A man who was raised to be a die-hard white supremacist explains it took for him to rethink his beliefs
"It was my life," Black told The New York Times' Michael Barbaro on 'The Daily' podcast.
Everyone around him, Black said, believed in segregation for the white "master race."
Black, whose godfather was former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke, comes from a long line of white supremacists. His father, Don Black, also worked for the KKK and started Stormfront, one of the first and largest white supremacist sites today.
Throughout the 1990s, Black would often see prominent KKK members stop by his house and even started a kids version of Stormfront as a child.
Despite everything, Black was convinced that he wasn't doing anything wrong. After Barack Obama got elected, Black started running the Republican committee of his parish and would regularly give speeches on why Obama's presidency would lead to America's decay.
"You could win these positions maybe as long as you didn't get outed as a white nationalist and get all the controversy that comes along with it," Black said.
It was only when, in 2010, Black left home to go to a liberal arts college that he started making friends with people of different backgrounds and political views - all while still hosting a white nationalist radio show for his dad's site.
"Trying to live both of those lives was terrifying because I knew that one day somebody was going to type my name into Google," Black told the Times.
But despite espousing deeply racist anti-Semitic views for most of his earlier days, Black later made a Jewish friend who would invite him to Shabbat dinners and community events.
"He doubted that he was going to convince me of anything. He just wanted me to see a Jewish community thing," Black said.
Later, they started arguing about white nationalist views and trying to convince the other with studies and statistics. With time, Black started losing faith that his side and the statistics he was getting through Stormfront were correct - and eventually told his family that he did not want to identify with the white nationalist movement anymore.
"I got to a point where I didn't believe it anymore," said Black, whose essay on leaving the white nationalist movement was published by The New York Times in 2016.
He now regularly speaks out on why he believes Donald Trump's presidency is dangerous to people and tries to get current white nationalists to move away from the movement.