No family had done more to help white nationalism bully its way back into mainstream politics, and Derek was the next step in that evolution. He was precocious, thoughtful, and polite, sometimes delivering handwritten thank-you notes to conference volunteers. He never used racist slurs. He didn’t advocate for outright violence or breaking the law. His core beliefs were the same as those of most white nationalists: that America would be better off as a whites-only country, and that all minorities should eventually be forced to leave. But instead of basing his public arguments on emotion or explicit prejudice, he spoke mostly about what he believed to be the facts of racial science, immigration, and a declining white middle class.
Under his watch, Stormfront grew into a gigantic, international community of message boards and chat rooms that offered everything from academic research on racial differences, to daily Nazi news links, to dating profiles rife with racial slurs. A few of Stormfront’s frequent users went on to bomb synagogues or murder minorities; the Southern Poverty Law Center, a hate-watch group, published a report connecting Stormfront to more than a hundred murders. Don discouraged violence in his own messages on the site, but he also managed the website with the language of a wartime commander, writing about “enemies” and “comrades,” in the “fight for our future.”
As Derek explained it to his listeners, white nationalists were not fighting against minority rights but fighting for rights of their own. As the white population in the United States continued to drop, Derek and other activists were “simply trying to protect and preserve an endangered heritage and culture,” he said. They were trying to save whites from an “inevitable genocide by mass immigration and forced assimilation.” Theirs was the righteous cause. They were the social justice warriors. “What’s happening right now is a genocide of our people, plain and simple,” Derek said. “We are Europeans. We have a right to exist. We will not be replaced in our own country.”
And then there was Derek, the white nationalist prodigy living anonymously in his dorm room, helping to moderate the world’s largest white pride website and calling in to his own political radio show five mornings each week. On the air, he repeatedly theorized about “the criminal nature of blacks” and the “inferior natural intelligence of blacks and Hispanics.” He said President Obama was “anti-white culture,” “a radical black activist,” and “inherently un-American.” There was nothing micro about Derek’s aggressions. He knew that if his views were discovered at New College, he would be vilified on the forum and ostracized on campus. So he decided that semester to be a white activist on the radio and an anonymous college student in Sarasota.
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?
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. By listening to snippets of Derek’s radio show, Matthew came to understand that Derek was sharp, rational, and good at making arguments with outsiders. He could deflect anonymous callers who belittled him and questioned his ideology. He had spent the last decade practicing—and teaching—the verbal tactics of debate against the enemy. So what information could Matthew provide during the course of one Shabbat dinner that would reorder Derek’s worldview? There was nothing. So 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.
Because there was nothing else to do that day—and nowhere else to go with classes canceled—Derek wandered by the event on his way to lunch and stopped at the edge of the quad to listen. In front of him he saw a few of his professors, Matthew, Moshe, and at least two hundred other students. 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.
The new status quo in the late 1960s was constant turmoil, so Don started searching the library for possible solutions until one day he found a slight paperback titled Our Nordic Race, written by a Virginia preacher named Richard Hoskins. “Today the entire world is seething with unrest,” the introduction read. “The line of conflict is found wherever our civilization comes into contact with the belligerent and aggressive nations of the colored world. It is a critical problem which will be solved not by emotion but only by the cold processes of intellect.”
“Derek Roland Black,” Don said, lingering on each syllable years later, on Derek’s twenty-first birthday, as they reminisced together on their joint radio show. Derek in honor of Theodoric, the great Aryan leader. Roland in remembrance of a white martyr who died speaking out for his cause. “There’s something about that name I really liked,” Don said. “It’s the name of a Viking in many ways, a real fighter. Solid and unshakable. When you say it, you can almost hear the sound of clashing steel.”
Their conversation on the roof had remained mostly civil and productive, largely because Allison also had the advantage of being white. Derek didn’t feel implicitly challenged by her racial identity; Allison didn’t feel personally threatened by his beliefs. Because she wasn’t the one he hoped to oppress or deport, she could also engage with him in discussions that were less emotional than logical. She could present herself not as an enemy armed for battle but as a confused and curious friend who hoped to better understand Derek’s racial conclusions.
Derek’s talk ended with a long ovation, and then Don offered a toast to what he called “the next generation.” Allison listened as the applause built around her and wondered, even if she could somehow convince Derek of the flaws in his ideology, how could she ever compel him to give up all of this? His parents were glowing. A line of admirers had begun to form near his chair, a dozen people waiting to compliment Derek on his talk. “They really loved and cared about him,” Allison said. “Derek was so much more at the center of everything than I’d realized.”
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. She emailed him medical research from Harvard about how psychologists considered racism a chronic stressor with the power to alter brain chemistry. 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.
James posted an image of a kickboxer pummeling a Nazi, and hours later Allison saw it on the forum and decided to write a public response. She had spent the last year sitting with Derek, Matthew, Moshe, and others at polite dinner parties. And even if the result wasn’t exactly revolutionary, she believed those conversations had opened Derek’s mind and begun to change his thinking. What she worried now was that the forum would undo that goodwill and push Derek back into a corner, where he would again see the campus as his liberal enemy.
By the time he arrived in Bordeaux, France, in the first days of 2013 for his French-immersion class, Derek felt increasingly detached from his white nationalist views. “The ideology is flawed, and I’ve moved away from it,” he told Allison, and when they traded New Year’s resolutions, he told her he wanted to “be more mindful of other people and concerned with what they say.” Then he started his French classes and befriended a handful of other American college students who were studying abroad. Eventually one of those students searched Derek’s name on Google, and soon the group was uninviting him to parties and talking about him loudly in the school. “His name is Black and he doesn’t like black people,” Derek overheard one of them say. He closed the door of his room and vented online to Allison. She asked him: How many more potential friendships was he willing to sacrifice for an ideology he no longer really believed in? How many more opportunities would he allow himself to lose?
On their long drive back to Sarasota the next day, she began to remind him of the public archive he had built within white nationalism: A website for “white children of the globe.” Thousands of public Stormfront posts. Several hundred radio shows. Dozens of interviews, speeches, and a conference now going into its third year. No matter how much Derek wanted to disappear, that legacy wasn’t going to disappear with him. In the car, Allison asked Derek how many people he had influenced during his time as a white nationalist. How many had he radicalized? How many had he turned into activists? And how many millions of other people had his rhetoric offended or oppressed?
Don dialed Derek late that night, and Derek thought this time his father sounded more measured—practically calm. Don said he’d been reflecting on his life, thinking back on the lowest moments. He had been shot in the stomach as a teenager. He’d spent years in federal prison. He’d suffered a stroke and fought off depression and seen many of his closest friends die. But this, Don told Derek, was by far the worst experience of his life. Don said he had weighed out the pros and cons, and he had concluded that it would have been better for their family if Derek hadn’t been born. Derek sat in stunned silence as Don hung up. Then Don called back a few moments later, his voice once again shaky, to tell Derek that of course that wasn’t true, and to apologize.
She told him she was proud of his courage, and as the news continued to spread on Facebook and through the mainstream media, so were many others. Derek’s message in-box filled with congratulatory notes and voice mails, many of them from people who had never spoken with him directly about white nationalism. Rose, whom Derek had dated for a few weeks during his first year at New College, wrote that she was “happy/proud, and I know it can’t be easy.” Juan said he had always believed Derek was “smart and kind enough to find his own way out.” Moshe said it was “pretty damn brave.” Matthew thought Derek had shown “uncommon courage.”
“People who disagreed with me were critical in this process,” he wrote. “Especially those who were my friends regardless, but who let me know when we talked about it that they thought my beliefs were wrong and took the time to provide evidence and civil arguments. I didn’t always agree with their ideas, but I listened to them and they listened to me.
“Furthermore, a critical juncture was when I’d realize that a friend was considered an outsider by the philosophy I supported. It’s a huge contradiction to share your summer plans with someone whom you completely respect, only to then realize that your ideology doesn’t consider them a full member of society. I couldn’t resolve that.”
For a decade, white nationalism had rallied around Derek as if he were the movement’s lovable mascot: young and smart, with a funny hat and bright red hair. Everyone felt as if they knew him, and so his rejection also seemed personal.
“Anger and disappointment,” one poster wrote. “Then again, we don’t need weaklings in our cause.”
“Derek’s now an open enemy to the survival of the white face.”
“He’s a traitor without hope or redemption. Should WN’s ever seize power, his name should figure prominently on the ‘Hunt Down List.’”
“Brass knuckles to the face and groin. Then water boarding.”
For the last decade he had been one person in public, and now he was another. All of the stereotypes he had promoted, all of the misinformation he'd helped spread, all of the hurtful and racist things he had believed and then said—it was all behind him now. That was Derek. This was Roland. He told Allison he never wanted to log on to Stormfront or watch cable news or so much as think about white nationalism or white supremacy ever again.
"It's all over and done with," he told her. Except at that very moment, at a white nationalist conference in Tennessee and beyond, the ideas he'd been promoting were continuing to spread.
In June 2015, Roof scouted out a historically black church in Charleston, South Carolina, and traveled there alone with a handgun. He went to a Bible study attended by black and mostly elderly congregants and waited until they stood up to pray. Then he opened fire and killed nine people, firing off dozens of rounds as he shouted about wanting to “start a race war.”
“A crazy kid latching onto portions of our cause” was how Don later explained it to the media, as the shooting brought Stormfront back onto the front page of The New York Times. “If the movement has a leading edge, it is Stormfront,” the Times wrote, and later in court Roof’s defense attorney attempted to blame the “racist internet” for Roof’s massacre. “Every bit of motivation came from things he saw on the internet,” his attorney David Bruck said. “He is simply regurgitating, in whole paragraphs, slogans, and facts—bits and pieces of facts that he downloaded from the internet directly into his brain.”
What Trump said during those next months was that he wanted to ban Muslims from entering the United States. He said he was the “law and order candidate” in the age of Black Lives Matter. He said he was qualified to be president in large part because of his “beautiful, terrific genes—a wonderful inheritance.” He said his primary goal was to erase the legacy of Barack Obama, the country’s first black president, who Trump continued to insinuate was a foreign-born Muslim. He said America’s inner cities were overrun by “gangs and thugs,” and “right now, if you walk down the street, you get shot”—and then to prove that point he re-tweeted a crime statistic suggesting that 81 percent of white murder victims were killed by blacks. A few days later, after criminologists told Trump that his number was wildly off base—that in fact it was only 14 percent—Trump said, “What? Am I gonna check every statistic?”
The wave of violence and vile language that has risen since the election is only one immediate piece of evidence that this campaign’s reckless assertion of white identity comes at a huge cost. More and more people are being forced to recognize now what I learned early: Our country is susceptible to some of our worst instincts when the message is packaged correctly.
No checks and balances can redeem what we’ve unleashed. The reality is that half of the voters chose white supremacy...
It’s now our job to argue constantly that what voters did in elevating this man to the White House constitutes the greatest assault on our own people in a generation, and to offer another option…
Those of us on the other side need to be clear that Mr. Trump’s callous disregard for people outside his demographic is intolerable, and will be destructive to the entire nation.
During the coming months, Don and Derek would watch as white nationalism continued to explode into mainstream politics. There would be fights over the destruction of Confederate monuments, followed by a succession of marches and rallies led by white nationalists throughout the South. One of those marches would arrive in downtown Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017, where Richard Spencer, David Duke, and hundreds of neo-Nazis would carry guns and torches into downtown, threatening counterprotesters with chants of “White lives matter” and “You will not replace us,” until one neo-Nazi rammed his car into a crowd, killing one counterprotester and injuring nineteen others. Trump would go on national TV to explain away the violence by blaming “both sides”—what he called the “alt-left” and also “the good people” on the “alt-right”—creating a moral equivalency between racists and antiracists. Don would call Trump’s comments “the high point” of white nationalism during his lifetime. Derek would write another opinion piece for The New York Times to say that Trump’s “frightening statement” had “legitimized” a racist ideology. Don would watch Stormfront's traffic triple overnight, spiking to 300,000 daily page views, signifying what he called the “full awakening of our people.”
