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

“New College was more than 80 percent white, but it was also listed in college guides as the most liberal school in Florida, the best school for hippies, the most gay-friendly, the most pot-friendly, the most likely to ‘transform your life and your worldview.’ One day on their radio show, as Derek readied to leave for a four-year college, a caller asked Don if he was worried about his son moving away from home to live ‘among the enemy in a hotbed of multiculturalism.’ Don started to laugh. ‘Derek’s the original nonconformist,’ he said. ‘It’s not like any of these little commies are going to impact his thinking. If anyone is going to be influenced here, it will be them.’”

Derek’s decision to attend a politically progressive school is questionable, given his white supremacist ideology. Both Derek and Don are confident that Derek’s intellect and commitment to white supremacism are strong enough to withstand influence from his progressive professors and classmates.

“In the mornings while [Derek’s] classmates slept, he walked alone to a patch of grass outside the dorm and called in to his [political radio] show to join his father on the air, and together they railed against the minority takeover. Whenever his classmates asked, Derek explained his morning ritual as a daily catch-up call with his unusually close family. Then he hung up the phone, returned to the center of campus, and befriended whoever walked by.”

Derek leads a dual life that creates internal conflict. Derek spends his early mornings discussing white nationalism on his radio show, then meets his college friends and behaves in a progressive, accepting manner so naturally that no one suspects he could harbor an ideology considered hateful.

“What Rose didn’t know was that Derek was constantly trying to quiet his own feelings and telling himself to back away. His two most serious former girlfriends had both been committed white nationalists, a daughter and a granddaughter of major leaders within the movement, people whose beliefs mirrored his own. It was one thing to befriend an outsider; his father and David Duke had both done plenty of that, and sometimes it could even be useful. But dating a Jew felt to Derek like a double betrayal-first and foremost of his own beliefs, and then also of Rose, who had no idea about his history or his racial convictions.”

New College has a profound impact on Derek from the outset. It is not the college itself that begins to erode Derek’s ideology, but his fellow classmates. Don and Chloe sheltered Derek his entire life. His entire social network prior to New College is white nationalist, so New College exposes him to diverse groups of people for the first time. As he meets more people, Derek realizes he likes them and they are nothing like the stereotypes presented to him by white nationalists. This realization is the first step in Derek shedding his ideology.

“But what became most evident at New College during those first overnight hours was the beginnings of an ideological rift, a divide that would widen over the next few years on campus. Ultimately, similar debates at campuses all over the country would convulse, splitting America’s liberal Left. What was the appropriate response to the most intolerant kinds of free speech? Exclusion or inclusion? Was it better to shame and demonize Derek? Or was it more effective to somehow reach out to him?”

Derek’s story exists in a larger narrative than that of personal transformation. In the coming years, “Dereks” would pop up all over the country, and the country would engage in a debate of how to address hate in its communities. Colleges implement a variety of policies—some intended to ensure student safety, some in response to student concerns. College students band together in opposition to hate speech, some peaceful and some violent. This debate, which has reached cable news and even the desk of the President of the United States, persists.

“[Derek] wasn’t a white supremacist, he said, but in fact a white nationalist—or, better yet, a racial egalitarian. He told [Rose] that he believed all races were in fact equal but that whites were better served living apart from other races. He told her words like ‘racist’ had been invented to demonize well-meaning white people. He said races had inherent biological differences, and for evidence he cited discredited studies based on flawed data that showed a small average differential in IQ scores between whites and blacks. He said the cornerstone of his belief was fear of a white genocide, and for proof he showed her recent census data that indicated the rising minority population in the United States.”

Derek is beginning to soften his racial ideology. He no longer believes whites are superior to other races but maintains the ideology of white separatism, believes in the conspiracy theory of white genocide, and adheres to debunked pseudoscience on racial IQ differentials. Derek’s process of abandoning white nationalist ideology is gradual and that requires persistent attack from his friends.

“‘There is no better way to make sure Derek keeps these abhorrent views than if we all exclude him,’ Matthew said. But nonjudgmental inclusion—Matthew believed that tactic had potential, and the more he researched Derek, the more convinced he became. On Stormfront, Matthew learned Derek had been homeschooled by his white nationalist family and therefore spent little time with people of color or Jews. […] 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.”

Matthew’s belief that nonjudgmental inclusion will lead to Derek abandoning his white nationalist beliefs is based on thorough research of Derek’s past. Matthew learns that Derek’s parents sheltered him from nonwhite, non-European cultures and infers that his view of such cultures is based entirely on propaganda. This is reminiscent of Germany during the Holocaust. Most Germans had never seen a real Jew and were familiar only with a propagandized version designed to elicit fear and hatred. Matthew reasons that by befriending Derek, he and Juan can convey their humanity to him and that will lead to Derek renouncing white nationalism independently.

“When some of Matthew’s other friends privately denigrated Derek’s character, calling him a racist and an oppressor, Matthew insisted on treating Derek with respect, even compassion. ‘In some ways, he just has way bigger versions of the same hang-ups we all have,’ Matthew told a friend once. He believed it was human nature to separate into groups, to define oneself against the other. […] Everyone had prejudices, Matthew thought, even if Derek’s were much more extreme and pronounced.”

Matthew’s empathy allows him to engage in the nonjudgmental inclusion that leads to Derek’s ideological transformation. Matthew views Derek from an unemotional, nonjudgmental perspective, reasoning that less pronounced versions of Derek’s hang-ups exist in everyone.

“Whatever his classmates might have mistaken as the first hints of softening—Derek’s civility, his intellectual curiosity—were the exact characteristics that 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.”

The same characteristics that Don and Duke praise in Derek, that they believe make him a valuable tool in white nationalism, are the characteristics that lead Derek to renounce his beliefs. He treats everyone with respect, befriends people of many cultures, and accepts and welcomes everyone for who they are. To Don, these are signs that Derek can be a polished, socially acceptable face for white nationalism, but to an outside observer, these are signs that Derek is not truly committed to such a hateful ideology.

“And Don would go quietly back to Alabama, back to the library, back to the same worn copy of Our Nordic Race. He lacked the ego and the confidence to be a political demagogue like Duke. He didn’t believe in sparking a revolution through violence, murder, or detonating bombs like Franklin. But in the pages of Our Nordic Race, Don found the outlines of another kind of racial soldier. ‘A problem to be solved by the cold process of intellect,’ the book had instructed, and that was the kind of leadership Don hoped to provide.”

Don is the technician of white nationalism. In Don’s prime, Duke was the political face of the movement, Franklin was the praxis, and Don was the intellectual technician. Don works behind the scenes to enable the public-facing and action-oriented white nationalists to achieve their ends. 

“Why, instead of confronting this infamous white nationalist and challenging his beliefs, was she making his campus life more pleasant and comfortable? […] She liked him. She trusted him. She was attracted to him. She felt increasingly convinced that he was inherently different from the overt racists whose hateful messages she read on Stormfront. And yet she was in no way willing to let their relationship become romantic. That would be tantamount to aligning herself on campus with Derek and all he’d chosen to represent.”

Befriending Derek makes campus life difficult. It also incites internal conflict within the students befriending Derek, who question the effectiveness of their strategy. Everyone who befriends Derek and practices nonjudgmental inclusion at some point wonders if they are enabling him or if he is persuading them to his own ideology rather than him to theirs. Derek makes this more difficult for his friends by being a likeable person. Allison is falling for Derek but can’t bring herself to act on romantic feelings because of Derek’s white nationalist ideology.

“In 2012 the Republican Party had essentially decided to forfeit the minority vote. It had chosen, as Derek once predicted, to become an overwhelmingly white party, and now the decisive question of the election was whether enough white voters remained.”

Derek’s white nationalist revolution is coming to fruition. In 2012, the ideology is gaining mainstream acceptance and major politicians are adopting it. After President Obama wins a second term, racial tensions among the populace explode. The Republican Party embraces disaffected white voters and becomes the de facto political party of white nationalists in the United States. It does so by employing Derek’s techniques of employing white nationalism as subtext without explicitly espousing anything hateful. 

“Most of all, 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. Maybe one of those conversations would trigger a shift.”

Allison takes a risk in attending Derek’s Stormfront conference. She believes she needs to go all-in to save Derek from this ideology. Allison loves Derek and is willing to do anything necessary to save him from what she perceives as a psychological illness plaguing him, even if the process harms her.

“But now Derek was almost twenty-three, an adult who had been living apart from his parents for a few years, and he was still just as devoted to spreading their ideology. Moshe worried: What if all he had done by befriending Derek was to enable him, to provide him with cover from the social justice activists on campus so that he could continue to promote a racist ideology while living a comfortable college life?”

The slow process of grinding away Derek’s ideology is exhausting for his friends and sometimes feels hopeless. After several years of Shabbat dinners, nonjudgmental inclusion, and debates, it seems like Derek is no closer to abandoning white nationalism. Engaging with Derek has been an arduous and painful process for his friends, one which has made their campus life difficult. 

“But sometimes Allison wanted their conversations about race to be emotionally charged. White nationalism wasn’t just some academic thought experiment. It was a caustic, harmful ideology that was causing real damage to people’s lives, so Allison began to send Derek links about that, too.”

Allison begins to stray from nonjudgmental inclusion. Derek grounds his beliefs in logic and reason. He is a prominent white nationalist because he removes emotion from his ideology. Allison wants to inject emotion into Derek’s ideology by connecting it to his friends and illustrating to him the real impacts it has on their lives. This is the most confrontational that Derek’s New College friends have been to his beliefs, but it is also a necessary step to Derek’s ideological transformation.

“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. 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.”

Derek has now abandoned the core of his white nationalist beliefs. He no longer believes in white supremacism, white separatism, or faulty IQ science. He now has many friends who are racial and religious minorities, and he no longer believes much of what white nationalists believe, but he won’t abandon the moniker because of his strong familial and social connection to white nationalism. His roots are tied-up in the ideology, and even if he reasons that the ideology is flawed, the label is difficult for him to untangle from.

“In their online chats, Derek had begun to imagine the possibilities of an anonymous life removed from white nationalism: earning a PhD, teaching at a university, and raising a family in a quiet college town.”

Derek no longer wants to be a white nationalist, especially not publicly. He wants more than anything to reinvent his life and pursue his academic goals without the movement hanging over him.

“Derek forwarded the SPLC story to Allison in Australia. She was disappointed he had publicly reaffirmed his commitment to white nationalism, but she also knew that for Derek rejecting that label was likely to be the last and most difficult part of any transformation, because the identity was so central to his family connections. She believed his evolution was still under way, and she understood the inherent pressure he felt from his parents and Duke.”

Much of Derek’s commitment to white nationalism is rooted in his familial and social relationships. This has been the case since his indoctrination: He grew within the movement while attending conferences with Don, spending quality time and forming childhood memories with his father; a large part of his schooling was spent building the Stormfront kids website alongside his father; when he travels, he crashes with other white nationalists. The white nationalist community has been a part of Derek’s life since he was born—the most infamous white nationalist, Duke, is Derek’s godfather. He wants to renounce the ideology but doing so means upending his entire life.

“He also could no longer quiet another alarm that had begun to go off with increasing frequency inside his head: What if so many of his classmates on the forum were valid in their criticism and righteous in their anger? What if white nationalism was inherently flawed and morally indefensible? It had been easy to dismiss their forum posts when he felt convinced of his beliefs, but now his certainty had shrunk down into something he could no longer define.”

Matthew’s nonjudgmental inclusion is beginning to show results. Derek is now part of a community of diverse minds whose intellect he respects. This creates a problem for Derek: When “the enemy” was abstract and unknown, Derek could easily write off their anger, but now those angry with him are friends whom he respects. He can no longer ignore their hurt and anger; it must be justified.

“As he traveled through Europe, Derek read historical texts from the eighth to the twelfth century, trying to trace back the modern concepts of race and whiteness, but he couldn’t find them anywhere. Instead, the facts of history pointed him to another conclusion: The iconic European warriors so often celebrated on Stormfront had never thought of themselves as white, Derek decided. Some of them had considered skin color not a hard biological fact but a condition that could change over time based on culture, diet, and climate. They had fought not for their race but for religion, culture, power, and money, just like every other empire of the Middle Ages.”

Every step forward Derek makes is the combination of emotion and logic. He has already made the emotional connection in understanding that white nationalist ideology hurts humans he cares about, and in Europe he performs the research to renounce the logic of white nationalism. Through analysis of historical texts and architecture, he reasons that much of what he previously believed is incorrect, which leads him to disavow much of what he previously accepted as established science.

“Out there in the massive crowd were thousands of Tea Partyers and several lawmakers they continued to support, like Ted Cruz, Jeff Sessions, and Steve King, all of whom had signed a pledge to defeat any bill resembling amnesty for immigrants. ‘It’s like I helped feed a monster that won’t go back into the cage,’ Derek told Allison once. ‘I can’t go back and do everything over.’ But Allison continued to insist there was something he could do. ‘You need to make these points in public,’ she told him. ‘You’ve caused too much damage to slip away.’”

For Derek and Allison, it is not enough that he personally, privately renounces white nationalism. For Derek’s own future and for the benefit of the nation, they believe Derek must publicly decry the ideology. Derek spent most of his life leading white nationalism to prominence. He has abandoned the ideology, but the harm he caused persists. Derek and Allison believe a public denunciation of white nationalism is the only way to fix some of the damage he has caused.

“If he was going to go through the painful process of renouncing his beliefs, he wanted to […] apologize for the damage he caused and condemn racism in the most public way he could. He wanted to release a thorough statement and then legally change his name, switching his first and middle names, so he could leave Florida for his first semester at Western Michigan and begin anew as Roland Derek Black. But there was no way to condemn his own views and actions without also condemning his family’s views and actions. He was sure they would be upset, and likely furious. What he didn’t know was whether they would ever speak to him again.”

Derek now believes a public denunciation of white nationalism is necessary, both for his own future and for the nation, to rectify wrongs he perpetuated. If Derek wants a future divorced from white nationalism, he must put on the public record that he no longer espouses the ideology and must legally change his name so his identity is divorced from white nationalism. He carefully crafts his message, hoping to convey his complete abandonment of white nationalism, offer a thorough critique of the ideology, apologize to those hurt by his past, and maintain a positive relationship with his family. As much as his relationship with white nationalism is rooted in his relationship with his family, his relationship with his family is rooted in white nationalism. Family and white nationalism are inseparable concepts in the Black household. If you remove white nationalism, you remove family.

“By the end of the night, Don felt reassured about the possibilities of white nationalism. ‘Camaraderie heals the spirit,’ Don remembered thinking of that night, and he continued to feel even more restored the next day, when he returned to the conference room and surveyed the people seated around him. The crowd was younger than ever before, and it included disaffected young men who had been introduced to Stormfront through online video game forums and the so-called men’s rights movement, a collection of fringe misogynists who believe men have become disempowered by feminism and political correctness. Nearly half were attending their first white nationalist conference.”

Derek may have publicly denounced white nationalism, but the effects of his earlier efforts persist in the movement. The Stormfront conference has a higher attendance than any white nationalism conference Don previously attended, and the audience is younger than ever before. Derek’s message and the political climate reach many disaffected young white males. The movement has grown beyond Derek, Don, or even Duke.

“[I]n Trump’s speech, Don heard echoes of a strategy that he and Duke had pioneered together thirty-five years earlier when they tried to rehabilitate the Klan’s image by shifting its focus from cross burnings in the Deep South to rallies against illegal immigration on the California border. Duke started the Klan Border Watch in 1977, and for two weeks he drove around the desert with binoculars and a few hundred other Klan members while the national news media trailed behind them. ‘This isn’t an issue about race or prejudice,’ Duke insisted back then. He said securing the border was about protecting America’s culture and its economy. And so, on behalf of the Klan in the late 1970s, Duke proposed the idea of building a wall, much as Trump was suggesting now.”

Current Republican messaging on illegal immigration and building a wall along the United States’ southern border with Mexico originated as Ku Klux Klan talking points crafted by Don and Duke in the 1970s. Since then Don, Duke, Derek, and others have refined the verbiage to make the message more palatable to mainstream white America, but the messaging originated from white supremacists in the Ku Klux Klan as a dog whistle for racist policy.