Derek Black comes from a white supremacist legacy: his father, Don Black, founded Stormfront (a popular white pride website), and Derek’s godfather, David Duke, was once the Grand Wizard of the KKK. Derek believes in white nationalism largely because he was indoctrinated into the ideology from a young age and was never exposed to different ideas. And when Derek eventually goes to college, befriends people of different backgrounds, and denounces white supremacy, this inevitably strains his relationships with many of his family members and friends. Although Derek knows that he’s making the right decision, being alienated from his close circle is painful. Through his experience, the book illustrates that communities and families tend to be built around shared values—and that one of the reasons it can be so difficult to change one’s beliefs is because it often means splitting with one’s community.
Derek’s upbringing demonstrates how his family, friends, and communities are built around sharing white nationalist values. Derek grows up entrenched in white nationalism, thanks in large part to Don. Don helps decorate Derek’s childhood bedroom with a Confederate flag and gets Derek involved in building the children’s page on Stormfront, and they ultimately share a radio show together. A great deal of Don’s pride in his son is based on how Derek beliefs—which are “a direct inheritance from Don”—are making him a rising star of the white nationalist movement. In this way, the shared values that they cultivate become the strongest bond in their relationship. Derek’s bond with David Duke—who essentially acts as his second father—is also predicated on their shared white nationalism. After Derek is outed as a white nationalist, causing an uproar at New College, Duke visits him while Derek is studying abroad in Germany. They find comfort in talking about history and their ideology, and they visit a town square where Hitler organized marches for the Nazi Party. Duke gives Derek advice about how other people’s ostracism and protest of Duke’s own ideas at school fueled his devotion to “the cause of our racial survival.” In this way, their shared values and experiences with white nationalism bring them closer together and create a mentor-mentee dynamic. Growing up inside white nationalism, Derek has many relationships of the kind he has with Don and Duke. This is one of the reasons why his friends at New College, like Allison, understand why it’s difficult to sway Derek from his ideology. When Allison attends a Stormfront conference with Derek, she sees that it’s also an opportunity for family and friends to see each other. After Derek speaks, they applaud him as the leader of the “next generation.” To them, white nationalism isn’t just a political strategy or movement—it’s a part of their family values and traditions. Derek’s participation in the community is built on his involvement with white nationalism, making it difficult for him to break away.
Eventually, Derek’s disavowal of white nationalism leads to a falling out with his family, illustrating how changing one’s values can be difficult because it means breaking with a community. After Allison helps Derek recognize white nationalism as a flawed and destructive ideology, he publicly denounces his former beliefs. This breaks his family members’ hearts, and they refuse to speak to him. Don even says that “it would have been better for their family if Derek hadn't been born,” though he calls back later and rescinds this statement. Just as shared values built a bond, losing those shared values breaks or weakens that bond—even one as strong as a parent-child relationship. Even when Derek tries to reconcile with his family, few of them are willing to do so. Duke is angry at the pain Derek has caused in the movement, and other relatives stop communicating with him. Don wants to speak with Derek at his 60th birthday party, but the rest of the family makes the pair leave the party in order to speak. Derek’s mother, Chloe, and his sisters say nothing to Derek when he arrives. In this way, Derek’s decision to separate himself from his values separates him from his loved ones as well. This is also true on Stormfront: where Derek was once beloved on the website, now users call him a “traitor” and physically threaten him in posts. Derek’s rejection of values not only separates him from his family, but from the friendships and communities he’s been a part of for years.
Yet while Derek loses his community for disavowing white nationalism, he also gains a great deal of support from newfound friends at New College now that he shares their values. After Derek disavows white nationalism, he grows even closer to Allison, who tells him that she is proud of him and that she loves him. Additionally, Derek receives many congratulatory notes and voicemails from other students, and he no longer feels like he must sacrifice potential friendships with people because of white nationalism. This offers another perspective on how shared values help build community bonds; indeed, Derek’s new values help him find a new place to belong. This reinforces the book’s overall suggestion that familial relationships and friendships are based largely on shared values, and that not sharing those values can make it impossible to fully take part in a community.
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Family, Community, and Values Quotes in Rising Out of Hatred
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.”
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.
“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.”
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.”
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?
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.”
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.
