Bret Weinstein speaks with Daryl Davis on his experience engaging with members of the KKK, emphasizing the importance of dialogue, empathy, and understanding in breaking down barriers. Find Dary Davis at https://daryldavisspeaking.com and on X at https://www.x.com/realdaryldavis ***** This episode is sponsored by Timeline. Timeline accelerate the clearing of damaged mitochondria to improve strength and endurance: Go to http://www.timeline.com/darkhorse and use code darkhorse for 20% off yo...
Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse podcast Inside Rail.
My next guest is somebody I have wanted to have on the podcast for the longest time.
He is Daryl Davis.
Daryl Davis studied jazz.
He plays rock and roll and blues.
And he is an all around marvelous person that I have had the good fortune to meet twice in person.
He has a new book out.
You'll understand the nature of this book very shortly.
The book is called The Clan Whisperer.
I have not read it yet.
It's brand new, but I'm excited about it.
And I will just say.
that he fits the term dark horse in the best possible sense of the term.
I will explain that connection shortly, but in the meantime, Daryl, welcome to Dark Horse.
Thank you, Brett, for having me.
Really appreciate it.
We're looking forward to this for a long time as well.
So when I say that you fit the title of the podcast, when I started the podcast, my intent was to interview people who had done extraordinary things from backgrounds that would not lead you to expect those particular accomplishments.
The podcast got caught.
And so that sort of changed the orientation, but I still retain my fascination for people who accomplish the extraordinary without being trained to do it.
Daryl, you came to my attention, and I think most people know you, as a guy who took it upon himself to go and talk to Ku Klux Klan members and despite how that sounds actually has succeeded in bringing many of them back into the fold of civilization,
getting them to put down their robes and come join the rest of us.
That is an amazing accomplishment, and I just feel it deserves wider notice.
Well, I appreciate that.
And you made an interesting point there, that I'd done something that I was not trained to do.
And that is correct in many senses, but the opposite side of that would be perhaps people don't do it because they're trained not to do it, you know, from an early age.
So, you know, if we go back to my childhood, I'm age 67 right now, and I was a child of parents in the U.S. Foreign Service, State Department.
So I grew up as an American embassy kid.
I was born in 58 and began traveling around the world in 1961 at the age of three.
And how it works is you're assigned to a foreign country abroad for two years.
with the American embassy and then you come back home here to the states you're here for a few months perhaps a year and then you're reassigned to another foreign country for two years so back and forth back and forth were the formative years of my life.
And my first introduction to school, Brett, was overseas.
I did kindergarten, first grade, third grade, fifth grade, seventh grade, all in different schools in different countries.
Now here's the interesting thing.
My classmates that I had in my classrooms overseas were from all over the world.
Because anybody who had an embassy where we had our U.S. embassy stationed, all of their kids went to the same school.
So this little girl right here sitting next to me might have been from Czechoslovakia, this kid from Japan, that kid from Nigeria, that kid from Russia.
If you opened the door to my classroom you'd say oh my goodness you know this is a united nations of little children because that's exactly what it was and that being my first introduction to school became my baseline for what school is supposed to be and you know i always hear about people tribalizing you know that that word is foreign to me because i tribalize with everybody and they start at an early age so that's why i would say you know,
I wasn't trained to do this, but it just came more or less natural because I was always around them, whereby, you know, people here in our own country for the longest time it was forced segregation and then as a result people tend to self-segregate just just through through habit or what have you tradition culture you know whatever but every time I would come back home after my dad's two-year assignment wherever we were Africa Europe wherever I
would be either in I would either be an all-black school or a black and white school meaning the still segregated or the newly integrated.
And just because desegregation was passed four years before I was born in 1954, schools and society do not integrate.
overnight.
Even today, in 2025, some school districts are still having issues with segregation.
So it was odd to me to see that having a baseline of the one that I described to you.
Well, I get a couple of things from this description.
One is in thinking about how to encapsulate what I understand you've been doing, It strikes me that you're somebody who has done extremely well by his people and by his people obviously at one level means black people but i also think you've done very well by your people americans and very well by your people humans that this is effectively what i get off you
when i hear you speak is that you you know you are who you are but you've had the benefit of this tremendously horizon broadening upbringing and you're trying to bring the benefit of that perspective to everyone including clan members which is just the most extraordinary uh instinct.
It's incredibly admirable and I think a little hard to wrap our minds around.
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Well, let me give you my very favorite quote of all time.
It was by Samuel Clemens, otherwise known as Mark Twain.
It's called the travel quote.
And Mark Twain said, Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness.
And many of our people need it sorely on these accounts.
Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.
And that is so true.
Now, as a musician, I have played in all 50 states here in this country.
If you combine my childhood travels with my parents, and now my adulthood travels as a musician performing abroad or lecturer, what have you, combine those two sets of travels, I've been to 64 countries on six continents.
What does that mean other than I have a lot of frequent flyer miles right in hotel points?
What it means is I've been exposed to a wide variety of people of all shades of color, ethnicities, religions, belief systems, ideologies, etc.
And all of that has helped shape who I have become.
Now, all that travel does not make me a better human being than someone with less travel.
But what it does is it gives me a better and broader perspective of humanity, on humanity, than those who may not have traveled as extensively because all they can do is presume what that person across the Atlantic or Pacific Ocean is like, where I can tell you what they're like because I've been there.
Okay, so unfortunately, according to our own U.S. Census Bureau, most Americans do not travel.
Less than 40% even own a passport.
So, you know, that's very telling.
And so I try to, you know, bring that kind of education, that kind of knowledge.
to people who may not have been exposed.
I'm not condemning them.
I'm just trying to open their minds a little bit.
And our country is so rich in diversity that the things that I've done since childhood, traveling back and forth to Europe or Africa or South America or Asia or whatever, we don't even have to do today by virtue of what we're doing right now.
You're in Washington State.
I'm in Washington, D.C. and we're right here together, right?
But people don't take those opportunities to talk to their own fellow American in another state or from another ethnicity or what have you.
We have it all right here.
So I wonder if your, I don't want to say training, but your experience as a musician actually contributes to this, especially in an innovative modality like jazz, where you and another musician can sit down and create something that is emergent between you.
a way that you know if you're a You're building up an impression of who you are and you're broadcasting it, but there's no interaction.
So you think music plays into this?
Absolutely.
No question about it.
You know, now you mentioned jazz, you know, jazz is based upon improvisation, you know, and most of your early jazz musicians did not even read music, you know, they wouldn't know a scale from Shinola, right?
They just played what they felt.
And every time they played the same song again, it was different.
They might phrase it a little differently, they might speed it up, they might choose another note within what what musicologists would call a scale.
I learned all my scales and all my modes when I majored in music.
But, you know, jazz is played from the heart, not from the chart, if you will.
So, yeah.
So yes, it is very improvisational, but music is definitely the universal language.
So let's just say, for example, today is Friday, and I'm a musician.
Normally, I would be playing on Friday night.
I play all week long, but I'll be playing on Friday night, and so people can dance and be entertained.
I'm the entertainer.
So tonight I have off, and I want to be entertained.
I don't want to be out there working on the stage.
I want to be out there on the dance floor, shaking it.
So I go down to a local club and maybe there's a band there, maybe there's a DJ, but there's music and a dance floor.
That's what I want to do.
So I go there.
A good song is playing.
I want to dance.
I look around to see if I see an unattached female I can dance with.
I see some lady sitting at the bar and by herself and she's patting her hand on the bar in time to the music.
So obviously she likes that song.
I don't know her.
I'm going to walk up to her and say, hey, you want to dance?
She says, yeah, sure.
Hops off her bar stool.
We walk out onto the dance floor.
If it's a slow song, we got our arms wrapped around each other and we're turning around slowly on the floor.
If it's a fast song, we're apart, we're shaking, whatever.
At the end of the, I don't even know this person.
At the end of the dance or the song, I escort her back to where I found her.
Thank you for the dance.
My name is Daryl.
She says, my name is Jen or what have you.
And I say, so, Jen, what do you do?
And she says, well, I'm the vice president of marketing for some major multi-billion dollar corporation.
I'm like, whoa.
And she says, what do you do, Daryl?
And I say, well, I'm a bus boy at one of the local chain restaurants.
What am I making?
Maybe nine, ten thousand dollars a year.
She's making, you know, a couple million or whatever a year.
Where would two people?
that far apart on the spectrum come this close and not even know each other's names.
Music does that.
Now, I just gave you a hypothetical example.
I'm going to give you a real one.
There was a bar not too far from where I live.
I live in Maryland about 15 minutes over the Washington DC line, a town called Silver Spring.
But about an hour and 20 minutes north of Washington DC, about 45 minutes north of me, is a town called Frederick, Maryland.
And there used to be a bar there called the Silver Dollar Lounge.
Silver Dollar Lounge had a longstanding reputation of not being welcoming to black people.
There were no signs posted like, you know, like you used to see of the colored only drinking fountain or restroom, all that kinds of stu nothing like that you just knew if you were black you were not welcome there and if you go somewhere where uh where you're not welcome and alcohol is being served it's not always a good combination right so i you know i was well aware of the reputation and i'd never been in there but i joined this country band country music had made a resurgence you know it had never gone away but it had kind of like gone falling
off the top 40 charts if you will And then a movie came out called Urban Cowboy with John Travolta.
A lot of country music.
So all the venues began changing their format from top 40 and disco, whatever was going on to country music.
So, you know, if you're a full-time musician, you got to play what people want to hear.
And I have no problem with country.
Country and blues are kissing cousins.
They use the same three chords.
It's society that divides us and puts us in categories.
So anyway, I joined this country band.
I'm the only black guy in the band.
And they were pretty popular around the Maryland area.
They played there many times.
And so now they're going back there and I'm in the band.
So I knew the reputation, but hey, you know what?
I'm here to play music.
So I go.
And of course, I got some looks when I came in.
But we did our set.
People danced.
And on the break, I'm following the band to go sit down at the table with them after the first set and I feel somebody from behind put their arm across my shoulder and I'm turning around trying to see who's touching me I'm getting ready to take somebody out if I have to because I know the reputation and I don't know anybody in this joint and I see the whole band in front of me so who's putting their hands on me and I turn around and it was this white gentleman 15,
18, maybe even 20 years older than me.
Big smile on his face.
He goes, man, I sure love Y'all's music.
I said, thank you.
I appreciate that.
And I shook his hand.
And he pointed at the stage and said, I've seen this here band before, but I ain't never seen you.
Where'd you come from?
And I explained, well, yes, they've played here before, they told me.
But this is my first time.
I just joined the band.
Man, I sure love your piano plan.
This is the first time I ever heard a black man play piano like Jerry Lee Lewis.
Now, I took it as a compliment.
I was not offended by what he was saying.
But I was surprised that given his age and being that much older than me, that he did not know the black origin of Jerry.
Lee Lewis's piano style.
And I proceeded to tell him that Jerry Lee got it from the same place I did, from black blues and boogie woogie piano players.
That's where that rock and roll, rockabilly style came from.
Oh, no, no, no.
I never heard no black man play like that except for you.
So I'm thinking, okay, well, dude never saw Little Richard or Fat's Domino.
You know, he's in that zone.
And so I said, look, man, I know Jerry Lee Lewis.
He's a very good friend of mine.
You know, he's told me himself.
He didn't believe I knew Jerry Lee.
He didn't believe Jerry Lee learned anything from black people, but he was fascinated with me.
And he insisted that I come back to his table and let him buy me a drink.
Now, I don't drink alcohol.
I never did.
But I went back to his table, let him buy me a cranberry juice.
He pays the waitress, takes his glass, and clinks my glass and then cheers me and says, you know, this is the first time I ever sat down and had a drink with a black man.
I'm just sitting here just totally baffled, which is why it's so important to understand how my upbringing was, where I've been around everybody.
You know, so it was baffling to me that I know there are black people in Frederick, Maryland.
I've seen them.
So how is it that he did not, you know, in all his years sit down with one?
And so innocent, I wasn't trying to be facetious.
I just said, why?
And he looked out at the table, didn't say anything.
I asked him again.
I said, why?
He didn't answer.
His buddy elbowed him and said, tell him, tell him, tell him.
I said, tell me.
He says, I'm a member of the Ku Klux Klan.
Well, I burst out laughing at the guy, just like he just did.
I thought it was funny as anything, right?
Because I know a lot about the Klan.
I had some racist incidents when I was a little kid.
People throwing rocks and bottles at me as the only black scout in a parade.
So racism fascinated me, but it didn't dawn on me that I was sitting down with one of these kinds of people.
And so I thought the guy was pulling my leg.
And I'm laughing because I know a whole lot about the Klan and they don't just come up and embrace some black guy and want to hang out and buy him a drink.
So I'm going along with the joke.
He goes inside his pocket, pulls out his wallet, flips through it, and handed me his Klan membership card.
I instantly recognized the Klan emblem, which is a red circle, white cross, and blood drop in the center.
This thing was for real, so I stopped laughing.
It wasn't funny anymore.
I gave it back to him, and I'm sitting here thinking to myself, am I in the Twilight Zone?
Why am I sitting here, you know, with a member of the KKK?
And, but he was very, very friendly.
You know, we talked about the Klan, different things.
He gave me his phone number.
and wanted me to call him anytime I was to return to the Silver Dollar Lounge because he wanted to bring his friends, you know, clansmen and clanswomen, right?
right um to see as he put it the black guy who plays like jerry lee i'm not sure that's how he told it to me i'm not sure he called me the black guy to his friends but uh you know whatever right so i'd call him about every six weeks because you know we were on rotations with other bands every six weeks and um i'd call him like on wednesday or thursday and say hey ma'am you know we're playing down at the silver dollar this weekend come on out he'd come he'd bring clansmen and clanswomen not in robes and hoods but in street clothes,
you know, and they come in there and they dance and they gather around the piano, the stage, and watch me play the piano.
On the break, I'd make my way over to his table, thank him for coming.
I'd meet some of his fellow members.
And now two of them didn't want anything to do with me.
When they see me coming, they'd get up and move to the other side of the room.
So I'd hang out with the other ones.
And they were very curious.
I guess they never sat down and talked to a black guy either.
But that went on for about a year.
And then I quit that band, and I went on back to playing rock and roll and R&B and whatever else.
And then it dawned on me.
Because I had formed a question after that incident where I had rocks and and bottles thrown at me at the age of 10.
I formed a question in my mind which was, how can you hate me when you don't even know me?
You know, and I've been looking for the answer to that question ever since.
But it dawned on me a few years after this meeting with this Klan guy.
You know, I didn't stay in touch with him after I left the band and went on with other bands in my own band.
I had no reason to hang out with the Ku Klux Klan.
I mean, I do now, but I wasn't back then.
And so it dawned on me, Daryl, you blew it.
The answer to your question that's been plaguing you since the age of 10, it fell right into your lap.
And you didn't even realize it.
Who better to ask that question of?
How can you hate me when you don't even know me than to ask someone who would go so far as to join an organization with over 100 year history of practicing hating people who don't look like them or who don't believe as they believe.
Get back in contact with that guy.
Talk to him.
Get him to introduce you to the Grand Dragon from Maryland.
Grand Dragon means state leader, what you and I would call governor.
Imperial wizard means national leader, which you and I would call president.
You know, meet the Grand Dragon, you know, maybe hook me up with the Imperial Wizard, travel up north, down south, Midwest, West, interview different members and leaders, and write a book.
Because no book had ever been written on the Ku Klux Klan by a black author.
There had been two black authors who wrote books detailing how each one escaped a lynching, one in the 1930s, one in the 1940s, but not from the perspective of sitting down face to face, interviewing their potential lynchers.
And that's what I wanted to do.
And so I got back in contact with the guy.
The guy was not having any of it.
He was not taking me to the Grand Dragon or nothing.
He goes, Daryl, I can't do that.
He was fearful for his own safety as well as mine.
And I persuaded him to give me the Grand.
I knew who the Grand Dragon was.
I'd never met him.
I knew his name.
I said, yo, please give me his address and his phone number.
I'll take care of it.
Well, he didn't want to do that either.
But after 20 minutes of arm twisting, figuratively, he consented on the premise that I not reveal where I got this guy's personal information.
So that put me on that trajectory to write the book.
I interviewed that guy.
I began traveling all over the country, interviewing different members and leaders.
and other white supremacists.
And when you focus on one group, you will get people on the fringe.
You'll get black supremacists, you'll get neo-Nazis, you'll get Church of the Creator, you'll get the.
West Barrow Baptist people, you know, all kinds of people.
So that's how that started.
All right.
I definitely want to get to the continuation of this story, but there are a couple themes that you raise in there that resonate very strongly with me, and I think it's worth highlighting them.
So I will say, I don't know how much you know about my story, but I came to public attention when 50%.
And my instinct, which they caught on tape, was to try to reason with them and show them that the judgment that they had reached without knowing me was just simply incorrect.
So anyway, that created a whole whirlwind of events, but nonetheless, I feel the exact drive that you do.
If you find that people are prejudiced without cause, then I don't want to speak for you, but to me, it almost feels like a puzzle to be solved, a challenge of some kind.
Like I would, you know, sure there's, it's frightening, but it's, it's, I'm curious as to whether or not I can break through that veil of prejudice and reach the person on the other side.
And it sounds like.
you have that instinct and I'm wondering you've told us a little bit about where it comes from, but not just your view of the world that came from your upbringing, but do you know where?
in you the drive to see if you can short circuit that prejudice comes from?
Yeah, in me, yes.
Because like, say, for example, I lived in Africa for 10 years, for example.
And as a kid, every time I'd come home and go to a new school, people had to go around the classroom.
You say where you're from, where you just came from, et cetera.
And when I would mention some African country, I'm from here.
I'm an American.
Generations, generations, but I just came back from my dad's assignment and people were like fascinated, kids, that I'd been to Africa.
first thing they asked me I'm not joking Did you see Tarzan?
Things like that.
Did you live in a mud hut?
You know, were lions and tigers running through your backyard?
This is complete ignorance, all right?
A, there are no tigers in Africa, okay, unless it's in a zoo.
You know, you find them in India and over here or something like that.
But no, there were no lions running through my backyard.
I went on safari as I saw them out in the open, you know.
But so, you know, one's perception is one's reality.
So rather than get furious, I got curious, which is exactly, you know, your, you know, your thing, you know, these people didn't know you.
Something, somebody had said something you had said had been misconstrued or what wherever they came up with this perception you know they were they were you know they they felt that they knew you and and now they're going to put you in your place so one's perception is one's reality here's the thing one of the things that i've learned or two things i've learned a lot of things but two very important things in situations like this is to realize that that whatever somebody perceives becomes
their reality, even if it's not real.
Number one, you cannot change anybody's reality.
All right.
What is real to them is real to them.
That's it.
Okay.
What you can do is you can offer them a different perception or perceptions, plural.
If they resonate with one of those perceptions, then they will change their own reality.
All right.
So it's kind of almost counterintuitive.
You know, our first instinct, you know, when we're attacked is to attack back, you know, and, you know.
defy whatever it is, you know, they're trying to put across on you because, you know, they don't know what they're talking about, so I'm going to set them straight.
They're already convinced.
So rather than attack their reality, give them another perception.
For example, I'll give you two examples.
One hypothetical and one real that I've both experienced.
All right, so let's say you have a younger brother, maybe seven or eight years old.
He goes off to the magic show with his buddies.
And he comes home and tells you, Brett, you're not going to believe this magician on stage.
picked a female out of the audience, brought her up on stage, and had her climb into this long box and put her feet out the hole at that end and her head out the hole at this end.
And he closed the lid.
He took a chainsaw went right through the middle came out the bottom he cut her in half man and then he told her to wiggle her feet out the hole and she wiggle her feet and you say listen it didn't really happen like that yes it did i was there i saw with my own eyes you weren't even there i saw it he's 100 right you have attacked his reality he was there and you were not there so how dare you tell him he did not see what he saw right so You know it's not real.
You're old enough to know you can't just cut somebody in half and they wiggle their feet.
He doesn't know that.
And he saw it.
So you attacked his reality.
You've triggered him.
And to prove to you that he's telling you the truth, he tells you after this man cut her in half, he took the half with the feet and moved it over here to stage right and the half with the head and put it over there on stage left and he walked over there and talked to the lady's head and she spoke back to him.
And then he brought the two halves back together.
He did some abracadabra incantation over the box, opened the lid, and she climbed out.
He cut her in half.
He put her back, separated her, put her back together, and there was no blood.
And you say, listen, that's an illusion.
No, it's not.
He's going to go off on you again.
And if you keep.
attacking him, not only are the voices going to escalate, it's going to come into physical confrontation, you and your brother, all right?
You'd be rolling around on the carpet or something.
So rather than attack his reality, what you do is you offer him a better perception.
So what you say is, listen, I hear what you're saying.
I understand.
But let me ask you a question.
Do you think it's possible that maybe, just perhaps?
that when he asked for a female volunteer out of the audience and these 50 women raised their hand and he looked around and picked one out, do you think maybe she might work for him and she knows the trick and she travels all over the country with him always sits in that same theater seat wherever they go so he looks around and zooms in on her and when she gets up there on the stage and climbs into the box there's already a pair of mannequin dummy legs laying on the floor of the box that are wearing the same stockings
and high heels that she has on so she reaches over grabs the handles sticks them out the hole so just the high heels and her ankles are showing and then she brings her own knees up under her chest So her whole body is on that side of the box.
And when he cuts the box in half, the saw never touches her.
He says, wiggle your feet.
She reaches over, grabs the handles and shakes them and the feet wiggle outside the box and then when he separates the two you can she can no longer wiggle those feet so he does not want you looking at those feet he has to distract you so he walks over to the head and you're going to follow him and so he's talking to the head of course she's going to talk back her whole body is over there So then when he brings the two halves back together,
she simply reaches over, grabs the poles, brings them back in, leaves them on the floor, and she climbs out, and voila.
And your brother says, hmm, you know, that might be the only way that could work.
You've offered him a better perception which has resonated with him and now he has changed his own mind.
When you see my name in the media, unmusic related, with white supremacy or something, they have a tendency to say, black musician converts X number of white supremacists or KKK members, what have you.
No, I didn't convert anybody, not even one.
I have been the impetus for over 200 to convert themselves.
by offering them a better perception and letting them come to that conclusion, hey, maybe I'm going down the wrong path.
That's how that works.
So this clansmith, okay, that was a hypothetical example example I gave you.
A real one.
This clan leader who had the largest clan group in this country, he was based in Missouri.
He was murdered.
I knew him very well.
I knew the murderer very well.
I knew his whole family.
And I went out to his funeral and I participated in his funeral, which shocked the daylights out of everybody in the clan and other people.
But now his family was there, his mom and dad and his sisters.
They had nothing to do with the clan.
They abhorred the clan.
They didn't understand how their brother or son had gone down that rabbit hole.
But they loved their son and their brother.
And they knew about me and they were very happy that he was becoming friends with me.
And had he lived another year, I guarantee he would have been out.
But anyway, he was murdered.
So I'm glad I got to meet the family.
They were totally against the Klan.
And this was the father's only son.
I can say he had three beautiful sisters, all adult children.
And so he'd call me, you know, once, twice, sometimes even three times a week.
just to talk about his son because he didn't have that son anymore.
And he didn't want to talk to anybody in the Klan about his son.
Being in the Klan is what got him killed.
kill so he wanted to relate to me and talk to me and I spent as much time as I could talking to him one day I'm sitting right here in my living room my phone rings it's him the father and he's crying and he tells me he has a gun in his hand and he's going to kill the person who murdered his son he's telling me this I knew I had to do something very quickly and I and I could not screw up I mean,
this guy was hurting and he meant this.
And if I had said, if I tried to be logical and said, look, man, you know, you go and shoot this person, you know, you're going to be arrested and you're going to go to jail for 40 years, you know, you're already old.
You're going to die in jail.
You're going, you know, he would not have cared.
This person murdered his son and I don't care about it.
I'm going to take this person out.
I got it.
All right.
And that's his reality.
How are you going to change that reality?
His son is dead.
You can't bring him back.
So, you know, what he's telling you is true.
This person murdered his son.
He's not coming back.
This person needs to go.
You got to offer him a better perception.
So I knew if I tried to be logical and rational, it wasn't going to work because he's being irrational right now.
I had to offer him a better perception.
I said, look, man, I said, you know, you're already old.
Frank is gone.
Frank is not coming back.
You have three beautiful daughters.
You've already lost your son.
Do you want to lose your three daughters by being put in prison?
You're not going to be put in prison out here in Missouri where you live so family can come visit you.
They're going to send you to Rikers Island in New York or San Quentin in California and make it difficult for your family to come see you.
You're going to die in prison anyway, but you're not going to see your family.
You've lost your son.
Do you want to lose three daughters too?
He came to his senses.
He wasn't even thinking about his daughters in that moment.
I brought him to that and I gave him a different perspective.
It resonated and that's why he did not follow through.
So I wonder, as an educator, I thought a lot about how to break through people's incorrect perceptions.
And I agree with you that coming straight at it and telling them the truth is not very effective.
But providing a better narrative, one that matches the facts better that you know doesn't leave lingering questions as your example of the magician works well the other thing that I think actually I hear riddled throughout your story is providing a piece of evidence that can't fit and
that therefore forces you to reconsider So in many parts of your story, and I've heard you now talk on it a couple different times, you are that piece of evidence, right?
When the guy sat down with you at the Silver Dollar and misunderstood that Jerry Lee Lewis had gotten his musical style from blacks, that opened the door to sitting down with you and everything that he held as a prejudice isn't going to withstand the fact that you sitting across the table are obviously very decent.
uh open you're not what he had been led to understand blacks were and where he had no real evidence of his own because by his own account he'd never had a drink with one.
And that goes back to your very first sentence when you introduced us, you know, about my not being trained a certain way.
So I was open to anybody and everybody.
This guy was trained, you know, he made these presumptions based on training, whether it was his upbringing as a kid at home or the people he hung around with in his neighborhood.
You know, he was subliminally or even, you know, consciously trained.
to think this way about those people.
Absolutely.
Now, I'm also, unfortunately, I apologize to the audience.
The nature of your story is bringing up all kinds of things maybe out of order that may distort the story.
I had a very formative experience as a college student.
I was studying biology under a very famous evolutionary biologist who – No, no, I'm not that old.
Now, this is Bob Trivers.
Bob Trivers is still with us, and he has...
And anyway, he invited me to be a research assistant in Jamaica and I couldn't say no to that.
So I signed up and I had no idea really, you know, where I was going to be staying, how I was going to be living.
I had no understanding of where I was going.
And at the time, Southfield, Jamaica was remote enough that it literally, there was no phone in the entire town.
Anyway, he brings me to Southfield.
I show up in Montego Bay.
He picks me up at the airport.
And I end up living with his extended family, a black family in the hinterlands of Jamaica.
And so I was like dropped into remote part of Jamaica and, you know, more or less sink or swim yeah sink or swim and and anyway so i forged a bunch of friendships and i i just learned some amazing things that you wouldn't you wouldn't intuit you know so on the one hand what you say about um there was a tremendous amount of ignorance there just by virtue of isolation
right from and you we use the word ignorance not in a derogatory sense, but in an unaware sense.
One of my friends, you know, so they asked me a lot of questions because I was sort of scientifically oriented and they had nothing but questions and no one to ask.
And they, you know, one guy asked me, he says, so.
the moon that you see when you're back home, is that the same one that we see?
And I was like, oh my goodness, that's a great question.
Hadn't even occurred to me that you wouldn't necessarily intuit that and that it doesn't have to be the answer, but it is.
But here's the other thing.
The point of my taking you to this Jamaica chapter of my life was that I ran into the strangest prejudice, which I did not expect, right?
In the one way, my professor actually left the island while I was there.
I was literally the only white guy in town.
And I assumed that it would be, would just reverse everything about prejudice.
But no, it reversed some things.
I was definitely the ultra minority.
But there was a perception in Jamaica about white capability that was completely inaccurate.
Here I am in a – The people around me in Jamaica are capable of doing remarkable things with very little, you know, whereas in America, you know, people are repairing cars.
They're basically just buying parts and swapping them in, which isn't that hard.
In this case, they have to figure out, you know, what you do with a dead alternator when there's no alternative, you know, how do you revive it?
So there were all sorts of people who had tremendous resourcefulness of a kind that I wasn't really familiar with from back home.
But yet their perception was that white folks were sort of capable of miraculous stuff when really, if you thought about why they had this perception, white people had more wealth typically in their experience.
They would show up with, you know, more sophisticated gadgets, but that's not capability.
In fact, it's almost the opposite.
So anyway, there was something about that experience that really caused me to rethink a great man many things because there was no simple way to intuit what race would do in that, you know, sort of halfway reversed but not fully reversed part of the world.
Well, you know, like you're saying, we know the expression necessity is the mother of invention.
And that's what they were experiencing.
They needed this, so they had to come up with a way.
Here we have an abundance of whatever, so there's no necessity.
We just go and swap it out, as you say.
Yeah, and it creates a kind of learned helplessness here that is not obvious if your access is mostly what you see on the television and the occasional person who comes through.
But it also raises another element that I think comes through very clearly in your story, which is, you know, prejudice is really a narrative.
And a narrative can be very compelling, but it self-destructs in light of concrete experience.
So, you know, if you've never met a person, if you've never met a black person, then you could hold any number of prejudices.
But if you meet a black person and they just simply don't match what you've been told, then you know there's something wrong and you don't even know what it is.
You just know what I've been told is now suspect.
And so, you know, that guy was a fluke.
You know, somehow he slipped through the crack or something.
Right.
And right.
But then even that would need an explanation.
Right.
And so anyway, I guess at the end of this, I do want to talk to you.
You say you have this question about how a person could hold a prejudice about you.
without ever having met you or hold a prejudice about blacks without ever having interacted with blacks i do think that there's an ugly biological answer to that question that i don't think people people need to understand it because it actually tells us a lot about why history goes the way it does and if we want to avoid that it tells us something about how we have to avoid it but i guess in the in the interim
the there is a universality of what what it is to be human your classroom experience that you talk about when your dad was in the foreign service was it right um your classroom experience gave i think i don't want to put words in your mouth but my sensese is, yes, people differ a lot.
They differ, populations differ in things like values, but that isn't deep.
That's the result of the fact that, you know, if your population has faced austerity, then you see the world with that lens and you fear it more and you may seek comforts that reassure you that austerity isn't just around the corner for you.
And if you, you know, have an experience of, you know, adventuring out in nature, you come to see that as a hospitable place rather than a threat.
So there's lots of differences between populations, but those.
But those differences are differences based on historical idiosyncrasy.
And that basically if given, most people want the same stuff ultimately.
And I think most folks don't understand that.
They imagine that the differences between populations are somehow much deeper than they really are.
And, you know, again, I don't want to put words in your mouth, but I'm curious what you think about.
the idea that more or less given time to adjust to what's really threatening and you know what's fascinating people would end up wanting pretty similar things from the world.
Well, I agree.
And I'll tell you what, I have compiled because, you know, what was it that caused these KKK members or neo-Nazis or alt-right people or Patriot Front people, what have you, to give up their uniforms to me or the ideology?
What did I say?
What did I do?
And I have to go back in my mind to these interviews.
What was going on?
because they've been interviewed before by other people, but they didn't quit.
So I came up with this.
One thing that I can tell you, Brett, in all my travels, no matter how far I've gone from the United States or how close, whether I've gone right next door to Canada or Mexico or halfway around the globe, no matter who I've met, whether they...
Maybe they didn't look like me.
They didn't speak my language.
They didn't worship as I did.
Maybe they didn't worship at all.
What have you?
I always concluded that every single person I encountered, no matter how far away, no matter how close to this country is a human being.
And while we may have different cultures and different, you know, belief systems, etc., we all have these five core values in common.
Every single human being on this planet wants to be loved.
They want to be respected.
They want to be heard.
They want to be treated fairly and truthfully.
And they want the same things for their family as you want for your family.
And if we can learn to apply those five core values or any of those five values when we find ourselves.
in an adversarial situation or in a culture or society in which we are unfamiliar or uncomfortable, I'll guarantee you that your navigation of that situation, that culture, that society will be much more smooth and much more positive.
And that is what I have seen come about in talking with these clan people.
or white supremacists who have obviously a very vastly different view than I do.
And they've paused to rethink.
I'm not telling them what to think or how to think.
I'm just giving them something else to look at.
That's all.
I'll give you another example.
This one's kind of comical, but it's true.
You cannot make this stuff up.
This exalted cyclops, which means district leader, which you and I would consider a council person, selectman, you know, mayor or something he was in my car and he's over here in the passenger seat and i'm driving and we somehow got on the topic of crime and he was talking about about you know black crime and all this other kind of stuff You never hear about white crime, even though there are white criminals, but you hear about black on black crime and this and the other.
Black on black crime, no such thing.
It's a crime of opportunity because they're around those people.
That's what they do.
You know, they're not going to go all the way across town to go rob somebody else when they need the drugs right now and rob this guy right here.
So anyway, he got on the topic of crime and then he said something that I've heard a million times from other Klan people.
It's probably in their, you know, chlorine thing that they have, their little constitution.
He said, well, you know, they say, He used that figure of authority that nobody has ever seen named the they You know, they say that black people are born with a gene that makes them violent.
I'm driving.
I'm like, you know, what are you talking about and he says well who's doing all the drive-by's and car jackings in southeast he was referring to southeast washington dc which is predominantly black it's very high crime written there's some whites that live there but uh it's predominantly black and yes very high crime written i said okay it's black people what's your point he said well you're born with that gene i said listen man i'm as black as anybody you've ever seen i said i have never done a car jacking or
a drive-by.
How do you explain that?
He goes, he didn't even hesitate.
He goes, your gene is latent, hasn't come out yet.
I was dumbfounded.
I was speechless.
You know, my gene almost came out.
And I'm just driving along.
And so I tried to be logical with him.
I said, you know, you're not even considering the demographics.
You know, who lives in Southeast DC?
I said, who's doing all the crime up in Bangor, Maine?
White people.
Because that's what lives up there, man, in the New England state.
And he goes, no, no, demographics have nothing to do with it.
You know, you all are born with this gene.
That's what they say.
Again, they, the authority that we never see.
So I realized, you know, and he said, And he's sitting there all smug because I had nothing to come back at him with.
I had to think because I realized logic is not going to defy him.
I needed to go to where he was.
I had to change perception.
So I said, I use his figurative authority.
I said, well, you know, they say that all white people have a gene or born with a gene that makes them a serial killer.
He's like, what are you talking about?
I said, name me three black serial killers.
He could not name me one.
I said, here, I'm going to give you one.
I named one for him.
I said, just give me two.
He couldn't do it.
I said, Charles Manson, Jeffrey Dahlmer, Henry Lee Lucas, John Wayne Gacy, Ted Bundy, David Berkowitz, son of Sam, Albert DeSalvo, the Boston Strangler, on, on, on.
I said, son, you are a serial killer.
He says, Darrell, I never killed anybody.
I said, your genus Layton hasn't come out yet.
He goes, well, that's stupid.
I said, well, duh.
I said, but you're right, it is stupid.
But it's no more stupid for me to say that about you than what you said about me.
And he got very, very quiet, but I could tell his wheels were spinning.
And within moments, he chang changed the subject.
But within four or five months after that conversation, he quit the clan.
And his robe and hood were the first robe and hood I ever got.
It was way back in the 90s.
Fantastic.
Based on that stupid analogy.
But it gave him pause for thought.
Yep.
Forgive me for this.
I want to refactor your story just slightly.
because I think it leads somewhere important.
He's right.
You have a gene for violence.
In fact, a bunch of them.
and they're latent.
So do I. So does everybody else, right?
We're human beings and we have a violent history and that means that we all inherit the genetic capacity for violence.
And the question is, does it come out or doesn't it?
And it's not a question of whether the gene is transcribed.
It's a question of whether or not the circumstances cause violence to be a viable strategy, you know, compared to the alternatives.
And so let me just say.
Your point about all human beings want these five things, and they all resonate for me.
I think that's a fair characterization, is the flip side of what people do right before they go to war against another population or genocide.
What they do is they come up with reasons that the other person isn't quite entitled to that treatment.
Some thing that the other person has done to justify.
That's the training.
You know, don't look the enemy in the eye, just take him out.
Right.
And so they will come up with caricatures in order that they don't feel like they are attacking a human.
So in some sense, I think it is incumbent on people like us to make exactly the point that you're making about you know that person who you are in conflict with they're very like you in fact you know it's a long road before you get to the things that are actually going to be significantly different all of these things that you want they want and I mean,
I love about your story that what you're effectively doing is you are extending a hand of respect to people who you would have every reason to do the opposite, right?
These people have joined the clan.
They've declared war on you effectively.
And you have every reason, therefore, to cut them off from your respect.
But by being willing to extend that hand and to meet them where they are, right?
To respond to an argument that they offer, not by saying, that's idiotic, but by saying, okay, here's the other version of that argument in which you're the villain in my eyes.
Does that make sense to you?
It's just a beautiful, it tells us what is possible, right?
This potential lurks beneath the surface in, I don't want to say all, because there are some truly broken people in the world for whom likely nothing can be done, but for almost everybody, it's really a question of offering the possibility of this superior alternative world.
And what a shame that so few people have that instinct.
Well, you know, I think everything we do in life.
prepares us for what we're going to do next.
And perhaps, you know, all this travel, all this stuff, because as a kid, I loved music.
I never dreamed of being a musician.
I didn't even play in high school.
I was never in any of the school bands, marching band, concert band, jazz band.
No, I couldn't play.
I had friends who were in those bands and little rock and roll bands outside of school.
I had two other vocations in mind that I wanted to pursue, both of them non-musical.
But like I said, I always liked music.
I went and saw Elvis Presley.
I went and saw Chuck Berry.
I said, whoa.
That's what I want to do.
That's pretty cool.
And so I had to learn, you know, and I learned.
And now I do it, you know, for a living.
But I will also say, you can't say this, but I knew about your work with the clan before we met.
But when we met, it was you playing as a musician somewhere that I happened to be.
And you're spectacular at it.
I mean, not only a virtuoso, but very fun to watch.
Thank you.
Well, you know, music is my profession.
improving race relations is my obsession.
Love it.
Love it.
So I want to just throw something in before I lose it.
I've been saying for many years that bigotry is very expensive right if you walk around thinking that some group of people is frightening or that there's something wrong with them so that they wouldn't be reasonable people to partner with in business or in music or whatever if you harbor those beliefs then you're missing all kinds of opportunities.
Yes, you are.
And so shedding bigotry is like giving yourself a raise, right?
It's like, you know, your world is that.
much bigger.
There are that many more people who are interesting to talk to, who you could partner with in any one of a number of contexts.
And so why wouldn't you give yourself that raise?
And when I hear you talk about the interactions you're having, yes, you know, these people, maybe they have the sense that they're dealing with somebody who's highly unusual.
And obviously they are.
But what they learn by interacting with you.
is that actually their prejudice was just some needless cost.
And, you know, I love that it results in them handing over their robes to you.
I mean, that's just amazing.
And some of you have come out.
out and go on lecture tours with me, you know, denouncing and renouncing, you know, their former organization and trying to de-radicalize people still in that movement and trying to prevent young people from going down that rabbit hole.
You know, I never dreamed I'd be doing this, you know, as a kid when I experienced, you know, racism and things like that.
But as I was saying, I think, you know, everything we do in life prepares us for what's coming next.
You know, I enjoy music and music brings people together.
And through music, I've met a lot of people, you know, even clam people, you know, they were there for the music.
And they related to what I was playing.
They related so much that they came up and wanted to buy me a drink, you know.
I can tell you right now, right now with that, no doubt, if I had walked into that bar, not as a musician, just to come there and go dancing, I would have had to fight my way out.
You know, and I tell you, You know, you mentioned the violence and the gene.
Yes.
Unfortunately, there have been some times when I've had to get violent in these circumstances.
You know, somebody was having none of it.
I'm a black person.
I'm a cockroach.
I'm going to step on you.
Whatever.
There's no talking your way out of it.
And so you're confronted with fight or flight.
If you can't fly, then you better take somebody down.
I've put people in jail.
I put people in the hospital just to preserve my own well-being, which is very unfortunate.
Fortunately, it's been few and far between.
But sometimes you're in that situation and you have to do what you have to do.
Now, while we all, I think, have that capacity to, I mean, some people, you know, will just ball into a little fetal position and people will be hitting on them and kicking them.
them and kicking them and they're not even trying to deflect.
They're just, mm, like this, paralysis by fear or whatever.
You know, I don't go that route.
But I think we all have that capacity to strike out.
But it's a question of what capacity do we have to control ourselves as to how much we strike out and how much the balance between restraint and then actually having to do something.
to preserve our well-being.
Some people can control themselves a little better.
Others just instantly, boom, you know, and that's called hot-tempered or even-tempered, you know all right well there are two two things i'd like to do before we close this podcast out one the last time we encountered each other you told a story that i thought was extraordinary about um i think it's the continuation of the story that you were telling us already here where you uh got the information on the uh
it was the grand dragon I'm trying to think of which story.
I got 45 years worth of stories.
45 years worth of stories.
It was a story about some meetings in hotel rooms.
Oh, with the, okay, I think I know the one you're talking about.
You want to hear about that one?
I would love to hear that one.
And then after that, I want to give you what I think might be a new answer to your question about how people who don't know anything about you might come to hate you.
Okay, that's the biological thing that you mentioned earlier.
I'm still waiting for that answer.
Okay, that's good.
I'm glad you brought it back up.
Okay, so I had gone back to the guy in the Silver Dollar Lounge years later.
after I realized the answer to my question had fallen into my lap.
Who better to ask, how can somebody hate you when they don't even know you, than to ask somebody who would join an organization whose whole premise was that?
So I decided to write a book, and I wanted him to fix me up with the Grand Dragon.
And he was reluctant to do so, but I persuaded him to give me the guy's phone number.
He said, Daryl, the guy's name was Roger Kelly, the Grand Dragon.
And he said, Daryl, do not fool with Roger Kelly.
He will kill you.
And I said, well, that's the whole reason I need to see him.
Why would he kill me, man?
I need to understand this.
why I want to meet him Daryl don't do it well I said, I'll be careful.
So this guy was genuinely concerned about my safety.
He was also concerned about his own safety if he were to take a black man to this guy.
And so He says, promise me, you know, you won't tell him where you got his information.
I said, fine.
So my secretary at the time, that one, she's passed on now, but she was white.
And not that it matters to me.
I don't care what color anybody is, but I have to mention it in this story because it's part of the story.
I could have called Mr. Kelly myself.
I'm the one who had the phone number.
But I thought, no, I'm going to have Mary call him.
Because if I call, he might pick up in my voice that I'm black.
I said, I'm not talking to you.
and my whole project would have ended before it ever got started.
And so I figured if Mary called him, he would know that the voice on the other end of this phone line is a white woman.
And I knew enough about the mentality that he would not automatically think that this white woman is working for a black man, especially a black man who's writing a book on the Klan because they don't exist.
Right.
So I figured I have Mary give him a call.
And, um...
That might up the chances.
Just tell him that she's working for her boss who's writing a book on the clan where he consented doing an interview.
And I told her specifically, do not tell Mr. Kelly that I'm black.
If he asks, don't lie to him, but don't give him reason to ask.
And the reason why I did not want him to know in advance, two things.
One, if he knew in advance, he might hang up the phone.
Or B, if he accepted the invitation to come be interviewed by me in the interim, he could prepare different answers than he would give to a white interviewer.
So I wanted it to be spontaneous, candid, you know?
She understood, and so she called him.
And he agreed to do the interview.
He didn't ask what color I was.
So we set it up for this motel room.
Well, first he had invited us over to his home, and I had the to change the date.
And then I'm glad that I did.
But I would later go to his house many, many times after a couple years.
But I changed the date or had her change the date.
And we set up for the motel right above the Silver Dollar Lounge.
Mary and I got there super early, like several hours early.
Because the clan will send out people and scouts in advance to check things out.
You know, sort of like the presidential secret service team that goes and checks everything before they bring him.
We got there super early before any scouts could be around.
Got the room and I gave Mary some money, sent her down the hall to get soda pop out of the vending machine and fill the ice bucket with ice, put the soda in there, get it cold.
I had no idea what this man was going to do when he showed up to be interviewed and saw me.
Because, you know, I was already told by this other guy who knows him better than I do, don't fool with him, he'll kill you.
All right, so I knew what I was going to do.
I'm going to offer him a cold beverage, just like I would offer you if you came to see me, right?
Is he going to walk away when he sees me?
Is he going to beat me up?
Is he going to come in the room and do the interview?
I don't know, but I know what I'm going to do.
So she got the soda pop, put it in the ice bucket, set it on the dresser.
And the way the room just happened to be in this motel.
We didn't pick it out, it was just what we were given.
If you are standing in the doorway looking into the room, you cannot see who's in the room.
There's a big wall right in front of you and the restroom off to the side.
You have to come in the room, turn to your right, go around the corner, and there's the room.
So I took the little lamp table, took the lamp off, and put it in the most obscure corner of the room.
Put a chair on one side for Mr. Kelly, a chair on the other side for me.
And I had a little black bag, a canvas bag by my chair leg.
In the bag I had a recorder, a cassette recorder, which I set on the table all in hopes that a he would come in b he would allow me to record and i had some blank cassettes in the bag i also had a copy of the bible because the ku-klux clan claims to be a christian organization and they claim that the bible preaches racial separation now i've never seen that in the bible so i want to be able to pull out my king james and say here mr kelly please show me chapter and
verse where it says blacks and whites must be separate so i'm all prepared right right on time knock knock knock on the door i'm seated back here where you can't see me mary hops up runs around the corner opens the door.
In walks what is known as the Grand Nighthawk.
Anybody on the Grand Level means state level.
Nighthawk means bodyguard, security.
So he's the bodyguard to the Grand Dragon, like an Imperial Nighthawk would be the bodyguard to the Imperial Wizard.
In walks this Grand Nighthawk.
He's wearing military fatigues, camouflage, got the clan emblem, the red circle, white cross, blood drop patch right over here, the letters KKK on this side, and on his cap, was embroidered Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.
And on his hip, he had a semi-automatic handgun and a holster.
He comes in, comes around the corner and sees me and just freezes in place.
Now, Mr. Kelly is on the other side of the corner and doesn't realize that his Nighthawk has stopped short.
So he comes around and boom, slams into that guy's back and knocks the guy forward.
And so now they both are stumbling around trying to regain their balance and they're like looking all around the room.
You know, I'm just sitting there like, you know, looking at them and I can read their faces.
You know, I could tell they're thinking, is this an ambush?
Or do we misunderstand the room number or something, right?
So I got up and I went like this and displayed my palms to show that I had nothing in my hands.
I walked forward.
I extended my right hand.
I said, hi, Mr. Kelly.
I'm Darrell Davis.
He shook my hand.
He shook my hand.
And the Nighthawk shook my hand.
So far, so good.
I said, please, please come on in.
Have a seat.
Mr. Kelly sat down, and the Nighthawk stood at attention to his right.
And before I could sit down, Mr. Kelly says, Mr. Davis, do you have some form of identification?
I said, sure.
Went my wallet.
I gave him my driver's license.
He says, oh, you live on such and such street in Silver Spring.
Now that had me a little unnerved.
Why is this dude checking out my address?
All he has to do is look at my name, look at my picture, look at me, match it up and give me back my license.
Here he is calling off my street.
Is he going to come to my house and burn a cross in my yard?
What's up?
You know, I didn't say all that, but that's what's going through my head.
And I did not want to let him know that he had unnerved me a little bit, but I wanted to let him know under no circumstances was he to come to my house with any, you know, nefarious thoughts.
And so I said, yes, Mr. Kelly, that is where I live.
And you live at.
And I recited his home address and street number, right?
So what I was doing was I was leveling the playing field, you know, implying if you come visit me, I'm going to come visit you.
So let's confine all this visiting to this motel room.
He understood.
He nodded.
He smiled.
I did not realize that day that I had been presumptuous.
I had no reason whatsoever to fear Mr. Kelly coming to my house and doing anything stupid.
All right.
What happened was I didn't know this.
My street right here, right out here, it runs through a couple neighborhoods.
One of his clan members lived right down the street from me, two neighborhoods down.
So he recognized the street name.
That's all.
He has to get on my street to go to that dude's house.
Today, that same guy, he's there for a long time.
He sits in a federal prison in the state of Maine for committing a hate crime.
And Roger Kelly later banished him from the clan.
But anyway, I had no way of knowing that that particular day.
So I found that out months later.
So we got on with this interview.
And every time he'd make some biblical reference, he'd pound his fist on the table, say, Mr. Davis, the Bible says I'd reach down into my bag and pull out the Bible.
Or if my recorder ran out of tape, I'd reach down and pull out a fresh cassette.
Every time I'd reach down like this, the nighthawk would reach up like this.
You know, put his hand on the butt.
He never pulled the gun.
He just rested his hand on the handle.
And so this went on for about 45 minutes.
I reached down, he'd reach up.
After about 45 minutes, an hour of this, the bodyguard, the Nighthawk relaxed and realized there was no threat in the bag.
You know, I got it.
That's his job to protect his boss.
I'm the enemy.
I'm the black guy.
He doesn't know what's in my bag.
So he's doing his job, you know, to protect his boss.
So he relaxed.
I went in and out of the bag, The Nighthawk didn't move.
A little over an hour into this interview, interview, Mr. Kelly and I just sitting here talking casually, and out of nowhere, there was this very short, very fast noise.
I thought, shh, that was it.
Just like that..
And we all jumped because it was out of context.
Like, what was that?
I knew.
I didn't know what the noise was because the noise was too short and too fast for my ear to discern what it was.
But I knew that Mr. Kelly had made the noise.
But how did I know that?
Because I didn't make it.
So process of elimination, right?
If I didn't do it, he had to have done it.
So I jumped up out of my chair and I hit the table.
I'm getting ready to come across that table.
All right.
I had gone into survival mode.
I've been triggered to fear for my life because A. Because, A, here I am in this room as a black man with the head of the Ku Klux Klan from Maryland.
And I'd already been told, don't fool with this guy, he'll kill you.
So I got all this stuff going through my head.
And when you fear for your life, you will do one of just very few things.
You know, it's like fight or flight.
Some people will faint.
because the fear is so great their brain can't process it and it shuts off and they fall out and faint I don't do that another thing people will do is to their muscles will constrict and they'll start shaking and they can't release themselves.
Paralysis by fear.
I don't do that either.
Another thing to do is to run away.
That is the best option.
Separate yourself from the source of the fear.
Get away from it, you know?
That is the option that I would have chosen had it been available.
It wasn't available.
How am I going to outrun a bullet in a motel room?
I'm not armed.
The only person who I know for sure who is armed is the Nighthawk.
I can see his weapon on his hip.
Mr. Kelly was wearing a suit and tie.
I don't know if he had a weapon up under his jacket or not.
All I know is I'm not armed and I don't want to get shot that day.
So, you know, your last.
option is to do a preemptive strike and get them before they get you.
And I flew up out of that chair.
I'm on my way to dive across that table, grab the Nighthawk, grab Mr. Kelly, and slam them down to the ground and take away the Nighthawk's gun.
Because it's my job to protect myself and protect my secretary.
And so it was fight or flight, and I went into fight mode.
And when I hit the table, I'm just inches away, because a lamp table in a motel is very small.
It's not like a conference table, anything like that.
I'm inches away from this man's face.
And I'm looking at him right in his eyes.
I didn't say one word.
My eyes were speaking for me.
In fact, my eyes weren't speaking.
They were shouting.
And they were saying to him, what did you just do?
Well, his eyes had fixated on mine.
He didn't say a word either.
But I could read his eyes like telepathy.
They were saying to me, what did you just do?
And the night hog is back like this with his hand on his gun looking at both of us like, what did either one of y'all just do?
Mary was sitting to my left on top of the dresser.
because there were no more chairs in the room and she realized what had happened and she began explaining it when it happened again and we all burst out laughing at how ignorant we had been.
What had happened was the ice bucket with the cans of soda, the ice had begun melting and the cans of soda were just shifting down the ice.
That was it.
You know, somebody almost got shot over a melting ice cube.
I mean, yes, it may be in retrospect, it's a little humorous, but it's true.
And the consequences could have been fatal.
But this...
I'll say it was a teaching moment.
And the lesson taught is this.
All because some foreign, underscore, circle, highlight the word foreign, entity of which we were ignorant, that being the bucket of ice, cans of soda.
I mean, we knew it was over there, but we'd long forgotten about it because we're so engrossed in this conversation.
All because some foreign entity entered into our little comfort zone via the noise that it made, we became fearful and accusatory of one another out of that ignorance.
The lesson taught is this.
Fear breeds ignorance.
I mean, ignorance will breed fear.
We fear those things of which we are ignorant.
If we don't keep that fear in check, that fear.
will escalate to hatred because we hate the things that frighten us.
If we don't keep that hatred in check, the hatred will escalate to destruction.
We want to destroy the things that we hate.
Why?
Because we're afraid of them.
But guess what?
At the end of the day, they may have been harmless and we were simply ignorant.
So we saw that whole chain almost unfold to completion.
had the nighthawk pulled his gun and shot me or my secretary or had I pounced across the table and hurt one of them.
Fortunately, it stopped short of that last component.
But we've seen it happen time and time again.
Let's look at Charlottesville, right?
In 2017, August 12th, when a white supremacist drove his car full force, full speed into a crowd of protesters.
On August 12th, 2017, there was a lot of ignorance in Charlottesville, Virginia.
There was a lot of fear in Charlottesville, Virginia.
A lot of hatred.
in Charlottesville.
What did it culminate in?
It culminated in destruction because a young lady named Heather Heyer was destroyed.
Her life was destroyed.
All right.
This is not just indigenous to adults, even kids.
I speak to classrooms of little elementary school kids sometimes.
Of course, I tone it down, but I'll give you an example.
You have all these little kids sitting at their little desks, you know, five, six rows back.
I'm standing in front of the class just talking casually.
And all of a sudden, out of the book, say, hey, hey, there's a snake under your chair.
Just at my suggestion and pointing between some little kids' legs that there's a snake there on the floor crawling under their desk, everybody from First row all the way back to the back of the classroom throws their legs up in the air and their arms and starts screaming bloody murder, And then they realize there's no snake there.
And they start laughing.
I said, what are you all screaming about?
They're like, oh, I hate snakes.
I'm afraid of snakes.
There's your fear.
There's your hatred.
I asked them, well, why do you hate snakes?
Why are you afraid of snakes?
Oh, well, they're slimy.
They're poisonous.
There's your ignorance.
Anybody who's ever touched a snake knows they're not slimy.
They're dry.
And not all snakes are poisonous.
Some are very good snakes.
So there's your ignorance.
Ignorance breeds the fear.
the hatred and so i say okay well obviously there's no snake under anybody's chair here we had a little fun but let's just say let's just pretend if they're really was a snake under your desk and I pointed it out to you, what would you want me to do with it?
You know what they say?
Kill it.
There's your destruction.
I'm talking little kids, man.
You know, one digit ages.
You know, seven, eight, nine.
All right.
Well, you've left us hanging, though.
Well, we spend way too much time in this country talking about the other person.
talking at the other person and talking past the other person.
Why don't we spend a little bit of time talking with the other person?
I'm a firm believer that a missed opportunity for dialogue is a missed opportunity for conflict resolution, right?
Roger Kelly went on through the ranks of Grand Dragon, moved up to Imperial Wizard.
He became a national leader.
Now, he'd come down to my house.
The first two years I met him, he'd come down to my house, sit right here on my couch.
You see my coffee table right there.
I sit across in the chair.
He'd bring his Nighthawk, right?
The Nighthawk would sit next to him on my couch.
Sometimes the Nighthawk would get bored, pull out his gun, and twirl it on his finger like this while Mr. Kelly and I are talking across his table.
And so this went on for a year.
It went on for two years.
But for the first year, he brought the Nighthawk.
The second year, he came by himself.
He trusted me that much.
During those two years that he was grand dragon coming to my house, he never invited me to his house.
Now, if I called him and said, hey, man, I'm going to be up in your county.
I got to drop off a CD or a music contract or something.
Take a ride with me.
He'll say, okay, I'll meet you at.
He always wanted to meet me at the Kiss and Ride, Park and Ride, wherever.
And so he'd get in my car with the Nighthawk and we'd ride around the county and do what I had to do.
Sometimes we'd stop on the way back and get lunch.
Here we are, two clansmen and this black guy sitting at a restaurant table sharing mozzarella sticks out of the same basket using the same salt and pepper shaker the same ketchup bottle things that you and I have done thousands of times yeah and we take for granted they have never done that done that before sure they are they are aware of blacks and Jews and gay people and Muslims and whoever else they discriminate against they have to work with those people if they want to draw a paycheck
on their job but when they clock out they don't go to happy hour with those people they only go with their own kind And here they are sitting with the enemy, having mozzarella sticks or whatever we're sharing.
So that had to work on their minds.
Not overnight, but over time.
So after a couple years he became imperial wizard, national leader.
He began coming down to my house by himself.
He began inviting me to his house.
And I see his clan then.
I take pictures, you know, and take, and then he began inviting me to clan rallies.
I'd go to clan rallies.
I'd watch them march around the burning cross and proclaim white power and so forth and so on.
And, you know, I went to rallies all over the country with different clan groups.
But over time, Roger Kelly began reconsidering.
'Cause you start, let's say this far apart on the spectrum, Spend another five minutes, you're going to find more in common.
When you get here, you are having a relationship with your enemy.
You might not be going to his birthday party or something or her birthday party, but you're having a cordial relationship.
You keep talking, you've come closer.
Now you're friendly.
When you get at this point, you have caused a cognitive dissonance.
in that person's brain, you know, and they have found more in common with you at this point than they have found in contrast.
And the trivial things that they find in contrast, such as skin color or whether you go to a church, a synagogue, a mosque, or a temple, begin to matter less and less.
And then they began questioning themselves like, well, why did I hate that person?
That person's just like me.
Now, the one thing you got to be careful of is this.
And I would always make sure that when I trusted, you know, a neo-Nazi or a clansman or whatever, you know, not only do I want to be safe, but also if I have somebody else, one of my friends around them, I want them to be safe as well.
First thing they do is they try to justify how you're like this.
Daryl's okay for a black guy.
It's all those other black people.
That kind of thing.
Or so-and-so is okay for a Jew.
It's all those other Jews.
That kind of thing.
So you want to make sure that you don't let that happen.
You want them to look at people on an individual basis, not on a group basis like that.
So once I trusted the person, I would begin inviting over.
some of my other black friends, some of my Jewish friends, and allow them to interact so that they would see firsthand and stop all these presumptions and let that perception become theirs.
That's amazing.
I can imagine that the military-industrial complex does not want to hear people talking like this because you might just make war obsolete.
Well, you know what?
I'm glad you brought that up because it just reminded me of something.
And I was very, very disappointed in our military.
I mean, I'm proud of them for many things, but disappointing them for that particular thing.
You know, we have a policy, which I think is ridiculous.
of not negotiating with the enemy.
You remember when the guy's name was Sergeant Bergdahl and he went awall and he was picked up by the Taliban and held as a hostage or whatever for a while.
And so through some kind of negotiations, we agreed to release some Taliban people to get him back.
And it was shown live on TV.
You can go on YouTube and find the clip.
The U.S. Marines or whatever, they land the helicopter in the desert.
And these guys, these Taliban people, bring Sergeant Bergdahl out of this jeep across the sand.
And our people come and the Taliban is all lined up.
Our several Marines.
shake hands with all the Taliban.
They grab Bergdahl and they take off.
Go back to the helicopter and boom, he's gone.
And then the Taliban, these people were being interviewed on Al Jazeera and whatever else of the news, they're like, why do the Americans leave?
We want to talk to them.
Mr. President, we think that they are the terrorists.
They think that we are the terrorists.
They want the same things we want.
They may have been brainwashed like we've been brainwashed or fed propaganda or whatever.
Maybe they are the terrorists.
Maybe we are the terrorists, whatever.
But when you talk to somebody face to face and realize, This is a human being.
You know, this person wants the same thing I want.
You know, we swapped prisoners.
Why can't we talk now?
It's over.
You know, but no, we have that policy we blew it that that would have had a profound effect on those people to see us as human beings and for us to see them as human beings rather than somebody we don't look at but we blow their head off yeah i absolutely agree and and i must say um you know we've seen courageous attempts to do this through history and Very often these things end in
I remember Sadat being...
Yeah, Anwar Sadat being willing to make peace with Israel.
And of course, he ends up, you know, dead from an assassin's bullet.
And it's far from the only.
Well, Martin Luther King, another one.
Exactly.
Exactly.
Gandhi, I mean, it just, the list goes on and on.
But tell me what became.
of Mr. Kelly.
It's the strangest story that he's interacting with you in an ever more familiar way.
You're getting invited to his house as he's ascending the ranks of the Ku Klux Klan.
So what happened?
Well, he eventually left the clan.
I own his Robin Hood.
And he's become kind of reclusive.
And for a while, he'll come out with me and do interviews with me and things like that but he kept losing jobs um you know it's sort of like you know you name any any former clan member or whatever or white the media always says former kkk leader so and so they never just say so and so right they always have to give that former you know negative title and so he would work at this place and then he'd be seen on the news oh wow that guy was in the clan i'm not shopping there anymore i'm not you
know buying products from that store anymore you know even though he's he's done he's renounced it the stigma is still there and so he was losing jobs and so it was just better off, you know, that he not be so public anymore.
Ah, that's that's tragic.
I mean, frankly, somebody who has seen the error of their ways is, you know, especially worthy of redemption.
Of redemption and embrace.
If you don't allow for redemption, then of course there's no incentive for people to to wake up.
Exactly.
Exactly.
You know, just go back to what you know.
Right.
Oh, my goodness.
That's that's that's tragic and and that's an error that we should really easily avoid.
All right.
Maybe it's time that I give you what I think might be another answer to the question you've been pursuing the answer to for most of your adult life.
All right, I'm sitting here with baited breath, man.
All right.
Well, I mean, you know, it's funny, I've been working on this separately, you know, for most of my adult life.
The hypothesis has grown and I fleshed it out and pursued it in various different ways.
So to me, it's, you know, to me it seems very obvious, but I know it isn't to even to even to professional biologists.
So the idea is the following thing.
We understand evolution.arily, we understand why it is that we would expect a parent to run into a burning building to save their child.
This is very easy to explain because parents and children, a child is 50% related to each of their parents.
So it's not hard to understand why evolution would wire us to protect someone with whom we share so many genes.
What we don't do well in evolutionary biology is explain how that instinct decays as the degree of relatedness gets more distant.
And we sort of lose track of what we call the tendency, kin selection, the tendency to view those with whom you share a lot of genes as an extension of yourself.
We lose track of our tendency to do that after the named relationships have dissipated.
So there's a famous quote.
guy, 20th century evolutionary biologist named JBS Haldane joked that he would gladly give his life for two brothers or eight cousins, which spells out the exact math of genetic relatedness.
But what we don't do is understand that actually lineages of people are wired to view other lineages by a similar kind of math that's a bit harder to calculate because the borders are fuzzy.
So We pretend like racism has nothing to do with evolution when in fact there is, I believe obviously, a built-in tendency to view those with whom you have greater relatedness with more favor, even when you can't specify how related to them you are because they're just a member of a different population.
So this is the ugly part of the story.
There's a much better part of the story, which is that tendency to view people with sympathy based on how close their genetic relationship is to you, which does form a kind of foundation for viewing the world as us and them in terms of race.
That's one of the two bases that a civilization can be built on.
The other one is reciprocity.
And when I say that you can give yourself a raise by getting rid of your bigotry, I really mean it in very nearly economic terms.
That if you, let's say as an American, you're interacting with people from all over the world who've come to America and become part of one nation, if you look at that entire pool of people, And you say, well, I only really want to cooperate with the ones who come from the same part of the world that my ancestors came from.
Well, then the pool of people you can collaborate with is small.
and becomes incestuous.
Right.
Yeah, you're liable to get less because the people in it bring similar stuff to the table that you do rather than looking at the entire population and saying, actually, I just want to collaborate with best people I can find.
I don't care what they look like or where their ancestors came from.
You know, who's available to partner?
So our civilization on its good days is based on reciprocity.
and actually specifically is productive because we put your ancestry aside and just simply collaborate because collaboration is productive.
So my argument is these two things are both evolutionarily valid.
One of them I find abhorrent, but it's still a valid basis for a civilization to function on.
But the other one, the one that the West is based on, where we put race aside and collaborate with those who bring something to the table, is much more productive.
It is much fairer.
It is safer.
It is more liberating.
It does all of the things that people want in a better way, but it's fragile.
And so the problem is, given their druthers, given an actual opportunity to see how both systems work, virtually everybody would prefer to be part of a system where you don't have to fear people because they look different and you can collaborate with whoever.
it just produces more wealth in economic terms.
But when economic tides turn, it collapses into a, So at some level, what I'm saying is that human beings have both these potentials within them.
You can see historical threads that are advanced.
For example, in the New Testament, the story of the Good Samaritan is very explicitly a story where people who were part of a different tribe, who were viewed as other, are brought into the tribe and they're deemed worthy of having their wounds bandaged, two days' wages spent to buy them a hotel room so that they can recover.
This is the including of an ever larger set of people.
So I guess the short answer to your question, I think, Darrell, or at least the way I would see it as a biologist, is that we are predisposed to view people who come from other lineages with suspicions that justify us not treating them as human,
and that we have to exist in a system in which we shed that instinct and embrace, I think what in your terms fits very naturally as, what did you call it, a superior?
superior narrative.
I've forgotten what your term was.
But you said you have, in order to get somebody to overcome their prejudice, you have to give them a better perception.
A better perception.
Yeah.
So we humans are caught in this bind.
We can very easily fall into racial prejudice and we can escape racial prejudice and be better.
And the question is, do the conditions that you're given foster the one or do they foster the other?
And when you find people who are suspicious of you without knowing anything, what you're finding are people who've sort of defaulted into this ancient, more violent, less vibrant, less productive, more unfair.
They never got far enough away from their lineage.
Exactly.
Yeah.
And I can see that.
I mean, that's sort of like, you know, a feral cat as opposed to a domesticated one.
Right.
That's a very good analogy.
So, you know, now let me ask you a question.
Here's what I advise people to do.
I call it walking across the cafeteria.
And it can be done physically.
It can be done virtually like you and I are doing right now.
um you notice like in a city that's you know pretty diverse or whatever a college campus a workplace, company, corporation.
You got black people, Hispanic people, Asian people working there or going to school there.
These people may be working on the same project together.
They may even be sharing the same cubicle and they get along fine.
What happens at 12 noon?
Everybody goes down to the cafeteria and they self-segregate.
Blacks sit with Blacks, Asians sit with Asians, especially with Hispanics, right?
And now, does that mean that...
no, no, you don't belong here.
Go back to where you came from to the other table.
Yeah, there's a problem and needs to be addressed.
But in most situations, that's not going to happen.
And I encourage people to leave their comfort group and walk across the cafeteria once or twice a week.
You know, and if you're if you're on, you know, if you're not in a company working from home do it over the internet call one of your co-workers on on zoom or whatever and arrange to meet after the um after you all get off work find out about that person's family you have kids what do they do blah blah blah get to know one another okay because in the process not only will you you know do you have something to learn from that person you also have something to teach that person and in the process you will make a friend and you'll learn more about that person than
you will if you don't you know socialize with that person i had i had walked across a cafeteria and sat with everybody all my life starting at the age of three because i was in schools that were like united nations so i never learned that familiarity kind of thing.
And I think, you know, while I agree with you that it is something that may be in our lineage it's a transgenerational or what's the word um inner inner intergenerational trauma something like that that's passed down um i think it can be more indigenous to certain regions or areas or certain cultures because for example uh a lot of and
i'll say this about black people and about white people i'm talking about americans specifically We have a history of discrimination based upon color.
In Northern Ireland, it's based upon Protestant and Catholic.ism.
In Lebanon, it's Islamic against Christian.
In Israel, it's Palestinians against Jews or Hamas or whatever.
So there are all these different things, but they boil down to the same thing, lack of respect, lack of listening to one another, et cetera, and getting to know the other or the lineage, as you point out.
If we raised our kids, Like, for example, In some countries where I lived as a child, there was no TV.
Or if there was, there's only like one channel.
It was only on three hours of the day, and most of it was news and then of course later on you got more channels and more programs etc and went from black and white to color tv uh overseas and of course we had a lot of stuff over here when i would come back but as a black kid i never saw anybody growing up i never saw anybody on tv that looked like me all of my heroes were white people superman aquaman batman you
know, and whoever else.
I watched Leave it to Beaver.
I watched, what's the?
right?
Space Family Robinson.
There were these, these, these, the mother, the father, they had two daughters., Penny and Judy and the son, Will, and a doctor, and they had a robot.
And they went all over the universe to every planet trying to find Earth.
They saw people with three arms, four eyes, green people, purple people.
Not one black person in the universe.
So what am I looking at, right?
And we never had a black hero on TV.
growing up.
Now, yeah, you might have some now.
The first black person that people looked up to, you know, after years of protesting and protesting, hey, you know, we need somebody in we can identify with.
They found the ugliest black person you could find to give us somebody to look up to.
And that was Mr. T on the A-Team.
You know, they're not going to give us a Denzel Washington, somebody like that, because they don't want little white girls idolizing a black guy.
And that was the problem with a lot of these rock and roll people.
when Elvis came out, when Chuck Berry came out, all right?
Little white girls were screaming and hollering over these people in the 1950s.
That's why city fathers, mayors, and people.
were shut down rock and roll concerts.
We can't have this, you know?
And when they realized that they could not stop these white kids from gravitating towards that music, they would bring in their already established white artists who were singing Ten Pan Alley and pop songs like Pat Boone to cover Tooty Fruity and Blueberry Hill and all these little Richard and Fast Domino songs to lure white people back.
That's where the term cover song came from.
They hated Elvis Presley because Elvis was singing black music and wiggling around, dancing around like a black person until they saw how much money he could generate.
Then he became the king.
I love Elvis.
I saw Elvis 14 times.
I met Elvis Presley.
I went to Elvis's funeral.
I love Elvis.
But Elvis himself would tell you he did not invent rock and roll.
Yeah.
Now, you're telling me the term cover?
The original term cover song.
Today, you know, someone says, oh, I play in a band.
You say, oh, you do originals, you do covers.
Okay, cover today just means somebody else's song.
Yeah.
The original term cover song was when.
when a white artist did a black artist song.
Yeah, that was the original term.
Oh, wow.
Had no idea.
And the first cover song was Shaboom.
It was an old doo-wop song.
Yeah, yeah, I know it.
Originally it was by the Crue Cuts, which was, I mean, sorry, originally it was by the Cords, a black doo-wop group, but they weren't playing black music on white stations.
There were only a handful of white stations that would play black records.
That's why record labels would not put a black person's picture on the sleeve, especially if you couldn't tell from their voice.
Like, you know, smooth.
you know people who elocuted their their lyrics like nat king cole or the platters or johnny mattis you didn't know if that person was black or white back then you know and so they would not put that person's on person's picture on the record sleeve so the white stations would not know it and play it and they could sell records.
Somebody like Little Richard or Muddy Waters, you know, that person's black.
We're not playing him, you know.
But same thing with Elvis Presley.
You know, Sam Phillips, who discovered Elvis Presley with Sun Records, had always said he loved black music.
He was a white guy.
I knew him too.
He said, if I could find a white man with the negro sound, I could make a million dollars.
And that's how Elvis Presley got started.
Elvis Presley sounded black.
And if you'd never heard Elvis before, like people never had back then, they thought he was black.
When Sam Phillips put out his first record, which was a black blues song by a black blues guitar player named Arthur Big Boy Crudup called That's All Right Mama.
Elvis Presley cut it as his first record.
Dewey Phillips, no relation to Sam, had to play the song 17 times in a row because kids kept calling in saying, play that again, play that again.
They've never heard that music before.
We've been doing it for years.
White parents are calling in saying, get that N word off the radio because they thought Elvis was black.
So Dewey Phillips called Elvis Presley's house for him to come into the studio.
He wasn't there.
He was at the movies with his girlfriend.
They had to send somebody to the movie theater, get Elvis, bring him downtown Memphis to the studio.
You can go on YouTube and listen to his interview.
He was 19 years old.
He's sitting in there and Dewey Phillips says, Elvis, you know, how old are you?
I'm 19, sir.
And what high school do you go to, Elvis?
I go to Humes High School, sir.
That right there was the key.
Humes High School told all the parents out there that he was white by him saying that.
Because back then, schools were what?
Segregated, you know?
So, well, at least he goes to a white high school.
At least he's white.
But why is he doing this, you know, whatever music?
Oh, that's wild.
I did not know most of that.
And it, you know, it of course reinforces the fact that most of what rock and roll, let me tell you, well, let me tell you something else you might not have known.
And I can send you video clips and all kinds of examples of it.
Just like the water fountains and the restrooms and restaurants, if they allowed black people to use them, they were separate, right?
So were concert halls.
If they allowed black people into the building.
There were ropes going around the seats with signs hanging down saying seating for white patrons only, colored seating only.
You know, you don't sit together.
If you and I went to go see Frank Sinatra in the 1940ss, we may arrive together, but we could not sit together.
It was against the law, just like Rosa Parks in the bus.
You had to sit in the back of the bus.
It was stupid, but it was the law, which is why she got arrested, right?
And then finally that law changed in the 1950s.
You and I could go to the concert, but we could not sit together.
Well, that's interesting because, of course, the bus example, the drinking fountains, the lunch counters, you know, I remember learning all that, but I can't remember ever once seeing concert seating segregated.
Yeah, it was.
Okay.
And.
Okay, and what happened was this, two phenomena, in the 1940s, most people obeyed the law.
You know, they did not crawl sick because they'd be arrested.
You know, and they enjoyed Sinatra, they enjoyed, you know, Count Basie, they enjoyed the Dorsey brothers, whoever, Glenn Miller, whoever they were singing in the 1940s.
The 1950s rolls around.
There are two phenomenons.
One was the invention of rock and roll.
by black artists like Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Fast Domino, Beau Didley, and the popularization of that genre by great white artists like Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, Bill Haley in the Comics, Buddy Holly, and so on.
and so forth and so on, all right?
The musicians did not want to see segregated audiences, but the city fathers did, so did the parents, right?
But the second phenomenon that happened was this.
When those artists, Elvis or Chuck or whoever came out on stage, playing this new beat that had never been heard before, because everything before that was swing.
Now they're boom, boom, bop, boom, bop, you know?
So these kids, black or white, could not sit still.
They bounced up out of their seats.
They knocked over those signs there.
They're boogieing and dancing together in the aisles for the first time in the history of this country.
Black and white kids dancing together.
And guess what, Brett?
They didn't even know each other because they didn't go to school together.
Okay.
So this is the power of music.
Black kids and white kids don't even know each other.
Exactly.
They felt this new rhythm, this new beat.
They had to move.
And they're boogieing and dancing in the aisles together, which caused the cops to come in and shut down the shows.
That's very, very interesting.
The power of rock and roll.
The power of rock and roll.
I mean, there's also this other set of phenomena that play into the story in a very different way.
When you were saying about the first heroic black guy on television, Mr. T, I was sort of embarrassed by it, but I was wondering if you weren't going to say, and obviously he's not a heroic figure, but he was a breakthrough figure, George Jefferson.
who, you know, there was something about the, I don't know, I talk about it to my kids fairly frequently because I think it was such an important phenomenon but all in the family you know and norman was ahead of his time right ahead of his time but you know the thing about all in the family this sitcom was that it had archie bunker who was this just unabashedly racist
but sort of strangely lovable dad.
You know, he just was not going to be corraled.
And he, you know, he said all of the stuff that people said under their breaths so that, you know, you could hear it at home.
But it sort of allowed America to explore its own racism a bit because Archie was over the top and, you know, his, anyway, and then the Jeffersons spun off of it.
George Jefferson had been a sort of a secondary character.
He was a neighbor that would show up every now and then over the bunkers.
Right.
And so then anyway, he gets his own show the Jeffersons and you know it has this I mean I don't want to even say what I think but I thought it was a very um very compelling theme song about moving up about the black market yeah to the east side yeah exactly to a delet's apartment in the sky and you know the idea was the guy was a successful dry cleaner, I think, if I remember correctly.
But anyway, it's sort of embarrassing because this is, of course, white Hollywood exploring America's race dynamic, but definitely, you know, as seen through the eyes of white people, but doing its best to kind of mirror the experience of black people.
And, you know, this plays some role in.
what Americans think about race that I'm not even sure how you would go about quantifying it, but it's profound, right?
I think Hollywood, you know, has short-changed us.
us because we were doing a lot of stuff before Hollywood actually filmed it, but they did not want the public to see it because they didn't think the public was ready for this.
So like in Leaver to Beaver and things like that, Mr. and Mrs. Cleaver or Ozzy and Harriet, Ozzy and Harriet slept in different beds in the same room.
Your mom and dad, my mom and dad slept in the same bed.
What's up with that?
Okay.
Okay.
So, you know, because they didn't want to show a man and a woman sleeping in the same bed, even though they were the same color.
All right.
So now we're talking about the 1950s.
Now we move forward here to the 1970s, you know, with George and Louise Jefferson and so forth and so on.
Check this out.
You would see George and Louise sleeping in the same bed, because now that's been approved by the FCC or whoever does all the things of what ethics we can show on TV.
You see George and Louise Jefferson sleeping in the same bed arguing over something stupid George had done and Louise is cussing him out about what he did at the dry cleaners.
The upstairs neighbors, remember Tom and Helen?
Okay, Tom was a white guy married to a black woman.
You would see them down in George's apartment talking and so forth, but you never saw Tom and Helen in the same bed.
Nowhere in the Jefferson did you see that.
That's right.
Interracial.
I've totally forgotten that.
Yeah, exactly.
Well, and I also, it's a little bit before my time, substantially before my time, but I know.
from somewhere that the first interracial star trap between Oklahoma and Captain Kirk.
Yeah.
Exactly.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I remember it's either the 20th or 25th anniversary of American Bandstand, Dick Clark.
All right.
And what he did was he had all these stars from the 50s and 60s.
He would show their clips from back when they appeared on the show.
They were in black and white coming out singing, you know, whatever their Brenda Lee's famous hit was or Gladys Knight or, you know, whoever.
And halfway through the song, The actual star would come out.
She's playing on the screen.
She'd come up from behind the curtain in color and finish the song.
And when she finished, Dick Clark would come from the other side of the stage and he'd give her a kiss on the lips and say, you know, it's been 20 years, 25 years, blah, blah, blah.
And you saw he kissed, if it was a guy, he shook their hand.
If it was a female, he kissed them on the lips.
Here's what happened, though.
I watched this.
I was a teenager watching this.
Every time a black artist would come out, whether it's Ronnie Spector or Diana Ross or Gladys Knight, whoever, you see Dick go to kiss them and the camera would pan to the audience.
But they would show him kissing the white artist.
Interesting.
Oh, man, you could quantify it.
Oh, wow.
I mean, there's a whole other chapter I would love to explore with you at some time about what the black-white experience in America was, what happened to it.
You know, interesting things happened over our lifetimes.
Well, let's talk about for a second before you show.
Let's talk about what's going on now.
Please.
I learned this, Brett, in 1982.
Okay, from the head of the American Nazi Party.
All right.
Let me go back just a little ways.
In 1974, I was in 15 years old.
I was a sophomore, 10th grader.
And we had a class.
It was for seniors, but I was taking it as a sophomore.
It was called the POTC, which stood for Problems of the 20th Century.
I had a great teacher.
He would bring in these different speakers to our class, usually controversial about something.
It might be abortion, might be whatever.
And on this day, he brought in the head of the American Nazi Party.
You can never do that in a school today.
I wish they could.
I wish they would.
I'm happy he did.
So the American Nazi Party was formed right here, about 35 minutes from where I'm sitting, in the town of Arlington, Virginia, right across the Potomac River, by a fella named George Lincoln Rockwell.
And he was a major proponent of the ideology of Adolf Hitler.
He hated Martin of the King.
He always clashed with him.
Whenever King had a rally, George Lincoln Rockwell and his stormtroopers would show up and clash.
Anyway, George Lincoln Rockwell was murdered by one of his own American Nazis.
He got into an argument with the guy and the guy, I think it was John Poulter, shot him and killed him.
So Lincoln Rockwell's right-hand guy was a guy named Matt Cole, K-O-E-H-L.
Matt Cole took over the organization.
His right-hand guy was Martin Kerr.
Well, on this day in 1974, Matt Cole and Martin Kerr came to my school.
And they were in my POTC class, standing up front.
We're all sitting around watching, listening to them.
And Matt Cole pointed at me and pointed at another black kid in the class and said, we're going to ship you back to Africa.
And then he went like this with his index finger.
And all you Jews out there, you all are going back to Israel.
And I just, I was 15.
I just sat there looking at this guy like, what on earth is this man talking about?
And one of my classmates said, well, they live here.
You know, what if they don't want to go?
And Matt Cole said, oh, they have no choice.
If they do not leave voluntarily, they will be exterminated in the upcoming race war.
That was the first time I'd heard the term race war.
I'm thinking, what is this man talking about, right?
And that's one of the things that prompted me to buy all these books and read up on this, you know, stuff.
Later on that day, I was standing by my locker.
and Matt Cole and Martin Kerr were leaving.
They'd been there all day for other POTC classes.
And I was the only one in the hallway, and they paused right next to me and glared at me and sneered at me and then they started laughing and went on down the hall they didn't say anything just kind of glared at me went on down the hall i guess out the front door so eight years later you know i i never confronted matt cole i wasn't afraid of him but you know my generation you were taught to have respect for your elders you know whether it was the postman the librarian the cop you know whatever if they're older than you they're your elder you
may not agree with them but you show them respect So I knew what this guy was saying was ridiculous and I didn't respect it.
I didn't have to respect it, but I had to show him respect, my upbringing.
So eight years later, I've now graduated college and I had this fascination with this racism stuff.
And so I found, I made a lot of contacts and I found out about an unpublicized demonstration that the American Nazi Party was going to have in Lafayette Park, which is directly across the street from the White House.
Now back then, in 1982, you could drive your car up and down the 1600 block of Pennsylvania Avenue, which is where the White House sits.
Today you can't do that.
Only law enforcement vehicles.
You can walk up and down.
So I went down there.
Unpublicized means nobody knows about it, not even the police.
Every day, 365 days a year, 24/7, there is somebody in Lafayette Park protesting something.
Abortion, nuclear weapons, you know, the environment, whatever it is.
They set up their tents and face the White House with their placards.
So it's lunchtime.
I go down there.
I park Caddy Corner to the White House.
I wait.
This black van comes just before 12 noon.
13, 15 of these guys get out.
There's nothing that indicates that they're Nazis.
No Gestapo uniforms, no swastikas, SS insignias.
They're all wearing dark black suits.
There is Matt Cole gets everybody lined up.
They all stand there silently like this, facing the White House across the street.
And so I got out.
I felt the need to confront Matt Cole because I did not confront him back then because of my upbringing.
But now the dynamic had changed.
Yes, he's still my elder.
but it was 15 year old to like 40 year old or whatever back then.
Now instead of child to adult, it's adult to adult.
I'm two years graduated out of college, so I'm an adult now.
I can confront him.
So I walked right up to him.
And people were like walking by, not even knowing who they were because there was no indication.
And I said, Matt Cole, he like jumped back in the line, like, who's this black person who knows my name?
And he goes, you know, do I know you?
And I said, well, you spoke at my high school.
And he said, what high school was that?
I told him.
He looked at me, goes, oh, yes, yes, yes, I remember you.
That was a long time ago.
And I said, yes, it was eight years ago.
He says, I know.
What can I do for you?
And I said, well, I'm still, I said, you remember what you told me?
He nodded.
He goes, yes, I remember.
How can I help you?
And I said, I'm still here.
And he says, well, I can see that.
What can I do for you?
I said, well, you can tell me just who the hell gives you the authority to make permanent travel arrangements for me.
And he says, what's your name?
I said, Daryl Davis.
He shook my hand.
And he held my hand, his hand real tight with his right hand.
And then he shook his left finger in my face like this.
He says, Mr. Davis, you have to understand one thing.
It is in the interest of your race, the black race, to be a strong race.
And you cannot be a strong race unless you are a pure race.
It is in the interest of my race.
the Aryan race, which is what he calls the white race, to also be a strong race.
We are becoming a mongrel race by miscegenating with mud races such as yours.
So anybody who's non-Aryan is a mud race.
And he's upset because he called it white genocide.
That was the first time I ever heard that term.
And then he went on talking, talking.
And then he pointed out to me in 1982 that they are very concerned about the year 2042, which is now only about 16 years away from us.
And what he was concerned about is the demographic shift that he sees happening.
You know, our census is taken by the U.S. Census every decade.
And if you go to uscensus.gov, and you can see the trends.
When you and I were kids, the black population in this country was 12%.
Whites were like 86, 87%.
Native Americans, 1%.
Latino Hispanic Americans, almost 2%.
Asian Pacific Islanders, almost 3%.
All right.
Every year, this is happening.
In 2020, which was when our last census was taken, Native Americans remain at 1%.
Black people are at 12.9%, so they say 13.
We haven't grown.
Asian Pacific Islanders have almost doubled from 3% to almost 6%.
Latino Hispanic Americans are now at 17.
something percent, right?
More than quadrupled.
So if you take just 12 percent black, 17 percent Latino, that's 29 percent non-white.
That's almost a third of the population, right?
It is well predicted in the year 2042, for the first time in the history of the United States, it's going to be 50-50.
50 percent white, 50 percent non-white.
Between 2045 and 2050, it's going to flip.
And for the first time, again, whites will become the minority in this country.
You're old enough to know the term white flight, right?
You ask some 20-year-old, what is white flight?
What is what?
what I never heard of that before they have no clue because the color of the American landscape has changed so much that anywhere we go there's already somebody there who doesn't look like us right so white flight is it's flown it's gone so they know that this shift is coming and they're getting a lot of white people don't care.
Hey, this evolution, no big deal.
It doesn't bother me.
But there is a slice of our population that does care.
And those are the ones that I primarily deal with.
And what they tell me, Daryl, I don't want my grandkids to be brown.
They call it the browning of America, right?
White genocide through miscegenation, all that kind of thing.
And so they're concerned about immigration, but when they say immigration, it's a code word for South Americans or Mexicans or West Africans or whatever.
They don't care about illegal immigration here from Canada or from the UK or Eastern Europe or whatever, because if their grandkid, I mean, if their son or daughter were to marry somebody from Canada or Europe, the grandchild's going to be white.
No big deal.
But don't let them marry somebody from West Africa or from El Salvador or Mexico.
So that's a big concern.
And that's why we're seeing so many lone wolves, people who are walking into churches and synagogues and Walmart and the Buffalo Grocery Store and the Sikh Indian Temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin.
These are people who truly, I know some of these people, these are people who truly believe that they are patriots and it's their job to save this country.
We, meaning white, we discovered this country, we built this country, we wrote the constitution, and now there are people here who don't look like us squeezing the side of our own country.
And they surround themselves with this echo chamber.
And so they're going to start this race war, which is also called RAHOA, R-A-H-O-W-A, which is the white supremacist term for the race war, Rahoa, which are the first two letters of three words, racial holy war, Rahoa.
And it's also called the boogaloo, not to be confused with the 1960s dance music, the boogaloo, right?
But they call it the boogaloo as well.
So if you hear those terms, that's what they're referring to, the race war.
In fact, if I'm not mistaken, Boogaloo is used as a reference to the Right.
And it had a sequel, Electric Boogaloo to something this is a reference to a sequel to the civil war if i'm not mistaken yeah yeah so that's where all this comes from and that's and those are their words for that for that thing and so anytime one of these lone wolves is shot and killed by law enforcement or arrested and they go and search the property what do they find a cache of automatic weapons being stockpiled for rahoa you know and all this kind of thing um You
know, and now, you know, they're having their Confederate monuments and flags and whatever things, forts renamed and so forth and so on.
It's like they, they, they.
they feel that they're losing anything that they had, which is why the perception needs to change.
Yeah, the perception needs to change, which goes back to your suggestion, which I thought was brilliant, the walk across the cafeteria.
Virtually or in person.
Yeah, I agree.
And I would analogize that you had a much better analogy for my point about representation.
analogize that to the feral cat, which I thought was right on target, right?
A feral cat goes back to being a wild animal from being a, you know, a member of the family.
The walk across the cafeteria, it seems to me, trades one thing for another, right?
When you sit with people who are very like you and come from a similar background, you know what you're going to get.
And when you walk across the cafeteria and you sit with people who don't come from the same background, you know, the guarantees are of what you're going to get vanish, but the chances that you're going to find something remarkable go way up.
You know, my friend Jeff Scoop.
Jeff Scoop was the head of the NSM, National Socialist Movement, which was the largest neo-Nazi organization in this country.
And he was a member of that group for 27 years, and he led it for 25 and built it into the largest neo-Nazi organization.
Myself and a beautiful lady, Muslim filmmaker named Dia Khan, were instrumental in being the impetus for him to come out.
And today he works very hard to de-radicalize people still in that mindset.
How did I not know that you were causing clan members.
Well, you resisted the idea that you were causing it, but that you were inducing clan members to leave the clan.
I did not know that you were doing the same with Nazis.
That's incredible.
Yeah, like I said, you know, when you start with one group like that, you get people on the fringe.
You get the Nazis, the black supremacists, you know, these and so forth and so on.
So, yeah, they do come into play.
When I first started, yeah, it was basically just the clan, and now it's all kinds of people.
But anyway, Jeff was telling me, we just did a thing together in Orlando, Florida a few weeks ago.
But he was telling me, gosh, probably maybe about five, six months ago, that he ran, at one of his lectures, he ran into a couple guys, black guys from Cameroon.
And after his lecture, they came up and introduced themselves to him and talked to him.
And they told him, this is their first time in the United States.
They told him that they didn't even realize they were black until they came here.
That's great.
You don't happen to have...
You give me a second.
I'll get them for you.
All right.
I think that would be a fitting way to close this out.
This is Roger Kelly's robe, his imperial wizard robe.
And this is the emblem that I was talking about, the red circle with the white cross and the red blood drop.
They use the cross because they claim to be a Christian organization.
The cross represents Christianity.
The red blood drop is they will shed their blood for the preservation of the white red.
race.
If you see these black lines here, if you look at them, they form Ks.
There are four Ks here, Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.
That's what that stands for.
Okay, and here, of course, we have what is called the hood.
This is the hood.
This is the mask.
Members who want anonymity, they wear this mask and peep at you through these eyelids.
The hood is attached with, I mean, the mask is attached with three snaps and or Velcro.
If they don't want anonymity, they just detach the mask and the face is exposed under the hood.
This next one here, this is the robe of a former Grand Dragon.
He gave it to me.
And he's got two of these things on here.
He's got his U.S. flag and his Confederate battle flag.
A lot of people call this the Confederate flag.
No.
The flag of the Confederacy are the red and white stripes with the blue squares and circle of silver stars.
This specifically is the Confederate battle flag that flew during the Civil War, which was fought for the preservation of slavery.
All right, so anyway, this is his robe.
Now, as a Grand Dragon, as an Imperial Wizard, as any officer in the clan, you don't make money.
You may get a small stipend out of the dues that are paid every quarter or whatever, but you have to have a regular job.
Grand Dragon, Exalted Cyclops, Great Titan, these are all titles.
It's like Boy Scout Leader.
You have to have a regular job.
This guy, he went to prison for four years for conspiring to bomb a synagogue in Baltimore, Maryland.
While he was in the prison, he ran the Klan through his right-hand guy on the outside.
When he got out, he continued running the Klan.
He went back to prison for three years for assault with intent to murder two black men with a shotgun.
His name was Robert White, Bob White.
Okay.
Now, his day job when he was trying to bomb the synagogue, Baltimore City police officer.
Wow.
Okay.
He was not an undercover cop in the Klan gathering information, intelligence.
He was a bona fide Klansman on the Baltimore City police force.
All right.
And there are more.
There are plenty more.
Okay.
He told me that.
And he got out because of me.
And he gave me his robe and hood and all this and gave me his police uniform so I can show people.
And when I go around and lecture, this is a.
So they fly these at their rallies or when they have marches and things like that.
This here, same thing with the Nazis, the neo-Nazis, one of their flags.
What is YouTube going to do with this?
Of course.
We know what this is.
All right.
Yeah.
I want to say something about the Confederate battle flag and Confederate monuments and things like that.
People ask me, you know, do you think, you know, they should be torn down and whatever?
And how can you have that stuff?
No, they should not be torn down and destroyed.
They should be taken down and placed in a Confederate memorial museum or Confederate memorial park.
And people who want to honor that can go over there and honor honor it and plant flowers and kneel down whatever they want to do.
You know, if you know anything about American history, you know that there were plenty of black people who fought in the Confederacy.
My ancestors fought in the Confederacy.
I'm from Chicago because my dad had a job there at the time.
My dad was one of the first black secret service agents in this country before he became a foreign service officer.
So my parents are from Roanoke and Salem, Virginia, the seat of the Confederacy, General Robert E. Lee and all that stuff.
I'm a descendant of slaves.
Slaves had to fight for their slave masters.
Do I honor the Confederacy?
Hell, no, I don't.
All right.
My ancestors had to do what they had to do.
There are some black people who honor the Confederacy.
I'm not one of them, but that's their prerogative if they want to do so.
We went to war, America, went to war against Great Britain, and we won that war, which is why we celebrate the 4th of July.
The second largest white population of Americans are of British descent.
The largest white population in this country are of German descent.
All right.
The white people, now we're great friends with Great Britain right now, but the Americans of British descent here, they can go back to Great Britain and find their third cousin removed and so forth and so on.
And that's fine.
You know, we're all friends.
But they don't run out in the streets and fly the Union Jack or build statues to King George III.
Why?
Because the loser does not get to build his statue or fly his flag on the winner's property.
In 1941, we went to war against Japan for Pearl Harbor.
There are plenty of Japanese Americans in this country, as American as you and I or anybody else.
We treated them very poorly.
Okay, they gave up their Japanese citizenship and became full Americans.
Right?
Now, they love their ancestry but they became American they don't run out here and build statues to Emperor Hirohito or fly the Japanese flag for the same reason the loser does not get to fly his flag or build his statue we went to war against Germany the the largest white population in this country are of German descent they don't run out here and build statues to Adolf Eichmann, Adolf Hitler, Joseph Goebbels, Karl Mengele, or any of those people, right?
Or fly swastikas unless you're neo-Nazis, right?
So guess what?
The Confederacy lost the war.
They need to get over it.
They need to get over it, okay?
Okay.
You know, the South has a lot to be proud of, a whole lot to be proud of.
But slavery is not one of those things.
Yeah, I agree with you.
So that's incredible.
Thank you for showing those things.
It's incredible to me that somebody goes from plotting to bomb a synagogue and threatening black people with a shotgun.
to seeing the error of his ways enough that he's willing to give you the robes that he wore in his racist past, that's an incredible testament.
That's a kind of transformation most people don't undergo.
And yet, it's not that it's just happened by your insight once, it's happened multiple times.
So, whatever else may be true, you obviously have a huge amount of insight about people and you
you've found a leverage point that clearly makes America better and strengthens humanity by metaphorically walking across the most dangerous cafeterias and sitting down with the enemy and turning them into friends.
It's really an incredible story.
And thank you for letting me share it here.
I really appreciate that.
Hopefully you will call this part one.
We'll do a part two sometime.
I would love to do that.
Before we go, I will remind people that you have a book.
Is your book out yet or just out?
Yes, it's out.
It's on Amazon and it's called The Clan with a K, The Clan Whisperer.
The Clan Whisperer.
I am definitely going to get a copy of this.
I am very much looking forward to reading it.
Thank you so much.
Thank you, Daryl Davis.
I really appreciate all you've been up to and it was a great conversation and I'll see you in part two.
