Activist who went online as white supremacist talks healing
When Theo Wilson started posting videos about race on YouTube in 2015, he quickly learned that responding to racist trolls got him nowhere.
So the black poet and activist from Denver tried another approach.
Wilson, 36, took on a pseudonym, “Lucious25,” and began delving into alt-right online world as a white supremacist. His avatar was of the Marvel character John Carter, a sci-fi hero who was once a Confederate soldier.
It was an eighth-month experiment that he did quietly and anonymously. He never thought he’d go public with it, but what he learned about hate changed his view about race relations. That led to his viral video on Buzz Feed with more than 10 million views and his TED Talk last year with nearly 2 million views.
Wilson will speak about his experience and his perspective on healing racism at 7:30 p.m. Thursday at Unity Church, 2929 Unity.
His deep-dive into the world of white supremacy was a way for him to understand the movement and the people behind it.
“The depth of the evil wasn’t the eye-opening surprise,” Wilson said. “It was the size of the movement. The scope, the scale and the inherent danger that it presents to somebody of my profile, but also to other white people. White nationalists are the worst terrorists in the country. And often times, they kill white people as we saw in Charlottesville.”
Wilson would spend hours commenting on alt-right videos and posting words of hate against the Black Lives Matter movement and black leaders, like the Rev. Al Sharpton and President Barack Obama, to gain more access. The deeper he sank into the online world, the more he discovered the hate against black people, in particular, was fueled by intense fear.
“Everyone is afraid (in this world),” he said. “All of these white folks who profess racist ideology are afraid, first, of black retaliation. Then, there’s a fear of an economic loss through our gain since race is set up as a zero-sum situation. The thought is if there’s a winner, there must be a direct loser.”
Wilson said in reality white people aren’t losing based on the numbers.
According to a 2017 report by the Federal Reserve, the median net worth of white people remains nearly 10 times the size of black Americans. Nearly one in five black families have zero or negative net worth — twice the rate of white families. Between 2013 and 2016, net worth increased 46 percent for Hispanic families, 29 percent for black families, and 17 percent for white families.
A graduate of Florida A&M University, Wilson earned a bachelor’s degree in theater performance. He is a founding member of the Denver Slam Nuba team, which won the National Poetry Slam in 2011. (His slam-poet moniker is “Lucifury.”) He’s also the executive director of Shop Talk Live, which uses the barbershop as place for community dialogue and healing, and the author of “The Law of Action: Master Key to the Universe We Actually Live In,” available on Amazon.com.
Wilson’s curiosity about the psyche of a racist stemmed, in part, from his own experience with police brutality. In 2003, just three months out of college, he was falsely tied to a Denver night-club brawl. Wilson said he was beaten and threatened by police, then handcuffed to a chair. It left him feeling “neutered and castrated.” Then in 2011, Wilson’s friend Alonzo Ashley was killed with a stun gun by police at the Denver Zoo.
“Alonzo’s death made me realize that spoken word was not enough,” Wilson said. “I felt like if the police pulling me over actually could be white supremacists with badges, I needed to figure out how big this movement was. If I didn’t, then I would not be prepared to face the world and its realities.”
Surprisingly, Wilson found some compassion for the world he had infiltrated. Many of the online users were “average Joes” — white men, often outdoorsmen, who posted photos of their families and everyday lives.
“Never in a million years did I think I would find compassion for someone who hated me,” he said. “It wasn’t that I wanted to be friends, but it gave me enough compassion to understand how they got to where they are. These are people who are insecure. These are people who are afraid for the future and for their children.”
Today, Wilson says he doesn’t have the solution to the racial divide, but he hopes there’ll be more face-to-face conversations about race and hate, across color lines.
“We need courageous conversations,” he said. “Black people have had to have these conversations, but many white people haven’t. They need to get comfortable with discomfort. That comes with growing spiritually. When that happens, we can overcome our fears and start to heal.”