"Generation KKK," an eight-episode documentary series that plans to look deeper into the Ku Klux Klan, has been ordered by A&E.
The series, which is scheduled to start Jan. 10, will also include so-called anti-hate activists who will try to convince KKK members to leave the group or not force their children to become members, Variety reported.
"We certainly didn't want the show to be seen as a platform for the views of the KKK," Rob Sharenow, general manager of A&E, told The New York Times. "The only political agenda is that we really do stand against hate."
According to A&E's webpage dedicated to the documentary, the series will follow four families, including an "Imperial Wizard" who is encouraging his teenage daughter to join, an Iraq War veteran, a younger man who sees one Klan member as a father figure, and a fifth-generation Klan member.
"In 'Generation KKK,' cameras follow four prominent Klan families who each have a family member trying to escape the Ku Klux Klan," said the A&E statement on the series. "This series pulls back the curtain on the organization that the Anti-Defamation League calls 'a racist, anti-Semitic movement with a commitment to extreme violence to achieve its goals of racial segregation and white supremacy,' to show its effects on American families as member's grapple with the consequences of leaving."
The New York Times wrote that filmmaker Aengus James sent documentary crews to the South nearly two years ago to examine the views of Klan and other nationalists groups who believe they are battling against white genocide.
"The struggles we were most drawn to were the struggles with the internal families," James, an executive producer of the series, told the Times. "We had a stance, and we were clear with folks that we were hoping for them to see the light and to come out of this world. It's an incredibly destructive environment for anybody to be in, let alone children."
The Southern Poverty Law Center estimates that there are between 5,000 and 8,000 Klan members today, split among dozens of different organizations that use the Klan name.
"Since the 1970s the Klan has been greatly weakened by internal conflicts, court cases, a seemingly endless series of splits and government infiltration," the SPLC said on its website. "While some factions have preserved an openly racist and militant approach, others have tried to enter the mainstream, cloaking their racism as mere 'civil rights for whites.'"