How one black man convinced 200 KKK members to quit the Klan... by listening | Sarah Ruger

How one black man convinced 200 KKK members to quit the Klan... by listening

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Sarah Ruger, Director of Free Speech Initiatives at the Charles Koch Institute, tells us about Daryl Davis, a jazz and blues musician who has convinced over 200 KKK members to turn in their robes.

He didn't do it by heated debate. He managed to accomplish this feat by having dialogue and listening to the other side. This way, quite simply, he was able to understand where they were coming from. That made it far easier to show them the error of their ways. The Charles Koch Foundation is committed to understanding what drives intolerance and the best ways to cure it. The foundation supports interdisciplinary research to overcome intolerance, new models for peaceful interactions, and experiments that can heal fractured communities. For more information, visit charleskochfoundation.org/courageous-collaborations.The opinions expressed in this video do not necessarily reflect the views of the Charles Koch Foundation, which encourages the expression of diverse viewpoints within a culture of civil discourse and mutual respect.

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SARAH RUGER:

Sarah Ruger directs free expression initiatives for the Charles Koch Institute and Foundation. She is a passionate advocate for open inquiry, free speech rights, and engagement that respects the dignity inherent in every individual.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Sarah Ruger: Well, you're hearing a lot these days that everyone is fragile, everyone is a snowflake and who someone is pointing the finger at depends a great deal on their political ideology. And what the research is showing is that everyone wants to censor someone, everyone thinks somebody else is wrong they just disagree on who should be silenced and who is incorrect. One of the things I've been excited to see is the work of some of the folks like Jonathan Haidt at NYU who make the case that human beings are anti-fragile in the sense that we get better, we get stronger, we get more resilient and more capable of dealing with the world when we encounter difficulties and overcome them. I think that has huge relevance to the free expression conversation because fundamentally dealing with free expression is difficult. Supporting the idea of free expression means supporting the idea or the existence of even offensive speech. And that's not a small thing. We're cognizant of the fact that we're talking about free expression in an era where self-identified white nationalists and Nazis are marching down the streets in Charlottesville and people are dying trying to peacefully counter protest those ideas.

I'm thinking of a story that I think is powerful and somewhat representative of the good things that common people feel comfortable to express even nasty views, I was listening to NPR and heard the story of Daryl Davis. He's a jazz and blues musician who began, he's an African-American gentleman, he began collecting KKK memorabilia as basically a reminder of how far the civil rights movement has come, but how far we still have to go as a society in terms of eliminating bigotry and prejudice. And in the course of collecting this memorabilia he came into contact with a lot of current or former members of the KKK or family members of those people who had sympathies to those abhorrent views and he was just sitting down and talking to these people he was having drinks with them at a bar, he was conversing with them and often he would hear these people say that they've never met a black person, they've never actually had a conversation. So much of what they'd been taught had never been challenged through dialogue of that sort. And you hear this on college campuses a lot it is entirely unfair that a Darrell Davis has to bear the weight of those bigoted views and be the person who engages in the difficult exercise of dialogue. But over the course of his life of doing this he's converted more than 200 KKK members to turn in their robes, to disavow their beliefs and ultimately to recognize that they were wrong hating somebody on the basis of skin color.

So how can we promote a culture of openness in society that makes us as individuals receptive to engaging when even the most deplorable views with a goal of changing them? At the end of the day I'm a Jon Stewart Mills nerd, I think nothing but good things happen when you engage with ideas with which you disagree. You either learn how to better defend your position, maybe you move closer to truth, maybe you persuade the othe...

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