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

by Eli Saslow

As part of her introduction each semester, she sometimes showed a 2000 HBO documentary called Hate.Com, about the rise of bigotry on the internet. One of the first faces to appear on-screen was Don Black, described by the narrator as “the godfather of hate on the net.” Next came his eleven-year-old son, Derek, sitting down for an interview in a baseball cap adorned with the Confederate flag, explaining that “nonwhites do not have the same values, ideals, and beliefs that I have.”

The same was true for Allison. “I’m my best self with you,” she told him, and in her experience that wasn’t always the case.

She sent Derek a recent study from Johns Hopkins University about how first-generation immigrant children performed better in school than other American students.

It wasn’t that other races were biologically less intelligent than whites, Allison told Derek. It was that, in America especially, other races faced more obstacles and had fewer opportunities, which was sometimes reflected in test scores.

But Derek believed it was whites who were oppressed in America by policies like immigration and affirmative action, so Allison began bombarding him with data an...

She sent him research about the overwhelming white representation in state government and how whites were more likely to be promoted over similarly qualified minority candidates at work. She emailed evidence about how blacks were twice as likely as whites to be suspended from school for the same behaviors; twice as likely to work for minimum wage in the s...

She provided readings from her Stigma and Prejudice class about how whites enjoyed an advantage over minorities in everything from lower prices at car dealershi...

Derek clicked through Allison’s links and read about how minority victims of prejudice were more likely to suffer from high blood pressure, elevated heart rate, suppressed immunity, depression, and heart disease. 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.

“It’s not just that you’re wrong,” she told him. “It’s that you’re actually hurting people.”

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.”

Their friendship had gradually evolved into a romantic relationship during the last few weeks, and that relationship was quickly becoming serious. Derek moved some of his clothes out of Maynard’s house and into a drawer in Allison’s dorm.

After months of insisting on a friendship and nothing else, Allison decided it was best to be honest, and the truth was that she was falling for him. Whether she wanted to or not, it was happening, and she cared more about Derek than about what anyone else might think.

even if we differ in opinion,

Huh?

We’re just very much on the same page about almost everything.

These people weren’t evil psychopaths, Derek told Allison. They were his community.

When the great deportation came, would Derek himself be willing to break into their homes and force them out? Or would he stand by and watch as his father and other Stormfront members did it for him?

Allison thought the solution was simpler. “If you don’t want people to be afraid of what you’re advocating,” she told him, “then maybe you shouldn’t be advocating for it.”

“My beliefs about white genocide remain essentially the same,” Derek insisted on his radio show during the fall of 2012, but his behavior was beginning to change, and Don had noticed. Derek had all but stopped logging in to Stormfront or posting on the message board, even as the political conversation intensified in the last weeks of the 2012 presidential election.

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. How could he possibly appease both?

But then, in the evenings, Allison and Derek reunited with his parents and Dickson at high-class restaurants in Key West, where each night the conversation turned into another eulogy for white America. Don mourned the immigrant takeover of South Florida. Dickson wondered about the intellectual capabilities of blacks and minorities as compared with whites.

For years Derek had studied Dickson’s speeches, read all of his writing, and admired his intellectualism, but now, seated next to Allison, he thought many of Dickson’s views sounded cruel and extreme.

“Having to sit through some of that literally makes my skin crawl,” she told Derek later. “Parts were borderline crazy,” he agreed. “Sorry you had to sit through all that.”

Don thought the election had been “mostly encouraging,” and he had good reason to think white nationalism was beginning to take hold. Whites had voted for Romney by a 20 percent margin—59 percent compared with just 39 percent for Obama—the largest white support for a single candidate in twenty-eight years, whereas 83 percent of minorities had voted for Obama.

“We are more segregated than ever as a country along racial lines,” Don said, and he believed the aftermath of the election had only furthered that divide.

more than ninety-five thousand Texans signed an official petition requesting that their state secede from the United States.

On election night, Bill O’Reilly explained Romney’s defeat to his massive audience on Fox News by saying, “It’s not a traditional America anymore. There’s 50 percent of the voting public who want stuff. They want things and who is going to give them things? President Obama. Whereby twenty years ago, President Obama would have been roundly defeated by an establishment candidate like Mitt Romney, the white establishment is now the minority.”

“Are you even a white nationalist anymore?” one of Derek’s half sisters asked during dinner.

This asshat started a CHILDREN’S PAGE on a white supremacist HATE website. How can you guys not sit there and seethe over just how fucked up that is? Are you all seriously saying lets not hurt the white supremacist’s feelings? I hope your feelings get hurt Derek Black, because you are not welcome here and, sincerely, fuck off.

Allison decided she wanted to write a public response. She thought she knew something that nobody else on the forum understood: Derek had already begun the gradual process of reconsidering at least some of his views, and she worried the outrage on the forum would discourage him and hold his identity in place. She addressed her message to the entire forum, and then for the first time in public she began to tentatively defend Derek.

But regardless of anything about him personally—Attacking a person, especially a person who is not fighting back and has never fought back, is not productive to anybody.

STFU

Participate in diversity talks, be upset and give a damn, but in a positive way, not in a hostile way.

(so throwing things at him in the library, etc., which is what happened the semester after he came back, is not acceptable human behavior either).

Awww poor thing

Derek agreed it was time for him to say something publicly to his classmates. What they knew about his views came mostly from three-year-old internet posts and archival radio shows in which he had denigrated Jews and minorities, and now many of those comments also made Derek cringe. After poring over so many of Allison’s psychological studies, Derek no longer believed the white nationalist myths he had propagated about “Jewish manipulation,” “testosterone-fueled black aggression,” or larger brain sizes for whites. He was becoming unsure that his theory about IQ discrepancies held up to the best modern science.

Posting this goes against my general judgment, because I don’t think that people have an obligation necessarily to explain themselves for anything.

It’s been brought to my attention that people might be scared or intimidated or even feel unsafe here because of things said about me.

An easy response to this from someone who’s never talked to me could be along the lines of, “Well, that’s the type of discrimination you’ve advocated against minorities!”

And as should be understood for both the radio and the website, only things I’ve said myself are things I can be held accountable for.

Really?

the immediate response was private and mostly supportive. “I commend you,” one student wrote to him; and “Thanks so much”; and “I simply wanted to apologize.”

Disgusting

Without telling Derek, she decided to create a Yahoo email account and write an email to the SPLC using a fake name. She told them Derek no longer belonged on a public list of terrorists and demagogues, and as evidence she attached his recent post on the New College forum. She asked that the SPLC remove Derek’s profile, but instead an employee wrote back and said the SPLC wanted to publish Derek’s full post. Allison panicked and said no,

that they couldn’t, that Derek’s post was private and they could ignore her original email, but it was too late.

Derek received a message from the SPLC a few days later, just before Christmas. The SPLC had written to Derek several times before, usually to ask about his father’s activism or Stormfront’s connection to mass murderers. This time, a reporter from the SPLC told Derek they were planning to write a story about his “changing ideology,” and the reporter asked if Derek had anything more he’d like to say. “Your views are now appare...

he had prepared for his own television interviews by re-watching one of Duke’s early appearances on Meet the Press in 1991, studying how Duke smiled politely through confrontational questions,

how he stuck to his simple talking points and flattered the interviewer for twenty minutes until she conceded, “Sir, you speak beautifully, and you have a wonderful polish about you.”

The movement’s fractious leadership was careful to avoid explicit prejudice, but Tea Party rallies and protests had often become exercises in white grievance and resentment, featuring racist signs, Confederate flags, anti-immigrant chants, and hundreds of yellow flags bearing the Tea Party slogan, “Don’t tread on me.”

At one protest on Capitol Hill in 2010, Tea Partyers yelled epithets at members of the Congressional Black Caucus and spit on Representative John Lewis, a civil rights icon, as he walked through the crowd on his way into Congress.

For the Black family, white nationalism wasn’t just a belief system; it was the glue that held together friendships and family.

“My forum post and my racial ideology are not mutually exclusive concepts,” Derek wrote to the SPLC. “Everything I said is true, and I also believe in White Nationalism.”

Duke and Don both thought Derek had publicly reestablished himself as a committed white nationalist. Stormfront posters wrote that Derek had managed the impossible by reframing the tenets of white nationalism in a way that even liberal college students didn’t find offensive. “A hero,” one Stormfront poster wrote of Derek.

“I wonder if he knows which one of his classmates is the mole.”