organizations, speaking to liberal and left audiences. Her audience want to hear her story, and they bring narratives of their own — of lovers or relatives who’ve been lost to the far right:

To anybody who tells about their friend, their mum, I ask: who are they to you? Who are you to them? It’s the same question that Allison and Matthew used to ask me, who was I to them? If you get an answer to that question, it means you know if they’ll respond with consideration to the things you say. If the answer is your mum is just sticking fingers in her ears, then it’s going to be very hard. But if people respond, and they care, you know whether they are ready to listen to you.

The most obvious risk associated with Black’s question is that someone you love may well tell you that you mean less to them than some stranger they’ve met online. Black reports that in her family, there were all sorts of people who her parents had cut out. They’d argued too much and been rebuffed: “I didn’t know I had a whole bunch of cousins, they weren’t allowed to speak to my family because my family was unhinged.”

But there’s a second risk too. Because if the person you’re talking to says they love and respect you, then the burden of having to argue with them can also be heavy. “If there’s an opening,” Black says, “you just have to try your hardest, work with the ideas you have.”