Historian · Writer · Speaker
People change not when they admit they're wrong, but, before that, when they expand who they feel responsible for.
“Phenomenal night hosting Adrianne to a packed house — a fascinating conversation about identity, community, justice, and the courage to change.”Jamie Small, University of Dayton
45–60 minutes with Q&A. Campus convocations, common reads, annual meetings, memorial programs.
On stage with an interviewer from your own community, a faculty member, a rabbi, a student leader, or a local journalist.
Two to three hours, capped group. Case-study seminars developed for the Yale Politics Initiative, or close editorial work with an institution's own language.
An engaging public speaker … examined the conditions and environments that foster personal growth and change.Ilana Gilg, Director of Programming, Portland, ME
I grew up as the presumed heir to the American white nationalist movement. My father founded Stormfront, the first white nationalist website; David Duke, who I called uncle, was part of the family. My decade of political activism on behalf of White nationalism began in October 1999, when I was ten and gave my first public interview. I believed in the cause, as much as a curious child can believe in any ideology.
Appearing on that first show was the beginning of a life that increasingly boxed me in over the next decade. Each additional interview, each choice to go deeper, constricted the possibilities I saw for myself. By the time I arrived at college, I had become an internationally recognized leader of the White nationalist movement. I couldn't yet imagine any other path. I publicly condemned those beliefs in 2013, at the end of my college years.
Persuading anyone to change their beliefs about something fundamental to their identity is the same as asking them to change their community. It was only after I no longer believed the supposed evidence for racist beliefs that I was forced to admit it was the fear of losing the connections, care, and love I'd known until my early twenties that had kept me from following my values.
Antiracism is a worldview that constantly seeks to expand the circle of people so that anyone can find connection, value, and loyalty. It's a harder thing to advocate for than segregation and justifications of inequality ever felt. It asks people to change constantly, to spend their lives trying to find new forms of connection with an ever-expanding group of people. It can be overwhelming. It's not less natural than the fear peddled by racism, but it can feel more risky to ask people to imagine something that does not yet exist.
Represented by Authors Unbound · travels from Baltimore, available nationally and internationally.
Selected venues include Harvard, Yale, MIT, the University of Virginia, the Chicago Humanities Festival, Goldman Sachs, and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, alongside synagogues, JCCs, corporations, museums, and college campuses nationwide. My story has reached audiences well beyond the U.S., covered by the BBC, The Guardian, and Der Spiegel, and elsewhere across Europe. I welcome speaking invitations from hosts abroad.
In conversation with Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg at the University of Chicago. Chicago Humanities, 2024. Full program, 50 min. Watch on YouTube ↗
An 18-minute interview with Michel Martin on why people hold onto extremist beliefs. PBS, 2024. Watch on PBS ↗
A short documentary from PFLAG National's I Changed My Mind series, directed by Brooke Sebold. 2025. Watch on YouTube ↗
I'm a historian, writer, and advocate based in Baltimore, and the author of The Klansman's Son (Abrams Press, 2024), which earned praise from Ibram X. Kendi and Charlayne Hunter-Gault.
My work focuses on radicalization, community, how minds change, and the persistence of white supremacy in American life, as a writer, a researcher, and a speaker who has delivered more than a hundred keynotes, workshops, and campus visits since 2016.
I've served as a subject-matter expert advising Meta on building community across identity divides, contributed research to a Center for American Progress report on countering extremism, and partnered with the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and Facing History & Ourselves on public programs and educator training for nearly a decade. I'm available for strategic communications, narrative framework, and curriculum consulting, in addition to speaking.
Languages: German, Latin, French, Arabic.
It's a book about being given a title and choosing whether to uphold it. I spent the first third on the history my family built; the rest is what it cost to stop.
It was my first time in the public eye, my first time out front, and my first time claiming publicly my intention to lead White nationalism into its next generation. The experience was genuinely fun. It was also terrifying, and it taught me terrible lessons.
The Jenny Jones Show was a nationally syndicated daytime talk show filmed in the same studios in the NBC Tower in Chicago as its rival The Jerry Springer Show. Jenny and Jerry — and Geraldo and Maury and others like them — often brought on unsophisticated guests to face a shouting and brawling live audience, to great commercial success; The Jerry Springer Show, by far the leader of the genre, ended that season with ratings just behind Oprah.
The episode they invited me and my dad for was titled "Hateful Websites on the Internet" and ran on October 4, 1999. Several years before, David Duke, my dad's oldest friend, had negotiated to appear on The Jerry Springer Show in a one-on-one interview, away from the jeering audience. For my first interview, my dad negotiated something similar, allowing me to give a one-on-one interview offstage. In addition, the producers also offered to pay for a trip to DisneyQuest, the virtual reality amusement park that had recently opened downtown.
My dad asked me over and over, even up to the day of filming, if I was sure I wanted to give the interview. I felt listened to and respected, and I felt like I was fully consenting to my participation. I believed in the cause, as much as a curious child can believe in any ideology, and I was excited to begin advancing it myself.
When we arrived at the set, my dad went out with the other guests, including other White power leaders and two daughters of Fred Phelps, the founder of the Westboro Baptist Church. I watched the lighting crew and cinematographers, while I heard the echoes of the angry crowd through the thin prop walls. I refused the makeup artist's offers several times, because I didn't think makeup was for boys. I remember her explaining that it wouldn't be visible, and was only meant to keep the glare of the stage lights from shining off my face. I held firm, committed to upholding my sense of gender norms, and she relented.
When the time for my interview came, the crew turned on fog machines that produced a dramatic cloud around the stool the producers led me to. I was near the corner of the stage, behind two panels they slid open to reveal me there. Jenny Jones implied my separate interview was a last-minute decision: "He didn't want to come on the show, and we'll see, uh, he's backstage, he is ten years old, his name is Derek. You've been listening to us back there, Derek? Okay, you — you want to go out there in the audience? Sit next to your dad? You're welcome to."
Watching the interview now is an almost unbearably mortifying experience. It feels like I am watching it simultaneously through my eyes both then and now, from two different vantages and two different worlds. I had told the pre-show B-roll interviewers the night before, "I designed the website for White children. Most people think that my father has taught me to hate other races. He's just taught me to be proud of my heritage and to be proud of my race." Jenny asked me how I decided to create the kids' page of my dad's website, and I recounted, "There was a newspaper article with another racist kids' page on — that I saw in the newspaper, and I wanted — wanted to make another one to have other — to have kids have another way of being able to see ideas and other opinions."
I knew immediately I had messed up by using the word "racist." My family was strict about messaging, and nothing was more fundamental than their position that "racist" was a word only our enemies used to describe us. Jenny asked me what ideas and opinions I was hoping to send, and I told her, "I'm sending a message to be proud of your her—" — momentarily forgetting the word "heritage" — "history and your ancestry, just to be proud of all the things that your ancestors have done, because the news media and schools never say any of it."
Finally, Jenny asked me again if I wanted to go out in front of the live audience, and I shook my head with a look of fear. "No," I responded, "I've been hearing all the audience. They boo — they boo when you come on, they boo when you're talking." She responded, "You understand why, though?" and I responded, "Yes." I knew immediately I'd made another messaging mistake. She got up. "I'm going to go back and talk to your dad," she said, and I tried to add quickly, before she was gone and I lost my chance, "They don't understand us."
Looking back now, it's overwhelming to watch the moment I first plunged into public activism for White nationalism, on behalf of my family and the community that raised me. Even all this time later, I can't help being shocked to hear myself slip up and use the forbidden word "racist" in my first-ever interview. When my family gathered back home in Florida to watch the broadcast, they were disappointed to hear it and gave me feedback to remember to be careful not to use the enemy's wording, but instead to use the word "racialist" to describe our "pro-White" movement. The next decade trained me in how to stay on message. There's a part of me that still leaps to the fore unbidden when I watch it, wanting to coach that kid through their first interview. Or to tell them not to do it at all.
Once I overcome the twinge from watching my younger self spout talking points of a movement I've now spent nearly as much time opposing as I had supporting it, my next feeling is empathy. It's hard to listen to my younger self call out, "They don't understand us," to the back of Jenny Jones as she walked away. I loved my family. I wanted to stand up for them, and that day I felt like I had.
From the Prologue of The Klansman's Son, excerpted in Literary Hub
A meticulous account of the emotional journey — how internal courage and external love braced each step. A deeply moving memoir.Ibram X. Kendi, author of How to Be an Antiracist
A necessary warning that hatred can be comfortable as much as violent, that family warmth can nurture the worst as much as the best. Important.Financial Times
A page-turner composed with candor and grace. A must-read for all who hunger for hope in these cruel times.Nancy MacLean, author of Democracy in Chains
Interviewed by Terry Gross (Fresh Air), Krista Tippett (On Being), Michel Martin (Amanpour & Co.), Trevor Noah (The Daily Show), Elle Reeve, and Anderson Cooper. Profiled in the Washington Post, People, and O, The Oprah Magazine; subject of Eli Saslow’s Rising Out of Hatred.