Margaret Huang : Fighting Hate and Protecting Democracy

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0:49I'm Guy Kawasaki and this is Remarkable People. Thank you very much for listening. We're on a mission to make you remarkable. And today, I'm very pleased to host Margaret Wang. She is the president and CEO of the Southern Poverty Law Center. Margaret is a longtime human rights and racial justice advocate. She leads the SPLC in its mission to foster racial justice and white supremacy, strengthen intersectional movements, and advance human rights. Before joining the SPLC, Margaret was Amnesty International USA's Executive Director. She led campaigns to protect migrants, refugees, torture survivors, gun violence victims, and activists.

1:40Margaret led human rights missions to the U.S.-Mexico border to advocate for asylum seekers and to document abuse. Her work includes accompanying transgender youth seeking asylum and leading observer delegations to monitor U.S. police responses to civil and human rights protests. Margaret brings a wealth of knowledge and experience to the fight for justice with a master's degree in international affairs from Columbia University and a bachelor's in foreign service from Georgetown University. I'm Guy Kawasaki and this is Remarkable People. And now let's explore Margaret's remarkable journey from East Tennessee to the top of one of the most important organizations in the fight against injustice.

2:31How did your family end up in East Tennessee of all places? It's a great question. What a good way to kick off. So my father actually was born in mainland China. His family fled to Taiwan in 1949 as part of the nationalist departure from China. They settled in Taiwan. They were very poor when they arrived, like all of the mainlanders who resettled in Taiwan. And then he chose to study chemistry because he understood that was the best way to get a visa to come to the United States to study. And so he came to East Tennessee to get his master's degree in chemistry. Johnson City, Tennessee, in the Appalachian Mountains.

3:24Did it not occur to him he could have gone to Stanford? I really don't know all the details of why that place, but he had a friend who had a connection to the university. and for him it was just the chance to come and study in the U.S. He did his master's degree there, so two years there, and then he went to the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana to do his Ph.D., where he met my mother, who was doing her Ph.D. in mathematics, and after they finished at that university, they ended up being offered a teaching job back in East Tennessee. So that's how we landed there. And how many Chinese people were in East Tennessee?

4:10Very few. Very few. Actually, in a nearby town, so I grew up in Johnson City in Kingsport, there was the Kodak Eastman plant. And they actually did recruit a number of Chinese to come work there. So I did grow up with Chinese school. Do you know about Chinese school? You grew up with Chinese school in East Tennessee? Yeah. The parents organized. They were the teachers. We learned calligraphy and Mandarin. And sometimes if there was a really inspired parent, Tai Chi or something. Every Saturday afternoon, morning and afternoon for several years in middle school. It was pretty tough. Yeah. You played majo, make dim song.

5:02We didn't do anything that fun. Yeah. And in East Tennessee, how much Chinese history did you get? None. None? None. Zero? Zero? In the public schools, you mean? None. At the same time, how much Black history did your classmates get? None. What was history? Columbus, the white guy, came over and saved these Native Indians from peril, made them Christian, and had Happy Thanksgiving. Absolutely. That's it? Yeah. It was what you'd expect, plus a lot of memorization and dates of wars. I seem to remember that was really important in history, was to remember when people were fighting. And if you studied World War II, did anybody mention the Japanese being interned?

5:49No. So this is no pun intended, but history was completely whitewashed. Completely. In fact, do you know how I learned about Japanese internment? I do. I read your bio. So you know. So I moved to Washington for college. I went to the National Museum for American History. And I visited the exhibit. And I sat down in the museum and I cried. Because you'd never heard of that. Never heard of it before. And I couldn't believe that that had been left out of my history classes. This is slightly bizarre, but I grew up in Hawaii. Yeah. Okay. and I swear to God, I learned about Japanese internment also in college because in Hawaii, even though it was one-third Japanese American, there was very little internment in Hawaii.

6:44I think there was a couple hundred people. I get to Stanford and I meet a Japanese American from the mainland. There's a derogatory term called katonks. So I meet all these katongs and they're all like all pissed off because in World War II, their family was injured. I don't know. What the hell are you talking about? Man, I'm from Hawaii, man. We own Hawaii. It was like, for different reasons, we both didn't get that part of World War II. Exactly. Oh, that's amazing. And did you experience racism as a kid? Of course. Well, he grew up as children of color in the United States. Has anyone ever said no to that question?

7:32What, you were the slantide demo? Yes. Ching chong. Some other less polite words. Yeah. But then your black schoolmates had it worse or the same? Different and probably worse. And there were no Latinos in my school at the time. There were what? There were no Latinos in my school at the time. It was Black, white, and a few of us Asian. That has changed over the years, but yeah. Okay, now, switching gears here, can you just explain what the Southern Poverty Law Center does? Sure. I'm fairly literate, and I don't know what it does. We are an organization that was founded in 1971 with a commitment to making the civil rights movement a reality.

8:25So not just the laws that were being passed in the 50s and 60s, not just the Supreme Court wins that promise a new kind of United States, but actually suing on behalf of people who were being denied equal opportunity, equal access, equal treatment under the law. Over time, that has evolved significantly, and that is because of what we learned along the way. Our initial cases were representing women who were suing for discriminatory pay or unequal access to jobs. We also sued on behalf of Black families who were being denied access to the YMCA swimming pools. Or in some memorable cases, we represented women who were forcibly sterilized by the federal government as being people who should not have children.

9:22So we did a lot of those cases. And as we went along, we kept running into the open and ongoing discrimination of white supremacist groups in the Deep South that were causing serious harm to Black communities, Black families. And in one terrible case, there was a young black man who was lynched by the KKK. And we decided to represent his mother in a civil suit against the KKK. And that decision and that win, we did win the case. they were forced to compensate the family and they were then forced out of business. They had to give up all their property, all of their holdings as a chapter of the KKK, and they were put out of business.

10:13What city is this? This was in Alabama. I should remember the name of the city and I'm sorry, I don't. And this is in the 70s? This was in the early 80s. We were founded in 71, So the beginning of the next decade, we took this case on and it really changed. We became experts on the topic of extremism, on white supremacy, and on putting those people out of business. And if I were to go visit your office, is it just basically a bunch of lawyers and administrators? It would have been then. If you visited our offices in the 80s, that's what it would look like. But as I said, over the last few decades, we've evolved.

11:00So first we developed research and an analysis capacity. So we were studying who are these groups and where do they come from and what are their ways of operating and where does their funding come from? In a sociological sense. And a political sense. We've provided a lot of information over the years to law enforcement about groups who are planning bad acts. We, at different points, have collaborated with law enforcement. We don't do that anymore, but that has been part of our history. We also then developed an entire educational arm. And this is where your questions about education are so important.

11:41What we saw is that when children don't learn about our true history, they're much more inclined to repeat it. or to not see the risks and the dangers of what's surrounding them because they don't recognize the peril. Is that learning a language in the sense that if you don't get them like 10 years old, it's too late or something? I think you can reach them at different ages, but I think you also can't avoid it in early ages. And so we now have curriculum experts and training specialists who offer professional development to teachers and schools across the country on how to teach about the civil rights movement, how to teach about slavery and genocide, how to teach about some of the difficult periods of our life in the United States, and how to make sure that all students feel welcomed and included in the classroom.

12:42And that is a huge part of our work. And these people doing research, are they just poring over books and data? Or are they like Leonardo DiCaprio and they're out there in the field, patting heat? Is there going to be a movie, SPLC, CIS or something? Definitely not. No movie. But when we started, it was a lot of human intelligence. So it was actually going and studying the groups in person, sometimes infiltrating. collecting information that way. When you say infiltrated, you mean into the Ku Klux Klan? Yes. SPLC members are like wearing the sheets and being spied. I'm not going to comment on all the ways that that was done, but just to say that that was the best way of getting information at earlier times.

13:34That is no longer the case. These groups are meeting in person and these groups aren't doing the activities the way that they always have. Now all of it has moved online. And so in order for us to track what's happening, we have to use online, open source, and other sources of intelligence. I understand that it's worse in the sense that obviously digital communication is instant and free and far-reaching and all that, but it's also more easily monitored, right? Yeah, but you know this. There are hundreds, thousands of platforms out there that have no restrictions or rules about the kind of content you can post.

14:19And it can be very challenging identifying and tracking all of those. But that's what our researchers do today. So every once in a while, I read that such and such organization has been labeled a hate group. What does that mean when you guys label something a hate group? So we have a definition. You can find it on our website. It is a group that actually designates a community of people, either by the words of their leaders, by their official statements, or by the association, the activities that they do around those groups, that malign or attack a group of people based on their immutable characteristics.

15:08So, forms of identity, race, gender, religion, immigration status, a whole host of things. And that's a hate group. We also track anti-government extremist groups, which can be different. So sometimes they share some of that ideological hatred of groups, but sometimes they really just want to overthrow a government.

15:50Walk me through the mechanisms. Okay, every Monday we meet at 8, and this Monday we're going to decide on QAnon. How do you say? We're declaring you a hate group. So in our annual year in hate report, we start the slate clean in January. So even if you've been on a report in the past, it doesn't mean that you're continued automatically. And we spend that year. Everybody gets. Everybody's wiped clean in January. And we start the year by monitoring what are groups across the country saying, doing, what are their leaders saying, how are they using their platforms to talk about other communities. And if we see evidence, then you can be added to the hate list.

16:40But it's not an automatic. We've had groups that have been on the hate list one year and then they're not the next year because they no longer embrace that ideology or because they've become defunct. But I'm really interested in the tactics. Is there like a person who stands up at a meeting and says, OK, this is why I think this should be designated a hate group. and there's a demo Xamagin who argues against. They're like, how's the decision made? You poll your members? No, not at all. It's data-based. It's a rigorous analysis by trained researchers and data folks. And they're looking at a whole range of things.

17:20It can't just be that you stood up at a meeting and said something. That's not the way to designate. It has to be a track record. You have to be publishing things that malign a group of people. You have to have your leader go out and criticize a group of people. Maybe you're involved in things like flyering, where you're dropping off pamphlets in a neighborhood and criticizing a group of people. Those are all activities that will get you listed. But not one person affiliated loosely with somebody who stands up in a meeting and says something. I meant someone on your staff. No, no, no. And we have researchers who backstop one another.

18:01So when one person comes and says, I've been researching this group, I think they might need to go on the list. There are other researchers who then go back and check all of the facts and determine whether that designation is appropriate. OK, so let's say this group makes this hate list. What's the impact on that group? It really varies. I don't think the Ku Klux Klan ever minded that they were on our hate list. Some groups consider it a badge of honor. Other groups very much resent the designation. We do get sued on a somewhat frequent basis, I would say, by groups who do not appreciate the designation and want to have it removed.

18:41But the other thing to remember is this is the opinion of the SPLC. We ground it in data and analysis. We don't think it's frivolous in any way. We're ready to stand by our research. But it's our opinion, just like you can have an opinion about the Southern Poverty Law Center. If we think that you're a hater extremist groups, we actually are allowed under the Constitution to save. Every year it resets. And so in one month, QAnon might not be. Moms for Liberty might not be, or they might be, or who knows. Or their actions could change. Their activities, their leaders could change in the way they talk about things.

19:22It would be really unusual to see that degree of change in our experience. That doesn't happen often. But we create the opportunity every January. We start again. And that's the thing about the year in hate report. It's a snapshot of the year that we're reporting on. For example, the year 2023, our new report will come out in March, and it will cover who was actively engaged in hateful or anti-government activity in 2023. It's not who's doing it in 2024. That will be the next year. Is there some place that even you would not go like you, SPLC? Take an extreme example. March 2024, you guys say the Republican Party is a hate group.

20:12The qualities you listed seems to me that it's based on race. It's based on the qualities. You could check the box for the GOP. It's not necessarily the case. We haven't typically watched political parties for that. You have not? No. Oh. And remember, we only look in the United States. We're not designating groups outside of the United States. We have identified individual candidates running for political office as extremist candidates. And that is something that the SPLC Action Fund does. That's our C4. So there's a bad boys list, and that comes out once a year? It's come out around election times every year.

20:58And we haven't been doing it that long. Our C4 has only been around for six years. Who's been on the list recently? Some names you might recognize, but there are also some folks who are running for local or state office who might not be familiar. But you can find those on our website as well. Okay, just throw a name out now. Sure. So Marjorie Taylor Greene's made it on the list. This is not a surprise. No. Yeah. There are a few others. We actually just recently uncovered that Congresswoman Green has a white nationalist working for her who has formal affiliations with extremist organizations. I think that he no longer now works there.

21:39What's the trend like? Because it's hard to judge from reading media. It is worse. It is worse in some ways. So let me explain. There has always been hate and extremism in this country since before it was founded. And the organization of that hate and extremism has never been as open, as coordinated, as well funded, and as tied to political leaders as it is now. These groups have traditionally been more on the extremes. Now, of course, in the Deep South during Jim Crow, there were political leaders, law enforcement leaders who were part of the KKK. So that's familiar. George Wallace days. But we haven't seen that since the end of Jim Crow, right?

22:36Like that was... We're getting close. And what I'm trying to say is it's a return. So it's not new. We've seen it before, but we are going back to a moment where it is inextricably tied to people in power and seeking to return to power in ways that we have not seen for decades. And do you see this as a last gasp, desperate play for survival? And the trend is not their friend? Or this is just how it's going to be forever? It's not inevitable. No, it's not. The key here is that this is coming as part of a backlash. They're recognizing the changes that are happening in the country. Demographically, the values and morals of the younger generations who are growing up and coming into power, they are not aligned with this way of thinking.

23:39And so it is a bit of a last gasp, but only if we stay organized and aware and push back. If we don't turn out in record numbers to reject this in 2024, we may lose the opportunity to have our democracy pushback because our opponents And so I have been very clear that they're going to take away all of the powers of participatory democracy. This will become much more of an autocracy of a fascist state. And that is when we are really in trouble because we won't be able to organize at that stage. It would be very difficult to dig yourself out of that hole. Very difficult. Not impossible, but it will be much more difficult and likely much more violent.

24:29They're suppressing the vote now, Guy. If you look at the states where the Southern Poverty Law Center has offices, work, staff, we are seeing hundreds of bills to suppress the vote in each of our states every year. They're going after people of color. They're going after people with disabilities. They're going after women. They're going after young people. They're going after senior folks. There is not a constituency that they haven't identified ways to suppress their vote. And the more that we let them do that, who will be voting in the end? That's when we lose our power. Call me naive or stupid, but how can you believe that is going to be a winning strategy in the long run?

25:19For some of them, I don't think they care about the long run. If they did, we wouldn't be seeing the crisis and climate issues, right? Really only thinking about themselves at this moment. Maybe their kids, probably not. So I don't think these are people who care about the long term. I think they're people who are in it for their own benefit right now. I think for the rest of us who are worried about the future, who have to think about what happens next, it's a very different calculation. And how do you think they came to have this kind of mentality? I think people like having power. I think once they've had it, they're unwilling to share or give it up.

26:01This is a depressing interview. I don't mean it to be because I'm not actually demoralized by this. If anything, I feel strongly motivated. And I'll tell you, we see stories all the time, even in the Deep South, where some of these challenges are the biggest, I think. There are communities that are organizing and fighting back. The organization that happened in Georgia over the last decade. Stacey Abrams? The Stacey Abrams movement and the movement of so many other strong Black women who led the organizing effort in Georgia has transformed the way that people in that state feel about their relationship to government and the accountability that they expect elected officials to have.

26:50Is it sustainable? We've got to keep working on that. But they've shown us how to do it. And we are trying to replicate that incredible model across all of our states in the South to really build strong leadership, strong communities who understand what their priorities are and what they're going to stand for. I interviewed Stacey for this. Yeah. Right. Which took me two years of groveling to get that, but it was worth it. Funny, it's a coincidence, but I asked her for a blur for my book today. I'm such a dumbass, though I sent the wrong attachments. So she said back in email, it was just, where's the gang?

27:32So anyway, she's a powerhouse. She is. She has a vision. She has a vision for what people-led democracy should be. Now, you were also Amnesty International. That's right. Another organization I think very few people understand. So what does Amnesty International do? Amnesty is actually a movement for human rights. It is member organized and driven. It is international in scope. And the theory is that by individual people paying attention, taking action on behalf of human rights defenders, that we can make change happen, that we can hold autocrats and dictators to account. The original founder of Amnesty International was somebody who wrote a letter to a newspaper about some political prisoners in Portugal.

28:27He was in the UK. And after he wrote his letter, other people around the world started sending in letters. And ultimately, the prison officials decided to release those detainees rather than continue to have the scrutiny and attention from the international community. So it's premised on a few things. It's premised on the idea that individual actions matter. It's premised on the idea that you can shame government officials into changing their behavior. And it's premised on the idea that the international community can work coherently and coordinating their efforts to push for human rights. All of those are premises that have certainly been challenged in the last few years.

29:16But it's a powerful, powerful message when people from around the world are all demanding the release of a prisoner or the change in policy that's harming a particular group of people. Now, to get really tactical, at the U.S.-Mexico border, what does amnesty mean? I mean, is amnesty a certain kind of person trying to get into America? Or is it just people trying to find a better economic situation for the family? What defines the amnesty group from the other group? Sometimes amnesty advocates on behalf of asylum seekers and refugees, but that's not where the name came from. So it's fundamentally trying to reverse false imprisonment.

30:05Amnesty? Yes. Amnesty really believed that people were being arrested and detained because of political belief or because of identity. And the idea of amnesty was to seek their release, to seek amnesty on behalf of those prisoners. But it's only political. It's not someone wrongly accused of murder. Over the years, it's evolved quite a bit. And now it's not even necessarily about people who are being detained. Now, amnesty campaigns on behalf of, for example, women human rights defenders in Iran, who may or may not have been arrested, but who are being mistreated, maligned by political leadership.

30:45So they're campaigning on a whole host of issues, not just those who are being detained. I keep forgetting to ask you this, but how is it that a Chinese-American from East Tennessee is running the Southern Parkway Law Center? You're not exactly mine. No, I'm not. Of course, they've never had a black leader of the Southern Poverty Law Center. No. So I'm only the third president and CEO of the SPLC. And the first two were white men. And is that just an interesting factoid, or is there like some deeper meaning to draw from that? I think it's an interesting factoid. But what I will say is this. The person who leads the SPLC has to have a fundamental belief in the priority of serving black communities of the South, which I do.

31:42Why? Because I truly believe that none of us will be free and able to exercise all of our rights until we prioritize the equality and the equal treatment of African-American communities in the South.