Book on former white nationalist shows how to extinguish the fires of hatred

As we brace ourselves for the next shooter walking into a church or school and killing innocents, we must also acknowledge and celebrate those moments when the light shines through the darkness that shrouds the minds of those who espouse white nationalism, racism or anti-Semitism.

Eli Saslow, a Washington Post reporter, discovered such a moment in the aftermath of a horrific hate crime in Charleston, South Carolina, on June 17, 2015. Attending to his beat covering racism, anti-Semitism and hate crimes, Saslow visited the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, where a shooter walked into the church around 9 p.m. and killed nine people. Later, the shooter would write, “I would like to make it crystal clear, I do not regret what I did. ... I am not sorry. I have not shed a tear for the innocent people I killed.”

In the process of researching how a young man filled with such hate could bring himself to shoot churchgoers in cold blood, Saslow spent some time on the website Stormfront, which fans the flames of white nationalism. It was there he learned about Derek Black, who inherited the vitriol of the white nationalist movement from his father, Don Black, and his godfather, none other than David Duke, the white supremacist and KKK grand wizard at one point in his career.

By the time Derek was 19 years old, he was an elected politician with his own daily radio show, where he spewed his brand of white nationalism. Don Black founded Stormfront, which grew into the internet’s largest racist site. No one was better positioned to assume the leadership of the white nationalist movement than Derek Black.

But here’s where the story takes a transformational turn, still hard to fathom considering the years Derek Black spent with a father raising his son on the fundamentals of racism and white nationalism.

Derek enrolled at New College, a public liberal arts school in Sarasota, Florida. At the outset of his college experience, he chose to lead two lives, not sharing his white nationalist background with his fellow students and acting out college life as though he was just another guy. That wouldn’t last long, as his background and experience in the white nationalist movement was discovered by fellow students.

New College faced the same divisions in its student body that colleges and universities are facing everywhere. Some students argued that someone of Derek’s beliefs didn’t belong on the campus. Other students who upheld free speech rights argued for Derek to remain a student. Some students who befriended Derek early in his college career and were shocked to learn of his past took a different tack. A Peruvian immigrant, Juan, and an Orthodox Jew, Matthew, who invited Derek to attend his weekly Shabbat dinners, took it upon themselves to question Derek about his views.

Juan was particularly puzzled since he and Derek had developed a friendship in their freshman year, and Juan wondered how Derek – whose Stormfront posts had “all this horrifying stuff about brown people” – reconciled his racist posts with his friendship with a brown person. Could it be that Derek was in the process of an awakening and discarding his father’s thinking that “the great white gene pool was endangered by desegregation immigration, and rising Jewish political influence”?

Thanks to his fellow students, Derek Black eventually confronted his dark and misguided past and made an official break with the white nationalist movement. It cost him his relationship with his father, who remains deeply committed to the white nationalist movement.

The role that Derek’s college friends played in his conversion cannot be overstated. They hung in there with someone whose views they thought they could change – and they did. It’s a great lesson for college students and faculty today, who scream that the free speech rights of some are offensive and should be banned from the campus. If Derek Black had been removed from campus – a decision New College decided not to make – and if Derek’s fellow students had shunned him, no doubt that Stormfront and the white nationalist movement would have his dangerous and former voice of hate and vitriol claiming converts to the cause to this day.

Instead, Stormfront suffered the embarrassment of losing one of its most committed and persuasive voices, who disavowed everything the movement stands for. Derek Black is now a Ph.D. student at a prestigious research university, building a career in medieval studies. One of Derek’s friends, Allison, who challenged him to confront his past and recognize the harm he did over his young years, is a Ph.D. psychologist. Who knows how her experiences with Derek at New College influenced her own life and career?

Eli Saslow tells this story in his book, “Rising Out of Hatred,” and reminds us all that we must never give up on those who seem to be the hardest to turn. When I asked Eli during a recent interview on my Readers Corner radio show what we can take away from Derek Black’s story, he suggested that we take this down to the level of family and friends, and speak up when we hear racist or hate talk from those we know and love.

“Rising Out of Hatred” should be required reading on college and university campuses. New College and some of its students helped us understand what results when free speech is upheld and reasonable minds never give up on helping bigots see the errors of their ways.

This story was originally published May 17, 2019 at 7:35 PM.