Steven Howard gave his young daughters “prettily wrapped packages” that included “the distinctive pointed hoods of the Ku Klux Klan.”
“Giving my girls my legacy,” he reportedly said while putting the garments on their heads during filming for what was supposed to be an eight-part documentary, “Generation KKK,” on A&E that was scheduled to begin airing on Jan. 10.
The New York Times article described the scene as “chilling.”
But what’s really chilling is the blowback the series received before it even aired. The network has since canceled it because of nominal payments producers made to some of the participants.
I strongly suspect it was canceled because of the blowback, not because of a practice many networks use in one fashion or another to get controversial figures to speak openly and honestly on camera.
Critics of the show were afraid it would normalize the Klan, potentially creating empathy for a group of people they don’t believe deserves any. Here’s the truth, though: Many Klan members need our empathy and compassion — even as we rightly fight against a burgeoning racial extremism trying to mainstream itself — and denying their complex humanity only breeds the kind of hatred none of us wants to see replicated.
The show didn’t have to normalize the Klan, because there is no more normal American institution. It is one of the most iconic groups in U.S. history, growing from the ashes and dust of the Civil War more than a century and a half ago, then going dormant, then revitalizing and committing the kinds of atrocities on our soil that would make ISIS blush.
The Klan instigated and carried out thousands of lynchings, mostly of black men and women, but also Jewish people and white people and anyone else who dared ally with the push for racial equality. While those atrocities were concentrated in the South, they weren’t exclusively committed in the region where I was born. The Klan’s reach, its underlying belief system, that this country was made for the comfort of white people and that people of color are dangers and threats, has been longer and wider than many would like to admit.
Some of the worst atrocities — people being burned alive; men having their genitals cut from their bodies and stuffed in their mouths; fetuses cut from the bodies of black women dangling from the rope tied around a tree branch — were committed out in the open with the full knowledge, and sometimes direct or indirect participation, of local legal authorities.
The Klan from the late 19th century through the mid-20th century could do such things, cause so much harm, because so many others either joined in or did little to stop them, while even more codified the Klan’s racial views in housing policies that redlined black people out of certain neighborhoods and made it nearly impossible for them to grow the black middle class through education initiatives, federal social welfare programs and the GI bill the way white Americans did. Jim Crow could not have survived without the force of the Klan, and the Klan would not have been necessary if not for the rationale behind segregation.
Millions of black people would not have become refugees in their own country, flowing out of the South into other areas of the United States over the course of several decades if many non-Klan member white Americans didn’t help cultivate the environment in which the Klan felt comfortable acting.
That’s why the Klan is normal. That’s why the Klan matters. That’s why it does no one any good to push them back into the shadows even as their ranks have been growing during the Obama era and have found a renewed sense of purpose since Donald Trump showed up on the scene talking about birtherism and Mexican rapists and murderers.
You can’t truly understand modern race relations in America without first understanding the Klan. The pain of watching a jury deadlock in the Walter Scott case cannot be fully appreciated without first acknowledging our country’s ugliest moments, which were experienced by my mother and father and their generation, people whose lives were forever altered — people who still bear the scars, psychic and physical, from those battles — because of the Klan and those who supported the group with a passive silence.
That’s also why we need more depictions of the group in the 21st century. The Klan can’t lynch people in the public square any more, but the fear it still feeds — whether real or imagined, has the power to affect the shape of our legal system and social norms.
We need more of such depictions because it reveals a different kind of privilege. Steven Howard’s daughters were born into a household motivated by misplaced pain and hatred of the other. Those of us lucky enough to have not been born into such situations have been privileged in a way Howard’s daughters have not been. Our privilege has just as much meaning as the much more discussed white privilege too many of us shame white men for having been given.
We should use it wisely, not only to empathize with Howard’s daughters, but Howard himself. Hating him is not going make our lives better. Better understanding him — even while fiercely opposing his dark philosophy — just might.