Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Rising Out of Hatred, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Ostracism vs. Open Dialogue
White Supremacy and Racism
Family, Community, and Values
Redemption
Rhetoric and Language
Summary
Analysis
Derek spends his first morning in Florida at a coffee shop catching up on schoolwork while Don is doing the radio show. One of his first big assignments is to write a 50-page research paper, and he chooses his subject because of parallels with his own life. He is writing about a ninth-century religious leader named Bodo, “a rising star in the Carolingian Empire and the Christian church.” Historians thought Bodo was destined to become a Frankish politician until he abandoned his life with little warning, converted to Judaism, changed his name, and married a Jewish woman. There is very little record of the reckoning that led him to this decision.
The book creates a parallel between Bodo and Derek, who was also a “rising star” in the white nationalist movement before completely changing his beliefs. But in contrast to Bodo, whose thought process is largely undocumented, Rising Out of Hatred is an attempt to track how Derek reckoned with his ideology and came out the other side. Through this book, Saslow and Derek are trying to use language to give the reader guidance on how best to get through to people and change their ideologies.
Themes
When Don is finished with the show, he and Derek go out to a restaurant together. While Derek steers the conversation away from politics, Don continues to make jabs at Derek about his new liberal identity. Don and Derek then return home, where his parents have the news on all the time. To Don’s delight, he thinks the multicultural U.S. is unraveling. He watches a story about a man named James Jackson, who watched Spencer and Duke’s videos, boarded a bus from Baltimore to New York, and stabbed a 66-year-old Black trash collector to death in Times Square.
Jackson’s story represents yet another example of how language can be harmful because it can potentially lead people to violent action. Listening to Spencer and Duke’s white nationalist rhetoric, Jackson was then spurred to this violent act, which had fatal consequences.
Themes
Then Don, Chloe, and Derek watch Tucker Carlson, a new hero among the alt-right. Carlson talks about “alien immigrants” and “cultural erosion.” The SPLC has named his show the most racist news program on cable TV, with a nightly audience of over three million. He talks about the threats immigrants pose to “real Americans,” asking why they would want to live in a bilingual country. Later, Derek goes to stay at his grandmother’s house for the night, and as his parents drive him, they echo Carlson’s language and say that Derek is becoming an antiwhite activist. Finally, though, they tell him that they miss and love him.
Here, the book argues that pundits—not just politicians—are using white nationalist rhetoric to their advantage. Carlson, the book suggests, is capitalizing on the rising white nationalist sentiment among white people and again using dog whistles to make racist points in a more socially acceptable way. His language demonizes “alien immigrants” and suggests that white people—the “real Americans”—are victims of “cultural erosion” in the same way that Derek portrayed white people as victims of a cultural genocide.
Themes
The next morning, Don and Derek meet up again and go to the beach. There, Don tries to convince Derek to come on the radio again, or to see his old friends at this year’s conference. Don laments that Derek says things that are so exaggerated about race and immigration. Derek confirms that he thinks immigration and diversity are good things, and that they were all wrong about the issues. And even if they were right about keeping the races apart, putting that into practice would be a massive human rights violation. Don says there will be a horrible reckoning either way.
Don and Derek try to have an open dialogue, and Don’s belief that Derek is now and extremist illustrates just how much Derek has transformed his thinking. Notably, even though it seems like the divide between father and son is insurmountable, so did the divide between Derek and his classmates at the beginning of the book. This perhaps provides some hope that other white nationalists, like Don, could follow a similar journey if people like Derek continue to reach out.
Themes
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In the coming months, Don and Derek will watch as white nationalism continues to explode: for example, in fights over destruction of Confederate monuments and a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia with neo-Nazis carrying guns and torches. Trump explains the violence by blaming “both sides,” creating a moral equivalency between racists and anti-racists. Derek writes another op-ed to say that Trump’s statement legitimized a racist ideology, while Stormfront’s traffic triples overnight. But now, at the restaurant, Don asks what happened to Derek—everything he advocated for is finally beginning to catch on. Derek agrees, and he states that that’s why he’s trying to warn people.
The “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville further reinforces how ideologies can bleed into one another and more dangerous movements. The book suggests that such movements have gained legitimacy because of the white nationalist ideology espoused by people like Donald Trump. In the wake of this danger, Derek recognizes his continued responsibility to advocate against white nationalism, and Rising Out of Hatred is an important piece of the warning Derek alludes to in the book’s final passage. The book attempts to counter the rhetoric Derek spent his early life spreading, and it also provides a guide on how to help people escape radicalization and extremist movements.
Themes
