These cuffs on my hands, from the jump was a plan / I’m giving y’all a clue, there’s some clucks in they klan.—Vinnie Dewayne, “Page 37”
RACISM = BAD
No single American organization is so synonymous with fear as the Ku Klux Klan. A recent article by the Portland Mercury puts the spotlight on the group’s heavy-handed, yet often obscured history in Oregon in a review of veteran journalist Steve Law’s new book, Peddlers of Hate.
Some may wonder, however, if the Klan and their history have any material bearing on the state’s politics of the day.
While the Klan’s popularity has waned over decades, racism certainly hasn’t. In fact, while there’s been a historic rise in hate group membership, buoyed in part by Trump’s dual presidencies, there’s been another curious development by some on the right—as it turns out, many of these people do not want to be labeled as “racist.”
Even when the Klan’s official newspaper, The Crusader, endorsed Trump during his first bid for the Oval Office, he deemed the endorsement as “repulsive” (though stopping short of condemning the organization). But seemingly, Polite Society™ conservatives now prefer to dog whistle “Project 2025!” rather than bark, “White Power!”
In short, and for most: Klan = bad.
The KKK’s membership has been plummeting for years, even as other hate groups have seen a historic rise in popularity. So despite strong brand recognition, the KKK™ hasn’t managed to maintain its competitive edge in today’s crowded environment of hatred.
September marked one year since Charlie Kirk was murdered. The right-wing darling’s organization, Turning Point USA, has seen a noteworthy 180 percent uptick in new chapters on college campuses since his death. Kirk’s legacy presents a case study in the modern day laundering of racist ideals, while simultaneously avoiding owning said racism. While the Southern Poverty Law Center hasn’t pegged his group as a hate group, Kirk’s organization has certainly trafficked a level of White extremism that’s been carried on by his wife, Erika Kirk, in the year since his death.
Nonetheless, Kirk did not want to be called, despite all the evidence to the contrary, “racist.”
“Of course, I don’t want to be racist. And no American does want to be racist,” he declared in a 2021 episode of his popular, self-titled podcast.
Part of the reason it’s acceptable to some to talk about Kirk with a level of nuance, and even reverence, is because of the way he distanced himself from the most overt Kentucky-fried forms of racist ideologies.
There’s a viral video of Kirk shouting down a man arguing that America should continue as a Whites-only nation as envisioned by its founders.
Kirk, who spent a significant chunk of his career demeaning Black people, took the offensive against the seemingly more racist man’s ideology that has “No place in the conservative movement!” before telling the man to “get out of line!”
The crowd cheers.
The cheers that punctuated the aforementioned moment, along with the discourse that have followed his death, are indicative of the ways that racism actually functions in the USA.
Whether Charlie Kirk could have been a Klan member or not in a lifetime when it was more fashionable, I’ll leave to the drafters of fan-fiction to pontificate upon. Simultaneously, at times, it seems the discourse of racism is measured by a stunted yardstick that begins with hoods and burning crosses, and ends with epithets.
This form of racial analysis is an enticing narrative to engage in, if for nothing else, it makes identification of racism quite easy.
The KKK, their Halloween-like garb, and their childlike belief that they are supreme wizards, make them laughable by most modern measures. A mere withering villain, haunting an otherwise moral vessel built by patriots.
But then, you must remember—it was:
Not the Klan who steered the Mayflower and dropped Plymouth Rock upon Indigenous homesteaders.
It was not the Klan that commissioned the Trail of Tears.
It was not the Klan that drew up the plantation plots.
It was not the Klan that drew up the Oregon Provisional Government that gave up to 300 acres of land to White married men, while excluding other groups from living in the state or participating in its commerce… at the threat of public lashings.
EXTREME = HOODS
Historian Michael Harriot recently penned an article titled, Project 2025: How Trump Achieved Every Goal Of the White Agenda.
In it, he details the methodical ways that the conservative think tank, Heritage Foundation, has been able to execute the goals outlined in Project 2025 with the backing of the White House.
DOGE chainsawed through the federal government.
DEI has been mangled into a slur.
And in many places, voting has been Made Criminal Again.
Amongst other things.
It is the effectiveness of Project 2025 that calls us, in part, to remember that the Ku Klux Klan were founded in 1865—nearly 250 years after the first colonial ships touched down on these pre-occupied lands. The Klan are a post-Emancipation creation—a vile, yet predictable response to newfound freedoms for those who were not White men. So while the Klan enjoyed a level of popularity, including being the pre-eminent social group of 19th century Oregon, they certainly were not the sole expression of White extremism within its borders.
In my 2025 essay, Netflix’s Perfect Neighbor Proves Not All Hate Wears Hoods, I explored this dichotomy.
“…Mark Kruger,” I wrote, “a member of the Portland Police force who once erected a public shrine to five Nazi generals at Rocky Butte, was still with the bureau. By the time he retired in 2020, he’d not only been promoted multiple times, he was the highest paid cop on the force—raking in a clean quarter-million dollars annually.”
It would be reckless to pretend that every sworn officer is a raging White supremacist. In fact, I think it’s so disingenuous that it pokes holes into the crux of my point. Structurally, every police officer need not be Mark Kruger.
“In the era of colorblindness, it is no longer socially permissible to use race, explicitly, as a justification for discrimination, exclusion, and social contempt,” the lawyer and scholar Michelle Alexander writes in her 2016 classic, The New Jim Crow. “Today it is perfectly legal to discriminate against criminals in nearly all the ways that it was once legal to discriminate against African Americans. Once you’re labeled a felon, the old forms of discrimination—employment discrimination, housing discrimination, denial of the right to vote, denial of educational opportunity, denial of food stamps and other public benefits, and exclusion from jury service—are suddenly legal.” the lawyer and scholar Michelle Alexander writes in her 2016 classic, The New Jim Crow.
America continues to cage the most incarcerated people on the planet by an absurd amount. To this day, nearly one in four people in a jail or prison today is a Black American, despite making up just 13 percent of the population.
January 6, 2021 was an explosion of White Power. Amongst the hundreds injured or killed were police officers. Despite acting as ringleader of the whole affair, and during his 2024 bid for president, the Fraternal Order of Police, the nation’s largest police union, endorsed Trump.
“During his first term, President Trump made it clear he supported law enforcement and border security,” Patrick Yoes, the head of the 700,000 member organization said. “In the summer of 2020, he stood with us when very few would. With his help, we defeated the ‘defund the police’ movement and, finally, we are seeing crime rates decrease. If we want to maintain these lower crime rates, we must re-elect Donald Trump.”
Mark Kruger.
Charlie Kirk.
Project 2025.
Not White Power.
BLACK POWER = SIN
One of the foremothers of Black Power in Oregon was Beatrice Morrow Cannady. Shattering countless glass ceilings across her nearly two decades while living in the state, the Texas transplant’s many accolades included being Oregon’s first Black woman to graduate from law school and run for office along with co-founding the Portland NAACP. Additionally Cannady helmed a small, but mighty newspaper called The Advocate. At the height of Klan activity in Oregon, Cannady used its pages regularly to call out the group. A favorite of mine was when she told the Klan to stop hiding and “take the diapers off their face.”
Birth of a Nation is almost universally recounted as America’s first blockbuster film. Replete with actors in Blackface, unwieldy Negros attempting to rape White women and other unscrupulous behaviors, it depicts the Ku Klux Klan as the heroes of the three-hour Civil War-era minstrel. The popularity of the film lended itself to renewed interest and membership in the Klan nationwide. When the movie came to Portland theaters, Cannady spoke out forcefully, leading a campaign that she took to the mayor and governor to ban the movie.
For 15 years, she organized to keep the film from playing in Portland. Though never able to win an outright ban, she was able to galvanize thousands of Portlanders against it and limit the screenings where it was shown.
Coined by Kwame Ture in the ‘60s (then Stokely Carmichael), “Black Power” became a lightning rod of expressing Black love, and at once, a release from the forces of colonial bondage.
As the Black Power era began to take root in the ‘60s, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover stood up a cunning surveillance and infiltration apparatus to disrupt the movement known as the Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO). Ironically, “White hate groups” in addition to communists, socialists, Black nationalists, and the amorphous “new left”—were their top targets.
Hoover sent a nationwide memo to his field offices in 1968 saying COINTELPRO’s main goal was to “prevent the rise of a Black Messiah.”
The overwrought language of “messiah,” embodies the comical fear that has dominated much of U.S. governance, where Black Power is a supernatural threat to the ordained White order of the world—a sin.
Ironically, my favorite movie to come out last year is Sinners.
The Ryan Coogler-directed vampire flick turns the 1932 Mississippi Delta into a Blues-laden love note to Black joy and pain, and the rhythm that defines the dance we do between the disparate worlds of America. It’s sort of Birth of a Nation’s worst nightmare. Starring Michael B. Jordan who has dual roles as a set of twins named Stack and Smoke, who stand up a juke joint in a small town, transforming a property they buy from a local White man into a musical haven for Negroes. In the scene when they purchase the property, Smoke warns the White man, named Hogwood that if he or any Klan members came to his property, they’d be killed upon arrival.
“Shit… Klan don’t exist no more,” Hogwood retorts with a smile.
It’s later revealed that not only does the Klan still exist, but Hogwood is the group’s Grand Wizard. Without spoiling the entire movie, the Klan find themselves back on the twins’ property. And in one of the closing scenes, Smoke aptly makes good on his promise.
Armed with a machine guns and grenades, Smoke advances on the mob with precision, piercing their blood into the soil with all the cinematic flare and pizazz—slow mo’ explosions, etc.—in a moment of cinematic revenge not often seen on screen.
While many in the American public fear this sort of violent, movie-style retribution, what they seem to fear more is real-life repair.
The Black Panther Party represented that fear in the flesh when they emerged in the ‘60s. Most known for their leather getups, black berets, and armed neighborhood patrols, the American government understood that, beyond armed self-defense, the group’s biggest weapon was its commitment to organizing a cross class anti-imperialist struggle.
In popular American education, the Klan and the Panthers are presented at-times as radical extremists of the same ilk.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
Black Power organized for humanity. White Power has organized for vampiric subjugation.
October 15 marks 60 years since the Black Panthers first published their Ten-Point Program. Sixty years later, the plan drafted by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale is something of a Declaration of Black Power—an anti-Project 2025. Adopted as the official party platform, across ten points, it provides a slate of tools to assist in Black liberation that still find relevance today .
Universal income. Decent Housing. Full Employment. Education. An end to police brutality.
And chief among all: Self-determination.
It is a trick to believe extremism begins with hoods. As point five on the Ten-Point program points out, the lack of education that “exposes the true nature of this decadent American society,” creates confusion and leads some to believe that the expression of White Power is limited to hooded men.
But just as Beatrice preceded Kwame, so too, Project 2025 was preceded by the Mayflower.
Variant expressions of common goals.
The hoods were never the start of our issues. As we head into another round of elections in Oregon, my recommendation is to read the Ten-Point Program, and vote like the wretched ghost of J. Edgar Hoover was watching. Then organize every day after to ensure he turns in his grave.
Black Power!
Donovan Scribes is an award-winning writer, communications consultant, speaker and producer. A former vice president of the Portland NAACP, he writes on culture, place, and politics. Follow him on Instagram @donovanscribes. Want to keep the conversation going? Email him at
donovanscribes@gmail.com.
