There’s a scene at the end of a film called The Best of Enemies, set in Durham, North Carolina, in 1971. Brilliant film. Watch it.
C.P. Ellis, the local Klan leader, stands up in front of a packed hall to vote on whether Black and white children should share a school. Everyone knows how he’ll vote. Except he doesn’t talk about race. He talks about being poor, being overlooked, and how the Klan was the first place that ever made him feel like somebody.
That’s the bit that stayed with me. He didn’t join the Klan for the ideology. He joined for the belonging.
Ten days in a room
Before that vote, he spent ten days in a room with Ann Atwater, a Black activist he despised. They’d been asked to run the meetings together, and it turned out they had the same worries: bad schools, low pay, nobody listening.
Nobody won an argument. They just worked on something together.
Spoiler alert: he tore up his Klan membership card.
Britain now
I think about that when I look at Britain now. We’re trying to argue people out of where they stand, louder, online and from a distance. The left most definitely are.
But people don’t leave a place that gives them belonging because you prove them wrong. They leave when they find somewhere better to belong.
Somewhere better
C.P. Ellis lost the Klan that night, and most of his friends too. He went on to become a union organiser, fighting for low-paid workers. Most of them were Black.
He never stopped needing to belong. He just found somewhere better.
Photo by Matt Silveira on Unsplash