Turning away from white nationalism

A new book recounts the transformation of Derek Black, the infamous young white nationalist leader in the US who renounced his beliefs and family after gaining acceptance with fellow students.

Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post reporter Eli Saslow tells the story of Derek's path to tolerance in his new book, Rising Out Of Hatred: The Awakening of a Former White Nationalist.

Saslow says he was researching Dylann Roof, who murdered nine African Americans in a historically black church in Charleston, South Carolina when he came across Derek's story.

"Dylann Roof had spent time on this website called stormfront, so … I went on stormfront to try to sort of understand.

"There were these horrible, upsetting posts sort of celebrating what Dylann Roof had done - but the biggest thread on the message board was about Derek Black."

Derek, it turned out, was the son Don Black - a grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan for nine years who later founded the stormfront website.

"After the KKK had begun to sort of shrink and Don decided that that was not the way ahead, he decided that what he wanted to do was try to take over an island - an island called Dominica - and to turn it into a new 'white utopia'.

"So Don and 10 other neo-Nazis and skinheads had come up with this plan to overthrow the government of this small island nation, and they were caught as they were boarding a boat with all sorts of guns and armour.

"That resulted in Don going to prison, and it was in prison where he began to learn some early computer skills, and so he used that to build stormfront which turned into the biggest racist website in the world for 20 years running."

Derek's godfather is also former KKK Grand Wizard and Holocaust denier David Duke, "the most notorious racist politician in the last 50 years".

Derek was smart - he spoke four languages at age 16, and built a white pride site for children that had about 1,000,000 visits - and was quite politically savvy.

"He was disastrously successful at spreading this stuff: He had a daily radio show; by the time he was 20 years old he was elected to a little elected office in Florida ... based on nationalist talking points.

"He also had become the main conference speaker at most white nationalist conferences and he was telling these crowds of people that the way ahead for their movement was through politics and through having a big political movement they could 'take the country back'."

Saslow says Derek was influential in convincing his father to ban slurs and Nazi insignia from stormfront.

"Instead of just saying horrific things about minorities they've decided that instead they're better off speaking to - unfortunately - the real sense of grievance that exists in many white households in the world.

"Particularly in America, 30 to 40 percent of white people here believe that they experience more discrimination than people of colour or Jews, which is wildly inaccurate by every factual measure that we have."

Saslow says the father-son duo used various tactics to spread their messages.

"They would record slightly more explicitly white pride country CDs and then they would take these CDs and then they would distribute them at big country music concerts in the American south.

"Don and Derek told me that their main tactic when they were trying to recruit people to become white nationalists is they were looking for people who started sentences with phrases like 'I'm not racist, but -'.

So Derek seemed destined to become a white nationalist political leader, and had decided to go to an honours school in Florida - a good school that was fairly cheap called New College of Florida.

"Once Derek got there, he also realised that it was a very progressive school, a school that valued social justice, and valued equality.

"Derek knew that if those people knew who he was he would be ostracised on campus, maybe he'd be kicked out."

Saslow says Derek hid his identity - making friends and acting "normal" while still broadcasting his daily radio show in the early morning.

"So he lived this double life for a while until another student on campus was researching the primary extremists in the world … saw on this roll call of extremists a picture of a kid who sat next to him in math class."

Derek's identity was exposed on the internet.

"The school essentially exploded into a debate about what it should do … the students tried to figure out what were various ways that they could impact Derek's thinking."

Saslow says Derek was, at first, ostracised.

"A group of students organised huge protests against Derek and a campaign to sort of exclude him from campus.

"Students would flip him off when he walked around school … these students shut down the campus for a day and protested Derek's ideas, and I think that that was actually hugely necessary.

"Derek for the first time saw reflected back at him how hurtful these ideas were, and how much they were hurting his peers, and also the fact that Derek was excluded from campus left him vulnerable.

"When a few students did begin reaching out and beginning conversations with Derek, he was much more likely to accept their invitations, and he was also in a spot where the power dynamics had shifted and he was more likely to listen."

Those students, remarkably, were two Jewish students.

"What Matthew and Moshe decided was that regardless of what Derek was saying on the radio, regardless of what they knew of him, they believed that it was their responsibility to try to help him see beyond his prejudices to the people and to some humanity.

"They would assemble these very diverse Friday-night dinners - with people of colour, immigrants, gay students, straight students, Jewish students, secular students - and they would invite Derek to sort of participate in this very diverse conversation.

"He had always believed that anybody that wasn't white - or people that he defined as white because race in and of itself is a very nebulous and shifting concept … he thought that they were lesser than him or fundamentally different from him.

"He began to realise that in fact these were students that he liked spending time with, he enjoyed meeting with them for a beer, hanging out, talking about world history.

"They were every bit as smart as he was, they were incredibly perceptive and they were also kind - kind to him in ways that he had not been kind to other people and I think that was the first fundamental shift in Derek's thinking."

Another student was also particularly pivotal to Derek's transformation.

"Alison is now a PhD psychologist, she's incredibly smart and intuitive when it comes to people, and she decided that she was going to really invest herself in figuring Derek out and trying to argue him out of these ideas.

"[She wanted to know] how could somebody be saying these terrible things on the radio and yet showing up at these diverse dinners with kosher wine and being thoughtful?

"Those debates over the course of a year fuelled an intensity in their relationship that then turned romantic and as Derek's ideas about all of this stuff were shifting, that relationship was also deepening."

Eventually, Derek renounced his former beliefs, his family, changed his name, moved far away and became an outspoken opponent of the ideologies he once espoused. 

"I think Derek believes that right now in our times being silent about these issues is the same thing as being complicit and it’s his responsibility, I think, to speak back against them." 

Saslow says the change in Derek was slow. Part of that was very real threats to his personal safety, but part of it was also leaving behind the people he had known most of his life.

"Ultimately I think the courageous act for Derek was deciding not just to disavow this ideology once but deciding again and again and again, to speak up against it and to speak about the dangers of it even when that has meant losing basically every family connection that he has. 

"Every relationship from the first 23 years of his life depended on him being a prominent white nationalist.

"That was with his family, that was all his friendships, that was his entire identity - so he knew that if he said that he didn't believe it anymore he was very likely to lose all of that.

"The truth is, and I hope what the book makes clear, is that while Don Black is a bit of a monster ... he's also a father who loves his kid, and who experienced Derek's rejection in this almost like a death.