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

by Eli Saslow

“Most white people don’t want to be called racists, but they do want to make sure their culture and their position in society isn’t going to be undermined,” Derek said on the radio. “People are just waiting for white candidates to come along who are brave enough to talk about these things, and when that happens, whites will go streaming to the polls.”

He decided white nationalism could only grow into a viable political movement if it adopted a new language of its own—a vocabulary that sanitized the ideology and distanced it from a history of violence. “We have to take back the moral high ground with how we talk about this,”

They are looking for answers and we will provide those answers. I’m now convinced that any successful white revolution in this country will come largely from inside politics.”

Maybe this, finally, was the moment Don had been predicting for the last four decades, when the undercurrent of white dissatisfaction could no longer be quieted by political correctness.

It was easy for whites to be generous and egalitarian so long as it wasn’t costing them anything—so long as the American economy kept booming and whites continued to enjoy a vastly disproportionate share of the country’s rising power and wealth.

He wasn’t a white supremacist, he said, but in fact a white nationalist—or, better yet, a racial egalitarian. He told her that he believed all races were in fact equal but that whites were better served living apart from other races.

He was free to become his true self,

He told his listeners about a new research study in which whites said they considered antiwhite bias a bigger problem in America than antiblack bias. Other polls indicated that working-class whites were experiencing surging feelings of anger, depression, and victimization—a tinderbox of disenfranchisement that had exploded into American politics.

Don and Derek didn’t much care about the legitimacy of Obama’s birth certificate, but they were buoyed by the fact that by mimicking white nationalist rhetoric, Trump had amassed a massive following on the far right.

“Gen-o-cide,” said Duke. “Say it with me now. This is the murder of our very genes. Repeat that over and over.” “One hundred repetitions make a truth,” said Sam Dickson, a longtime lawyer who sometimes represented members of the Klan.

“I can only speak about my own view,” he told her, but now more than ever he was beginning to hear other people’s views, too, in a community so different from the one in which he grew up.

“what is your great concern about a white minority?”

“Always stick to the talking points,” Derek had instructed other white nationalists. And so rather than opening himself up to a series of unpleasant debates, Derek decided to follow his own advice with his classmates, many of whom began to feel as if they were debating against some kind of robot.

For a brief moment, he wondered: If this many smart people were so affronted by his beliefs, could they all be wrong?

Derek had always insisted that the best way to expand white nationalism was to reinforce feelings of white grievance and victimhood—to pit whites against minorities by hammering home what he saw as the travesties of cultural erosion and white genocide—and during President Obama’s first term that tactic had also become increasingly popular on the far conservative right.

I would be patient about taking people where they were politically and then slowly moving them in my direction, rather than just shocking or scaring the hell out of them, which is what I usually did.”

Instead, Don had taught him to spread their ideas by recruiting whites who said things like “I’m not racist, but…”

This was the audience Derek had always been after: whites who naturally gravitated toward spending time with other whites and believed their values to be at the true core of America—people living out many of the tenets of white nationalism without even realizing it.

He had spent much of his life honing a rational case for white nationalism, and Allison thought he presented his arguments as mostly dispassionate and factual. He based his prejudice not on an intractable gut feeling but on what he thought to be a logical theory,

White people in those same studies did not show any physical response to prejudice, which made Derek begin to wonder if in fact he had been wrong in his theory that actually it was white people who were discriminated against.

For years Derek had been hearing about the abstract evils of racism, which he had always dismissed as empty rhetoric from his enemies on the liberal left. But he didn’t consider Allison an enemy, so now he spent hours on his computer reading through raw data, doing his own research, and debating the evidence with Allison.

Derek told her that he didn’t want white nationalism to cause damage in the lives of people he actually knew. “I consider all of this more like a really interesting thought experiment,” he said, and he tried to avoid her questions about specific friends by resorting to vague, theoretical answers. “I don’t expect us to go back to being a whites-only country,” Derek said. “Maybe there are ways in which that might be good, at least in theory, but it is obviously unrealistic.”

If he returned to the radio show, he knew Allison and his other New College friends would be listening and parsing every word. Suddenly he cared about both audiences.

A part of his brain still reflexively believed America was slipping into a multicultural abyss. Another part felt personally relieved that Romney’s immigration policies wouldn’t unravel the lives of some of his friends on campus, like Juan.

He was becoming unsure that his theory about IQ discrepancies held up to the best modern science. During his time at New College, Derek had gone from believing whites were a superior race in need of an exclusive homeland, to thinking all races were equal but should be preserved by living separately, to thinking that segregation wasn’t really necessary, so long as whites weren’t forced to assimilate.

But ideas didn’t fight political battles; people fought them, and in James’s experience people who were systematically oppressed—by gender, by class, by race—always had to work harder to get their ideas heard. The concept of civil discourse was the creation of a privileged class that didn’t want their lives disrupted by protests or emotional arguments.

“My brain now has two ways of thinking, a white nationalist way and a new way,” he told Allison once. “It’s like living in two different realms.”

White nationalism remained embedded in all of his childhood memories, his sense of self, and almost every important relationship he’d had during the first twenty-one years of his life.

And if he had been that wrong about history—his field of expertise—then he was also willing to believe he had been wrong about so much else.

Only she knew how much their exclusion had made him reconsider the ways his ideology oppressed others, and how their inclusion at Shabbat had helped him better empathize with minorities and Jews.