How Do You Talk a Klansman out of the Klan? Ask Daryl Davis.

Daryl Davis has been one of my most requested guests for years, and we finally got him on the show. We’d crossed paths once before, at a live event with Cornel West, but this was the first time I got to really dig into how he does what he does. He’s spent over 40 years befriending members of the Ku Klux Klan, one at a time, until more than 200 of them left their hate groups for good. He has the robes to prove it. What struck me most was the method: He sits with people, lets them say the worst things they believe about him to his face, and answers with a question instead of an argument. A Klan leader once told him black people are born with a gene for violence, so Davis asked him to name the gene responsible for all the white serial killers in American history. The man had no answer, and a few months later, he was out of the Klan. I brought up something that’s been on my mind—the growing habit of people cutting off family members over politics. Davis’s response came down to simple math: A president is in office only for four to eight years, while family is supposed to last a lifetime. And if he can sit across from an actual Klansman without walking away, he doesn’t think much of the excuse that a relative’s politics are too hard to sit through at dinner. We also talked about what kids should be taught about race. I’ve argued for years that kids don’t naturally care about race–they notice skin color the way they notice hair color—and it’s often adults who teach them to attach meaning to it before they ever would on their own. Davis agreed with a lot of that, but he thinks certain history, the parts of this country’s past we still don’t teach well, needs to be taught early and built on over time rather than saved for college. By the end, one idea stuck with me. Davis thinks most of these people feel hated by the world, and the fact that he doesn’t hate them back is what actually gets through—not right away, but slowly, the next time they’re alone with their thoughts. He’s watched that play out more than 200 times. 0:00 Intro 2:18 How Daryl First Encountered Racism and White Supremacist Ideology 18:51 How Daryl Approaches Deprogramming Klan Members and Neo-Nazis 34:19 Weighing the Risk of Confronting a Grand Dragon 37:01 What Klan Members Say About Themselves After They Leave 42:42 Why Daryl Was Not Filled With Rage 46:54 Being Treated as the Exception to the Rule 54:15 Why Klan Members Feel Hated Too 1:01:31 When Should You Cut Off a Family Member Over Politics 1:11:41 What Should We Teach Children About Racism