I've never been particularly impressed by this guy. He did, after all, burn down a church and get away scot-free. I've never seen any kind of remorse on his part. He talks about it like it was just some funny thing that happened.

I saw him speak a while back and I really wanted to believe him, but too much of his story did not match up. Many of the claims he makes about the KKK, supposedly dating to the 60s were not true of the Klan at that time and didn't really come about until the 1980s. I got the feeling he was either involved with the KKK much more recently than he owned up to or that he was making most of his story up based on the available literature and television talk shows.

I am not impressed.  So, he changed because Wade Watts was the "right kind" of black person, and it had simply never occurred to him that black men sometimes were polite Christians in business suits?

Plus, while it sounds like Wade Watts would be a great guy, and was no doubt an important player in the Civil Rights and Post-Civil Rights era, I still don't like the tone of the article.  It paints Klan members as misguided and ignorant hill folk who could just be changed if us mean black folk were NICE instead of getting angry everywhere.  But not every Klan member is John Clary.  The Klan still exists today, in a world where you simply have to flip on the TV or open a newspaper to have images of kind, Christian black guys in "normal" clothes (um, hello, PRESIDENT OBAMA?).  Martin Luther King was assassinated the same as Malcolm X despite the difference in their attitudes.  Morgan Freeman and Will Smith are some of the most well know and wall liked actors around, and people are still racist.  I know scores of white folks my age who have taken and aced sociology of race classes taught by intelligent, polite black people in Western professional clothes, and even majored or minored in Sociology, and are still racist.  I've tried to "politely educate" plenty of people, and if someone wants to believe racist ideology because they were raised with it, it doesn't matter how many polite smiles they're given or how many sassy-but-nonthreatening jokes you tell, they'll still be racist.  Racists won't stop if black people just decided to be kind and funny, and not get angry about threats to our lives or property damage done in the name of "race purification."

I dig Reverend Wade Watts (not sure how I feel about Clary), but I feel like there's a message to this that tells black people to just be nicer and more forgiving and then the mean white folks will come to their senses. Which, yeah, no. An interesting journey for two men (if the facts check out?), but not a general model for social change that I would invest in. Not on its own. Plenty of people are confronted by the violation of their racist expectations every day - some of them change their minds, but many just come up with more "sophisticated" justifications. Plus it has nothing to do with ending structural racism - the KKK suck and have caused serious hurt, but they aren't the most insidious form of racism and they are not the hardest to eradicate.

In fact, there is some interesting psych research discussing how increasing positive relations between social groups can actually work *against* achieving social change. Here are a couple that are open-access (I think):
Dovidio, J. F., Gaertner, S. L., & Saguy, T. (2009). Commonality and the complexity of “we”: Social attitudes and social change. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 13, 3-20.
http://www.yale.edu/intergroup/DovidioPSPR2009.pdf

"Taken together, the studies in this section extend our findings on the preferences of majority and minority group members for different forms of recategorization. Specifically, these results implicate the potentially strategic functions of these orientations, of which people are not fully conscious. Moreover, they suggest the importance of going beyond a focus on intergroup attitudes to consider how the nature and content of intergroup interaction can impede or facilitate meaningful social change. However, these findings do not indicate that commonality, positive intergroup contact, and intergroup harmony necessarily undermine efforts toward equality. The critical factor likely involves the nature of positive contact and how this harmony is achieved. For instance, whereas emphasis on commonality topics that are unrelated to group inequalities may deflect attention from disparities and thereby lead group members to relax their motivation for achieving equality, common identity constructed around a sense of morality and humanity would likely bring the illegitimacy of disparities to light. Such a commonality focus can bring members of advantaged and disadvantaged groups together and motivate them, perhaps in coordinated fashion, to eliminate social inequities. However, it is important, theoretically and practically, to recognize that commonality and intergroup harmony per se do not necessarily lead to intergroup equality." (p. 14)

Saguy, T., Tausch, N., Dovidio, J. F., & Pratto, F. (2009). The irony of harmony: Intergroup contact can produce false expectations for equality. Psychological Science, 20.
http://www.yale.edu/intergroup/SaguyPsychSci.pdf

Abstract: Positive intergroup contact has been a guiding framework for research on reducing intergroup tension and for interventions aimed at that goal. We propose that beyond improving attitudes toward the out-group, positive contact affects disadvantaged-group members’ perceptions of intergroup inequality in ways that can undermine their support for social change toward equality. In Study 1, participants were assigned to either high- or lowpower experimental groups and then brought together to discuss either commonalities between the groups or intergroup differences. Commonality-focused contact, relative to difference-focused contact, produced heightened expectations for fair (i.e., egalitarian) out-group behavior among members of disadvantaged groups. These expectations, however, proved unrealistic when compared against the actions of members of the advantaged groups. Participants in Study 2 were Israeli Arabs (a disadvantaged minority) who reported the amount of positive contact they experienced with Jews. More positive intergroup contact was associated with increased perceptions of Jews as fair, which in turn predicted decreased support for social change. Implications for social change are considered.

This video also makes them both out to be cartoon characters, but why is Clary the one who gets to tell it? I wasn't clear if Watts was deceased or not, but I would rather have heard this particular story come from him.

Very inspiring story.

OMG. I just laughed at the Imperial wizard. I'm so sorry but seriously? Imperial wizard? That sounded like a position in some LARP groups or something...in a racist way.

I'm dying.....

Not cool man fuck you bitch ass Whole