Here we got Alphonso’s entire gang, who once tried knock me down as a white man, to “beat the system” in a more constructive way. Except for Alphonso they are all dead today from murder and aids.

Here he is telling my wife about the time in 1972 when his gang saw me and decided to attack that “white boy, but then your husband did something so that we ended up as friends for life. Since then I have been more than 40 times in prison and killed two people. So why your husband escaped I still can’t understand.” Well, that is the power of non-violent communication.

Alphonso’s saving angles were his daughters Alfrida and Joann who are both ministers today. They literally saved him in church, where so many of my other gangster friends also ended up, all singing the same deadbeat melody “I was a sinner, but I found God.”
Well, nothing is as boring as an old gangster who has found that new narrative. They were a whole lot more fun to hang out with in their angry youth :-)

After prison Robert met and married Nancy seen here. In those days they had only black friends since they were drug addicts and in that criminal underworld blacks and whites have no problems hooking up with each other very much as we now start seeing it among hells angels and immigrant gangs in Denmark. But one day Robert got help from the KKK to get out of his drug problem – “they made a man out me” – a story I have often heard Klan members tell. Nancy would have nothing to do with the KKK, so they split.

Since then she has only had black or Mexican boyfriends. Robert, who can usually only utter a few coherent sentences, is the only one I know in the Klan who says “niggers” about blacks. When he says clichés like “I stand up for my race” I always tease him and say “So if you stand up for your race, why then do you lie down on the couch there while your ex-wife fucks a Mexican behind the wall there?” Well, he says, “that wetbag was a good father for my son during all those years I was gone and failed him!”
Here I should point out that the Klan today are more against illegal Mexican immigrants taking their jobs than against blacks.  

His son here is 18 now and just out after one year in prison. He is now running around in his school boasting about how he wants to be a big Klan leader like his father. Well, he is not too bright and that has not made him very popular in school in which he is the only white kid.

Many Danes saw the movie on TV about how I brought the biggest Klan leader in America around to my black friends, but little about the therapeutic value it had for him in terms of helping him out of a discourse which is generally seen as negative. Let me tell the background story. Two young Danish film makers in 2001 got the idea to make a movie about my life in America, but had no idea how to make it and then decided to film me in a meeting with the Klan leader Jeff Berry. But a school in Maine moved my show because of a snow storm so I couldn’t fly with them to Indiana. Instead they put up a camera in my apartment in NYC and said: “Say something to the Klan leader.” I had no idea what to say since I had never met a Klan leader before and was racking my brain.

What I ended up saying was something like this which can be seen on their movie on my website: “I can only feel deep compassion for the Klan. For in all the years as a lecturer in American universities I have picked up so many poor hitchhiking Klan members who – during the long hours of driving on American highways – would usually tell me about either incest or severe mistreatment in childhood often committed by an alcoholic stepfather. Often they said I was the first one they had ever talked to about it since they as a result of their pain had developed various forms of behavior which made people avoid them, so they would usually be extremely grateful to me helping them to process their pain. In turn I ended up liking them and since this is so similar to a lot of the pain I work with in black ghettos, I actually developed a secret fondness for the Klan,” I said. After which I made a lot of parallels between the KKK and blacks.

Now, based on the prevailing narrative about the Klan many of you would probably think that this would make a proud Klan leader furious at me. But look on the video how he reacts. The two TV-people flew out and played the tape for him while filming his reactions. He was deeply moved to the point of tears and afterwards stands up saying: “How can I meet this man? You must promise me I meet Jacob Holdt.” I had obviously hit the nail of his own pain and before I had met him was already helping him to create a new narrative about his life – especially by treating him with compassion rather than what he was used to, hostility.

Well, I myself didn’t give it much thought – was busy with my own life as a lecturer – but a year later I had a workshop in Ohio Wesleyan University. As usual I say to the privileged students that their racism is far more dangerous than the Klan’s and as usual these liberal students fight me back while I attempt also for them to create a new narrative about the Klan. Then suddenly I got a bright idea: “By the way, we are only 5 hours away from the headquarters of America’s biggest Klan group and the leader last year invited me to see him. Do any of you want to come with me? Then you can examine for yourselves if the Klan really is so bad as you postulate.”  There were maybe 50 hands up, but I could only have two in my car, so I chose two of those who had fought me most passionately. They should report their conclusions afterwards to the others. We drove off and were welcomed by the Klan. When after a day and a half we drove back both otherwise very talkative students were sitting totally quiet in the darkness of the car for hours until abruptly Melanie said: “Thank you for having changed my life. I realize now that it was me who was full of hate, not them.”

And this is the truth I have found about the Klan. It is us who hate them as believers of the worldwide negative narrative about them. Not themselves who are full of hate. (Their self-hate is a different matter). I myself now had some time off and decided to move in with the Klan. In the meantime the Klan leader had gone to prison – at first sentenced to 130 years. Therefore I moved in with his wife, Pamela, who was now the functioning Klan leader. As you can see it was love at first sight. So I decided to propose to her. I had so many funny girlfriends in my life, but never a Klan leader. Well, what I want to say with this picture is that such people should be approached with humour. They love it because humour is a form of love, which they are starving for. Most people believe their negative discourse and confront them with hostility and anger and thereby trap the Klan in a negative narrative which gives them a feeling of temporary power, but which I soon found out they don’t really themselves believe in.

So here is how I became a member. Pamela had no extra beds, but I am used to share beds and therefore helped clean up the mess in her bed so typical for poor whites. When I saw that the Klan’s membership cards lay spread all over the place, I said again with silly humour: “If I now write my name on one of these cards, will I then become a member of the Klan?” And what did she answer: “Yeah, won’t you please; we have never had an anti-racist as a member. It would mean so much for us!” And the next day she called up her husband in prison and triumphantly shouted: “We got an anti-racist as a member. Now it is going forward for us.”
And so, this was my successful entry into America’s biggest Klan group. All you have to do to become a member is to wait until the Klan leader is safely away in prison and then move in with his wife and help clean up after him :-)  

I hope my humour helps deconstruct your negative Klan story just as well as it worked over the years to deconstruct the Klan’s own. Just think of the fact that they soon made me their official webmaster. As I say to my black and Jewish friends, “Now you have me – an antiracist – as a guarantee that there will never be anything racist or anti-Semitic on the Klan’s website. That power over their lives you don’t get by standing on street corners and yelling hostilities after them. As I always said before; you fight racism with love, not hate!” Oh, they never looked at it that way before.

And partly he is fighting me, I believe, in the same way I see it in my workshops from those who are just about to enter into a new narrative or understanding of their lives. They will be fighting us during the whole process. We call them the militants and love them because afterwards we see great personal changes in them and they usually become our allies in the struggle against racism.  

Certainly the trip with Jeff helped him create a whole new narrative about his life, for a month later he dissolved the whole Klan which he had been a member of all his life. It was his entire identity and pride. He knew very well that without the Klan he was nothing but poor white trash – totally forgotten by the world. It came to cost him even more, for afterwards the other Klan members attacked him and tried to kill him. For two months he was in coma and the doctors gave him only a 50% chance of surviving. When he woke up he had become crippled and blind for life as you see here on my last visit. But now he has found peace and happiness from preaching light and love in his local church instead of hate in the dark woods. There was never any more neither hate nor love in him than in me, we always found in our friendship. We had just both found a powerful narrative about ourselves to give us some undeserved attention. Another time I would like to show you how my racism is actually far more dangerous for blacks than his.

The next part of the story I found out when I had been with Raine to one of their Klan meetings and met the leader. I asked: “Can I now put up all the pictures I took on my homepage?” Normally the Klan loves all the negative attention they can get, but Raine stopped me, “No, please wait, I am right now applying for the dream job of my life. I want to be a social worker in the local state prison, but you can’t work for the state here in North Carolina if you are a member of the Klan.” Well, a few months later she called me up in Denmark and said: “I got the job, so now you can post the pictures on the web page.” Later that year I wondered why she had not sent me an invitation to her wedding as she had promised. So I googled her since she is a very active writer on the internet. To my chock I then saw everywhere stories about “the brutal rape and murder of Raine Carraway” and was totally depressed for a whole day until I called her husband to find out what had happened. Then it was herself who took the phone and now told what had happened and the deeper reasons.

Here is a summary: Growing up on the wrong side of the tracks she had as a poor white only had black school mates, but because of her father’s racism she could never bring them home. “I don’t want such criminals and junkies in my house!” he would yell. With a certain truth to it since the children we have marginalized in ghettos usually do not end up as God’s best behaving kids. But this was very hurtful for her as a little white girl not to be allowed to take your school mates home. So when in Africa she had learned a different narrative about blacks which was denied her in America, she had decided to devote her life to helping all the blacks ending up in prison to become “better people” or at least just as well behaving as she had seen them in Africa.

When some of the other Klan members found out she was working with black inmates, David Lancester and Scott Belk whom I photographed here to one of the rallies, they broke into Raine’s house, raped her and shot her all over with a submachine gun. Probably not because they were Klan members, but because they themselves had been in prison and been beaten up by the black gangs there. Only through blood transfusions managed the hospital after a long time to save Raine’s life – the reason the false rumor got out on the internet that she had been murdered. When the prison now found out that she was a Klan member, they fired her. But what happened then? Well, all the black inmates now rioted in protest, for Raine was their most popular social worker. But didn’t they know that she was a Klan member, the prison asked? Yes, of course they did.  
 

I hope DISPUK members will love this story, for as I see it this is about a woman who – deeply pained from the problem of lack of love in her childhood and the loss of both her school friends and her father to racism – is brought into a new narrative perspective which empowers her to externalize the problem and commit her life to help others. In this violent world she knew it could cost her the life. This is again that kind of story about love disguised as hate, which makes my day.  
Now Raine is happy to take up her work among the black prisoners, but she is taking no chances any more and has as you see armed herself to death. The Klan which helped create her new narrative she has now quit in order to engage herself in the local church while her husband is taking a seminary education to become a priest.

Such language she never heard in the Klan which can be explained the absence of hateful talk among American politicians and media. 60 years ago American politicians talked very much like the Danes today trash Muslims. To get elected in those days they would the game was to trash the blacks – or niggers as there were called, it was called “to out-nigger each other” – but that they have long since learned only created pain in blacks resulting in low self esteem, ghettos, violence and prisons and such things which cost white tax payers too much. So today the tone is politically correct and when the people in power now sets a more inclusive narrative, this filters down to even the lowest, most powerless people in society such as the poor whites in the Klan. In that sense the Klan is politically correct today …..just as it was in the days of Mississippi Burning when all the whites in the south encouraged the resistance against forced integration and acquitted them in all white juries when they went a step too far.