Rising Out of Hatred: The Awakening of a Former White Nationalist

by Eli Saslow

“A shameless opportunist perfectly willing to exploit racism for personal benefit,” the SPLC said of Trump and others in the so-called birther movement.

“The basic principle is that it’s our job to push the rock, not necessarily to move the rock,” he replied. “That’s the only part we can control.

The idea of race was a modern, sociopolitical concept that was impossible to define because there was no one exact metric. In South Carolina, someone one-sixteenth black could be categorized as black, whereas someone in Brazil who was fifteen-sixteenths black could still be considered white. Some Asians in America were categorized as blacks in Britain. “At what point is White Black or Black White?” the article read.