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From her computer in Australia, she decided to confess to Derek that she was the one who had emailed the SPLC in the hopes that it would remove his extremist file. “I’m sorry for being so naive,” she told him, but she also explained she had been motivated by a desire to protect whatever was left of Derek’s public image.
“You are not that same person anymore,” she told him. “Your views are way different than they used to be.”
Really?
Classmates had finally seen his response to the SPLC. “This is the truth we needed to hear from Derek, still a committed racist,” one student wrote, and the responses were more indignant than ever before. Now Derek’s classmates weren’t just speculating about his views. They knew he was still a white nationalist—and, worse, a “snake” who had attempted to sanitize his ideology for his college classmates.
A: Forum thread about you again re: the SPLC article. Hate this hate this hate this and it’s not even about me. It’s about you. I want to go running or I want to curl up and do nothing or I want to lose myself in Sydney. I disagree so strongly with this shit.
And it’s not like this is something like abortion or some more misguided moral thing where both sides are equally good people.
This chick is so annoying.
Was she making the right choice in getting so close to Derek? She still wasn’t sure. If Derek had been a men’s rights activist, she thought she would have been too furious and disgusted to ever speak with him. She didn’t believe she had the same courage as Juan, Matthew, or Moshe, victims of Derek’s prejudices who nonetheless chose to become his friends. So Allison wondered, if sexism would have been a deal breaker for her, then why wasn’t racism?
Oh really?
Had her own privilege—and her childhood in a conservative, all-white community—somehow made her more capable of forgiving or overlooking racism?
Naaaah couldn’t be!!!
James, the anarchist organizer, had started the latest thread, in part because he felt in some ways vindicated by Derek’s statement to the SPLC. Of course Derek was still a white nationalist, James wrote. In a decade of activist organizing, he had come to believe that America’s systems of oppression only changed, if ever, after a long, painful fight.
How many forum posts had he read during the last years from classmates who thought the remedy for Derek’s views was open-mindedness and inclusion? Just be nice. Go talk to him. Give it time and the truth will prevail. James thought there was a naive assumption among some of his liberal classmates that the world was a fair marketplace of information, in which the best ideas naturally won out.
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. “Revolutions don’t happen at polite dinner parties,” James wrote, and as the forum thread continued, he posted again and again:
I like James
He had made a small effort to embrace the New College community, and it had shunned him. The loneliness made him wonder about his future, and whether a public role in white nationalism could ever be worth so much exclusion.
So the attacks against him were effective after all? Interesting.
I feel like I leveled with NCF students. I was more open than I felt comfortable being, and now I feel like they’ve chosen to use my vulnerability in order to hurt me more effectively. Even as I think about it, I know it’s not really a mob of conniving bullies, though that’s an aspect. I understand there are intellectual ideas to discuss, and yet I feel almost betrayed. What happened to me not caring what others think of me? I feel like they’ve gotten a little under my skin and it hurts.
Awww poor baby
He had chosen New College because he wanted to study medieval history, and he had been drawn to medieval history in part because the mythology of white nationalism centered on the Middle Ages. On Stormfront, Derek and others had posted Latin battle cries and medieval crests as they shared stories about white knights and Viking warriors.
Much of the modern white supremacist movement was built on the idea of reclaiming the conquering spirit of those European warriors, compelled to victory by genetic destiny and ethnic pride, and Derek had invested himself in that version of history.
As a teenager, he had taught himself some Latin. He had apprenticed for a blacksmith at the local Renaissance fair and learned to forge his own chain mail armor.
l
He had joined a medieval reenactment society and persuaded his parents to travel with him across Florida to relive the Middle Ages, winning contests for archery and sword fighting.
And then he had come to New College as a history major, where his classes and his assigned readings revealed a more nuanced Middle Ages—a version that contradicted much of what Derek read on Stormfront.
If European whites were really a genetically superior race, then why had Europe lagged so far behind Islamic culture in technology, art, and science for much of the Middle Ages? Why was it Baghdad that had become the world’s largest and greatest city in the ninth and tenth centuries—a place with superior doctors and libraries, where pale-skinned European emissaries were sent to learn from dark-skinned Arab scholars about astrology, algebra, and the science of distilling alcohol?
