Throughout Derek Black’s early life, he is considered the “heir” of the white nationalist movement, the goal of which is to promote a white racial identity and form an all-white nation, or “ethnostate.” He does, however, try to distinguish his ideology from neo-Nazism and other forms of violent extremism. While Derek thinks that white people are better off living separately from non-white people, he doesn’t believe in violence or outright discrimination against other groups, and he’s polite to everyone he meets regardless of their race. However, Rising Out of Hatred shows that even Derek’s relatively nonthreatening white nationalism still has harmful effects, as his prejudice makes his friends and classmates feel hated, dehumanized, and even unsafe on their college campus. Moreover, Derek implicitly condones more extreme forms of white supremacy by associating with groups that support violence and promoting his ideology to the mainstream: he hosts a white nationalist radio show, attends the same conferences as neo-Nazis and the KKK, and even runs for political office on a white nationalist platform. Thus, the book suggests that no form of white supremacy is harmless. The same racist beliefs underpin all white supremacist movements—from the mildest to the most extreme—and the book suggests that these various ideologies often play off one another and can put people on a dangerous path to radicalization.
At first, Derek makes a point to distinguish his ideology as relatively harmless, portraying himself as non-threatening compared to other groups. Derek often clarifies that he is a white nationalist and not a white supremacist or a member of the KKK. His core beliefs are that the U.S. would be better off as a whites-only country, and that white genocide and the erasure of white culture are real threats. This framing enables him to try and distinguish himself from various hate groups that promote violence and overt discrimination against minorities. Derek claims that white nationalism is particularly different from other groups because he doesn’t advocate for violence and thinks that “overt prejudice can be really bad.” Again, this is a way that Derek tries to separate himself from the other groups, attempting to argue that he is not involved in white supremacy or violent extremism. Derek even tries to show that he doesn’t base his beliefs on emotion or bias, but “what he believe[s] to be the facts of racial science, immigration, and a declining white middle class.” By positioning white nationalism as an emotionless, nonviolent, logical creed, Derek tries to create a contrast between him and others who base their ideology on anger and hate.
However, it becomes clear that Derek’s beliefs are harmful to others, and that his associations with people in the other movements make the boundaries between them almost irrelevant. While Derek tries to argue that his ideology isn’t based on prejudice, he writes on Stormfront that Jewish people are “possibly evil.” He also argues that Black people are more aggressive because of higher testosterone levels, and that white people have bigger brains and higher IQs. Not only are these studies and beliefs false and racist, but they are the same kinds of arguments that people in all different sects of the white supremacist movement make. This becomes clear to Derek when he learns that his peers are afraid of him and feel unsafe on campus with Derek there. Thus, Derek’s ideology isn’t as harmless or as he purports. In addition, Derek’s friend Allison teaches him that the prejudice that underpins white nationalism causes deep harm—it’s not just a “modern civil rights movement for whites,” as Derek argues. She shows him studies proving that non-white victims of prejudice are more likely to suffer from health risks like high blood pressure and suppressed immunity, experience housing discrimination, and face police brutality. Thus, even technically nonviolent white nationalism can physically and mentally hurt people. Additionally, Derek has many friends and family members who are white supremacists, KKK Klansmen, or neo-Nazis. So even though Derek asserts that he’s not a white supremacist, his association with them indicates his implicit approval of their attitudes. Many of these groups band together into the “alt-right” movement and host rallies—like the one that took place in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017, where attendees carried torches and guns and displayed antisemitic and racist slogans and symbols. This reinforces that ideologies can bleed into one another and feed broader, more dangerous movements, and that all variations of white supremacy can be harmful.
Lastly, the book illustrates how white nationalism, even if it appears more benign than other ideologies, can lead to extremism and radicalization. Derek’s father Don, for example, reads a white nationalist book called Our Nordic Race, which advocates for separating white people from people of color. After reading this, Don finds more white nationalist literature from the same publisher, ends up reading a newspaper called White Power, and then starts attending white nationalist conferences. Ultimately, he gets involved with other white nationalists who try to overthrow the government of Dominica so that they can form an all-white ethnostate. Thus, even “separationist” ideology that advocates for voluntary (rather than forced) separation between races can lead people down a dangerous rabbit hole to violence and extremism. This is also true of Joseph Paul Franklin, another young white nationalist whom Don meets at a conference. He finds white nationalism through reading Hitler’s Mein Kampf at the library. Then, through his involvement in white nationalism, he gradually becomes more extreme in his beliefs and decides to spark a “race war” by bombing synagogues and shooting people of color. Again, even though white nationalism itself doesn’t explicitly advocate for this violence, it still feeds extremist fires. This is particularly true on Stormfront, the hate website that Don creates and that Derek also posts on. At least six murderers are linked to Stormfront, and Don calls these connections “a series of very unfortunate coincidences.” However, it’s clear that white nationalist and white supremacist ideology motivated them to perpetrate this violence. Through these various examples, the book emphasizes that racist ideology, no matter its form, is harmful and can easily lead to violence.
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White Supremacy and Racism 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.”
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.
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.”
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.
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?
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.”
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.”
