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

by Eli Saslow

He wasn’t worried about unpopularity, political correctness, or even death threats. “The only thing that scared me was the idea of failing, or falling short of this plan for my life, and then having the white race collapse because of it,” he said.

as his father often said, but Derek also liked them, and gradually he went from keeping his political convictions quiet on campus to actively disguising them.

Derek had gotten into the habit of deleting his abundant hate email without bothering to read it. But now the forum messages flooding into his email in-box came from names he recognized, peers at a Florida honors college whom he knew and respected.

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.

In the past, the victims of his rhetoric had always been out of sight on the other side of the curtain, imaginary enemies nursing imaginary wounds, but now he had seen the injuries firsthand. It was Rose who was offended; Rose who felt oppressed by his worldview; Rose whose reputation on campus had now been damaged.

he hoped to turn the forum thread into a lesson that would benefit other white nationalists, and late in the summer of 2011 he landed on an idea: an international conference for Stormfront members, the first of its kind, focused on verbal tactics to out-argue “anti-whites.”

what most experts thought about race: that it was a fluid, social idea, and not a scientific fact. No clear genetic boundary existed between races, no biological line dividing minorities from whites. James had studied anarchist theory and read that in English the concept of “race” didn’t appear until the sixteenth century, as a way for colonialists to differentiate themselves from natives, and later for slave owners to differentiate themselves from their slaves. It was a man-made tool of oppression and exploitation.

“Race is socially constructed and has no basis in the hard sciences, biological or otherwise,” James had explained that year to one audience of anarchists in Baltimore. “But it has been structured into every part of society, conditioned into individuals and bonded to emotions from early on in life. Race itself isn’t real, but it has real meaning.”

Whites were much better off than any other social group by every statistical measure: income, net worth, life expectancy, home ownership, infant mortality, graduation rates, and on it went. And now, as another school year was about to begin, James kept reading on the forum about Derek, who believed he was “oppressed and victimized by a lifetime of anti-white discrimination.”

Matthew even considered forgoing his admission to New College and staying in Miami to work as an assistant to a rabbi. He worried about putting so much distance between himself and the Kabbalah Centre, but his father and his rabbis encouraged Matthew to go. The purpose of Kabbalah, they reminded him, was less about being observant or pious than about putting his faith to practical use. They told him to set an example on campus by respecting human dignity and always seeking out the best in himself and others. “Reach out and extend the hand, no matter who’s waiting on the other side,” his father had told him once, and now, on a Friday afternoon in September, Matthew wrote again to Derek.

instead of trying to build a case, Matthew began working to build a relationship in which Derek might be able to learn what the enemy was actually like. “The goal was really just to make Jews more human for him,” Matthew said.

He just believed, in the long run, that America was better off as a country that put white people and their interests first.

As Maynard considered what to do, he tried to square the idea of this bigoted radical with the quiet tenant in his house. Was this person really hateful? The one buying baby chickens, naming them after Beatles’ songs, petting them day and night, chasing them across backyards in the neighborhood as they learned to jump and flap, apologizing to everyone for the inconvenience, befriending the retirees down the block and the black woman next door?

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.

For a brief moment, he wondered: If this many smart people were so affronted by his beliefs, could they all be wrong? He listened to a succession of minority speakers tell stories about the ways in which racism affected their feelings of safety and self-worth. All this time, Derek had dismissed his rejection on campus as an overreaction from hysterical classmates, but now he began to consider if there was truth to what they said. The moment felt significant to him, so he took out his phone and snapped a photo of the crowded quad.

It had begun for Matthew as a strictly tactical relationship—to change Derek, who in turn could change the thinking of other white nationalists about Jews and minorities—but now a friendship was growing in its place.

Matthew insisted on treating Derek with respect, even compassion.

He believed it was human nature to separate into groups, to define oneself against the other. He had noticed it happening all the time in Judaism, in which prejudices ran thick between different sects and orthodoxies.

For Matthew, the point of the joke was that it was natural for people to define themselves partly by what they were not.

made Don more certain than ever about his son’s potential as a white nationalist leader. Every slur Derek never said, every enemy he never made, every minority he somehow managed to befriend, was all more proof of what Don already believed: Only someone like Derek could lead white nationalism beyond its violent history of swastikas and white robes and into the multicultural mainstream of twenty-first-century politics. Only someone who possessed discipline, patience, tact, and control—the qualities Don had spent his life trying and sometimes failing to master.

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.

Allison thought Derek was being dishonest about his beliefs, watering down the true extent of his racism in order to preserve their friendship. He had been socialized on Stormfront, but he didn’t sound like most Stormfront users, and for that reason alone Allison was tempted to go with him to the conference. She wanted to see if he offered the same dispassionate arguments to an audience of skinheads and neo-Nazis that he articulated to her when they were alone on the roof of their dorm. Only then could she know for sure if he was telling her the truth about his views, and only once she knew his actual views could she possibly begin to dismantle them.

she thought the best way to make an effective argument against Derek’s beliefs was to first make a legitimate effort to fully understand them. Only that way could she earn his complete trust. Only then could she build a case against white nationalism using not just her values but also his values and his vocabulary. By going to the conference, she would earn her way into those conversations.

Don still looked forward to the drive. He had traveled to more than 130 white power conferences since he first drove to Arlington, Virginia, as a sixteen-year-old with David Duke and Joseph Paul Franklin in the late 1960s. Over the ensuing decades, racial conferences had become the epicenter of his personal and professional life, providing him with vacations, intellectual nourishment, and his only time with many of his closest friends.

Derek accepted as fact their theories about whites having larger brains than blacks and Jews possessing a unique psychology that allowed them to manipulate other groups.

Don thought of his son as a partner and eventual successor.

Everything about the conversation disgusted her, but what good would it do to speak out? She was alone in the woods of Tennessee, and she wasn’t going to persuade dozens of the country’s preeminent white nationalists to change their beliefs. But she did hope to influence Derek, if only she could continue to earn his trust.

After months of conversations with Allison, he was slowly becoming less secure in his beliefs. Whereas before he had catered his message exclusively to white nationalists, he now was at least aware of another perspective. Each time he caught a glimpse of Allison in the audience, it was a reminder of everything she had told him: His words could often hurt, alienate, and oppress.

He said white nationalists were the “true multiculturalists,” because they were trying to protect the white race from extinction.

Derek thought the white race was facing imminent decline and singular racial persecution. She believed minorities had a harder time in the United States because they were victims of structural racism and oppression; he believed people of color were more likely to struggle because of their own biological deficiencies. She thought greater diversity made for stronger communities; he found diversity so threatening that, at least theoretically, he wanted to separate people by skin color onto different continents, even if that meant disrupting millions of lives.

He thought of different races as subspecies that had evolved over time to have clear biological differences, so she sent an article from American Psychologist about how race itself was a fluid, unscientific concept.

It was still very much a white person’s country, she told him, at the great expense of everyone else.

Don reminded him, to spread Derek’s ideas about white genocide. He was supposed to be making history, spreading the family gospel, and saving the white race from genocide. But now Derek’s brain was also crowded with new ideas, backed by data and dozens of studies, which suggested white nationalism was both dangerous and flawed.

“Finally, we are waking up!” Duke told his audience that week, because in the wake of the 2012 election he believed whites felt increasingly threatened by record levels of immigration, a two-term black president, and a sluggish middle-class economy.

The loneliness made him wonder about his future, and whether a public role in white nationalism could ever be worth so much exclusion.

Derek became increasingly convinced that the structures of white supremacy remained very much in place. Whites in America were not oppressed or persecuted; they were unfairly advantaged to the great detriment of everyone else.

Trump’s rise reminded him of what he had always known as a white nationalist and what he had spent the last years trying to forget. “Intrinsically, white people in this country always expect that their interests should come first,” Derek told Allison that summer. “American history is so fundamentally based on white supremacy that it’s still the basis for most of our culture and our politics.” Whereas that fact had once seemed to Derek like an opportunity as a white nationalist, now he considered it America’s foundational flaw. And rather than deny the importance of structural racism in the United States—just as Derek believed much of white America had tried to do for decades—he wanted to understand it and to challenge his own assumptions by reading perspectives different from his own. He read Ta-Nehisi Coates’s writing about Obama; and Omar Saif Ghobash’s Letters to a Young Muslim; and Edward Said’s Orientalism; and Ibram Kendi’s book about the history of racist ideas, Stamped from the Beginning.