By Eli Saslow, Doubleday, 288 pages
If there is such a thing as white nationalist royalty, Derek Black would have inherited the throne. His father founded the racist internet community Stormfront, and his godfather is none other than David Duke, former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. Black was an outspoken racist by age ten, homeschooled by his parents and steeped in their ideology. His radio show and blog garnered him a following among white nationalist youth.
And then he went to college — specifically, to the quite liberal New College of Florida, across the state and a world away from where he’d grown up in Palm Beach County. Despite his sheltered upbringing, Black had a fiercely intellectual mind. He loved history, reason, and science. He’d always considered his belief systems to be anchored in verifiable academic principles. The friends he made at school appealed to this sensibility in order to show Black a version of reality outside of his race-based bubble of understanding. This was after they found out who he was. At first, he kept his identity a secret.
Written by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Eli Saslow, Rising Out of Hatred: The Awakening of
is an example of how a drastic change in environment can potentially open one up to considering or accepting new belief systems. It’s not an easy or fast process, but it can happen. Saslow’s clean and detailed approach to his subject makes Black’s difficult and prolonged transformation accessible. He explains the nuances of white nationalist belief systems as well as Black’s particular take, painting him as someone whose ideas were shaped by his family but who possesses a gentle nature and intrinsic intelligence. Black was never a neo-Nazi skinhead, not the type to hurl racial invective or use foul language to disparage people of color. He was proud of his civility; in his mind, his brand of racism was practically benevolent. He didn’t want to violently harm African Americans, Latinos, Jews, or Muslims. His main concern was that the white race was being decimated by too many nonwhite people living in and coming to the United States, which he and other white nationalists consider an annihilation of their identity and culture. Though this rhetoric was considered to be radically on the fringe a generation ago, Black and his followers have seen their talking points absorbed into mainstream right-wing discourse on subjects like immigration and affirmative action.
At the New College of Florida, Black hid his beliefs even as he continued to call into his radio show each morning and shoot the breeze with his father, the co-host. When his classmates eventually discovered the truth, the campus was divided. Some shunned him; some thrived on confrontation, yelling at him or making rude gestures when they saw him in public; and still others wanted to convince him of the error of his ways. Much of the debate about him raged for multiple semesters in an online student message board. But it was the real-life invitation to a weekly Shabbat dinner in the dorm room of some Jewish students that started Black down a new road. Black, for all his posturing, had never actually met a Jew before, but these students became his friends. Over plates of salmon and stimulating conversations about history and philosophy, he quickly saw that, contrary to what he’d thought, his friends were obviously not part of a nefarious conspiracy to control the world. He’d been wrong about that. Had he been wrong about anything else?