South Florida Sun-Sentinel (Sunday)
Change of heart: How a white nationalist turned against hate
Derek Black was reared in the cradle of white supremacy.
His godfather was David Duke. His father, Don, a former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard and founder of a popular hate website, plotted to overthrow the Caribbean island nation of Dominica to create a white utopia. As a child, Black’s bedroom was adorned with Confederate flags. By age 10, Black had built a children’s website featuring racist songs and games that attracted more than 1 million visitors.
Later he launched a 24-hour online radio network, and hosted a show in which he peddled racial pseudoscience and advocated for a whites-only country. But just as the rise of the movement culminated in the election of Donald Trump as president of the United States, Black had a change of heart.
In “Rising Out of Hatred: The Awakening of a Former White Nationalist,” Eli Saslow, a Pulitzer Prizewinning reporter for The Washington Post, charts Black’s conversion from a right-wing extremist to a high-profile critic of the movement.
As a white nationalist, Black felt his ideology was validated by Thomas Jefferson and other lions of American history, who held similar views. “It felt to Derek as if he were being let in on a secret,” Saslow writes. “White nationalism wasn’t just a fringe racist movement but something much more forceful and dangerous: a foundational concept embedded in the American DNA.”
But when he took up studies at a liberal arts honors college, his thinking slowly began to change.
He befriended Jewish classmates and attended Shabbat dinners. His double life was exposed and links to Black’s articles and radio show were posted on a school forum.
Although Black was ostracized on campus, he was befriended by Mike Long, a “popular student body president” who, Saslow says, “had never been afraid to talk to anybody, including a white supremacist.” Long invited Black to a boat outing, where Allison Gornick, a student who had previously shunned him, began to see him in a different light. Gornick challenged Black’s bigoted views and nudged him to reconsider them.
Saslow recounts a turning point — when Black found himself revolted by his father’s views after the acquittal of George Zimmerman, the man who killed an unarmed Trayvon Martin. “It wasn’t just his father’s views that suddenly horrified him,” Saslow writes. “... It was the memory of his previous self. He had made versions of those same flawed arguments. He had expressed similar callousness, ignorance, and cruelty. It seemed obvious to him now that he needed to publicly condemn not only white nationalism but also his past life.”
Black then typed a letter and emailed it to the Southern Poverty Law Center. He admitted that his actions had been “harmful to people of color, people of Jewish descent” and others. “I will not contribute to any cause that perpetuates this harm in the future.” He then criticized the tenets of white nationalism. “I can’t support a movement that tells me I can’t be a friend to whomever I wish or that other people’s races require me to think about them in a certain way or be suspicious at their advancements. Minorities must have the ability to rise to positions of power, and many supposed ‘race’ issues are in fact issues of structural oppression, poor educational prospects, and limited opportunity.”
Black’s father, Don, at first thought the letter was fake; when he learned the truth, he was shocked and sickened. But he and his son agreed on one key point: After they both spent years promoting its tenets, white nationalism had finally seeped into the American mainstream.
“Rising Out of Hatred” is a disturbing look at the spread of that extremism — and how it is planted and cultivated in the fertile soil of American bigotry. And yet, Saslow’s vivid storytelling also conveys that during this period of deepening racial division, there is the possibility of redemption. Pamela Newkirk is a professor of journalism at New York University and the author of “Spectacle: The Astonishing Life of Ota Benga.”