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Chapter 1
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Rising Out of Hatred, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Ostracism vs. Open Dialogue
White Supremacy and Racism
Family, Community, and Values
Redemption
Rhetoric and Language
Summary
Analysis
Derek drives himself to college with everything stuffed into his car. But on his way, he gets lost, and then he can’t find the building where orientation is being held. Then, he sees another student—Juan Elias—who is also looking for the orientation. Like Derek, he is a community college transfer student, so they agree to find the orientation together.
Already, Derek’s white nationalist views are incongruous with his new environment and the relationships he is building (it’s possible that Juan isn’t white, given that he has a Spanish first name). Even though Derek believes that white people would be better off separate from minorities, he immediately relates to Juan as they find the orientation together.
Themes
Juan is from Miami, which Derek once referred to as “the front lines of the third-world invasion.” Juan moved to Miami from Peru when he was 10 and attended a high school made up of 94 percent Hispanic students. Derek doesn’t mention anything about his background and remains polite; both have rarely spent time with people outside their races. They find the orientation together and realize that they share two classes and live in the same dormitory. They sit in the dorm, with Derek playing guitar and Juan listening to his country songs.
Again, the friendship that Derek is already building with Juan implicitly challenges the ideology that Derek has expressed in the past. This suggests that simply being exposed to a diverse group of people and building personal relationships can be helpful in changing people’s minds, particularly when they find things in common rather than focusing on differences.
Themes
Juan was born amid a communist uprising in the late 1980s in Peru; a few years later, men murdered his uncle as punishment for working as a community organizer. As a result, Juan’s mother left him with his grandmother and traveled to the U.S. on a legal visa, saving money for Juan to join her three years later. Juan was traumatized by the move, and he spoke little English. But he managed to learn the language, Americanize his wardrobe, and get into honors classes. Still, he’s never felt like he truly belongs, and he hopes that New College will be the first place that feels like home.
Juan’s backstory humanizes him, counterbalancing the dehumanizing language that Derek uses to describe minorities. It also illustrates that Juan is trying to find a community that shares his values and feels like home to him, which is ironic given that (unbeknownst to him) his first friend on campus is prejudiced toward immigrants like himself.
Themes
The first night the boys are on campus, Juan and Derek explore the school, and they see some older students streaking to the swimming pool, which is closed. The students are “men and women, straight and gay, white and brown,” but all of them unselfconsciously leap in. Juan takes off his shirt and jumps into the pool, but Derek walks away in his clothes and goes back to his dorm.
The description of the students jumping in the pool together emphasizes New College’s diversity. But while this makes Juan feel as though he belongs, this type of camaraderie does not align with Derek’s values. This suggests a tension in Derek’s life: he has to sacrifice participating in the community at New College due to his values and the fact that the other students don’t share them.
Themes
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Derek quickly discovers that not everyone thinks like him. A student-driven email forum often talks about white privilege, racism, micro-aggressions, and trigger warnings. They discuss the right to self-expression, universal equality, gender and sexuality, and ableism. Derek, by contrast, helps moderate the world’s largest white pride website, theorizes about the “criminal nature of blacks,” and asserts that President Obama is a “radical black activist.” He knows that if his views are discovered at New College, he will be vilified on the forum. So, he decides to continue his work without telling anyone.
In contrast with Derek’s white nationalist values and the racist language that he uses, the book also explores some of the more progressive and socially conscious language that’s common at New College. Derek fears what might happen if people discover his background because he acknowledges the fact that his values don’t align with the other students’. Because of that, he is in danger of not being accepted by the community or being fully able to participate in it, providing another example of how communities tend to be built on shared values.
Themes
At college, Derek spends much of his time outside. He often sits in the courtyard doing homework with Juan and playing guitar. One day, an Orthodox Jewish student named Matthew Stevenson sits next to Derek, singing along to his music. Derek once wrote “Jews are NOT white” on Stormfront, but he quickly gets to know Matthew, who is funny and bright and likes medieval history just like Derek does.
Just like Derek’s friendship with Juan, simply being exposed to Matthew, who is Jewish, makes Derek start to reevaluate his beliefs. While his white nationalist ideology would hold that he and Matthew shouldn’t interact, by sharing conversation, interests, and friendship, Derek grows more open to a different perspective.
Themes
Over time, Derek realizes how much he likes the students around him, and he starts actively disguising his beliefs. When a classmate randomly brings up Stormfront one day, Derek pretends not to know what it is. He is beginning to feel at home. He gets to know another student named Rose, who often stops by the courtyard to listen to him play. They get to know each other and go dancing, and he thinks that she is smart, thoughtful, and kind. After several weeks, they circle around the possibility of dating—until Derek learns that Rose is Jewish.
The more Derek gets to know the other students at New College, the more he grows to like them and feel like a part of that community. But, knowing as he does that any community is built on shared values, he starts to disguise his own because they are incongruous with his friends’. Simply being exposed to people like Rose, Matthew, and Juan helps Derek reconsider his understanding of people he always considered “enemies,” which begins to show the importance of open conversation in changing people’s beliefs.
Themes
Derek has spent many hours online debating “the Jewish Question”—whether Jewish people should be considered white. The white nationalist movement has a long history of anti-Semitism, and Derek made his own position clear in his teens. He explained that “Jews are the cause of all the world’s strife” and promoted this idea on Stormfront. Derek wrote that Jewish people were smart, “possibly evil,” and were orchestrating a plot to weaken the white race by promoting multiculturalism and taking over the media and government.
Even though Derek claims that he doesn’t hold explicit prejudice, the background the book provides here illustrates that Derek does hold deep prejudices about Jewish people—believing them to be “the cause of all the world’s strife” or “possibly evil.” The passage also emphasizes that he has been instrumental in spreading that prejudice on forums across Stormfront, countering the idea that Derek’s ideology isn’t about being prejudiced against others.
Themes
And yet, Rose is sweet and unassuming. Derek has never spent so much time with someone Jewish and has learned a lot about her. She lived in Texas, Minneapolis, Mexico, and Arkansas. She belonged to a Reform congregation whose services were interfaith. The goal of the congregation was to serve as a focal point of Jewish life, despite the Jewish population having dropped dramatically in Arkansas. Judaism was Rose’s primary identifier to others—her nickname at school was “the Jew.” She needed a note from her rabbi to explain to the school that Yom Kippur was a real holiday, and kids often teased her for killing Jesus.
This passage illustrates how the open dialogue and friendship that Derek has fostered with Rose has helped to counter some of the prejudices that he held about Jewish people. Moreover, hearing about Rose’s background illustrates how harmful that kind of prejudiced rhetoric can be, because it made Rose feel targeted among her peers and dehumanized. In this way, language can have tangible damage, and the book implies that Derek has perpetuated that sort of damage through Stormfront and his radio show.
Themes
While Rose often felt like an outcast in her hometown, Derek doesn’t make her feel that way. He points out sexist stereotypes about men being better at math and uses correct “they” pronouns with one of Rose’s transgender friends. Rose thinks he is confident and mature, but she sometimes feels he is distant or pulling away from her.
One compelling and complicated aspect of Derek’s story is that it often portrays him as respectful and kind, even toward people he might usually see as outsiders. The reader already knows that Derek will eventually renounce white supremacy, and it’s likely that beginning from a place of mutual respect will help change his mind and find common ground with people who are different from him. It is not just that other students have to be open to dialogue—Derek has to show that he’s open to it, too.
Themes
Derek, for his own part, is trying to back away. Dating Rose feels like a double betrayal—to his own beliefs and to Rose, who has no idea about his history. He has written that race mixing is a “traitorous act” on Stormfront forums and advised other people to break off interracial relationships. It was easy to be certain and firm when the enemy was impersonal, but he likes and trusts Rose. She isn’t like the outsiders he had warned about. As the fall semester ends, he suggests that they date—but only for a few weeks before he goes abroad in the spring. Internally, he treats it as an experiment, and Rose agrees.
Simply by getting to know and like Rose, Derek is already grappling with how to reconcile his interactions with the fact that he previously wrote interracial relationships were unacceptable and even “traitorous acts.” It illustrates how this relationship—even without the goal of changing Derek’s view—is forcing him to reevaluate his ideology.
Themes
During the next month, Derek feels like he is living two lives: he goes out with Rose and her friends for breakfast and then has Thanksgiving dinner with Don and Chloe. He has late-night talks with his girlfriend and then laughs as his co-host on the radio show mocks a Jewish person whining about Israel. Once, he even calls into his radio show and makes small talk with his audience while Rose is in the car, unaware. She thinks he's simply talking to his family.
The fact that Derek is going to such lengths to hide his “double life” from those around him is an important shift from what his life has been like so far. It suggests that Derek now knows the language he is using is harmful to people he cares about, like Rose, because he understands that she would be extremely hurt if she found out about his white nationalist beliefs.
Themes
Derek had long cultivated two identities: as a child, he liked typical things like Spider-Man and also created racist games and songs for children. Now, at New College, it seems as if two different sides of his identity are growing—and conflicting. Either his friends will find out who he really is and shun him, or white nationalists will discover his new relationships, and he will discredit his family and his cause.
Derek acknowledges here that he will likely be ostracized from one community or another because he can’t fully share in two opposed sets of values. This internal conflict hints at the question of what values Derek truly holds and whether they might be changing because of his new relationships—whether he feels more aligned with his family or his new friends.
Themes
Whenever Derek needs a reminder of his core beliefs, he finds it in a biography of Thomas Jefferson that he brought with him to college. Though Jefferson is credited with the statement “all men are created equal,” he also espoused that white and Black people could not live in the same government and that Black slaves should be deported. Abraham Lincoln similarly stated that there was a physical difference between races, that white people were superior, and that the groups could not live together. Derek believes, therefore, that white nationalism underpins U.S. history, and that if the culture is threatened, the U.S. will continue to define itself as white. However, at New College, he’s less certain about that.
This passage provides some background on Derek’s white nationalist beliefs, particularly as they underpin U.S. history. Derek seems to believe that because white nationalism was a part of the U.S.’s founders’ beliefs, he is justified in believing the same things. But what Derek doesn’t yet understand is that these beliefs aren’t harmless to non-white people—though his uncertainty here hints that his new relationships are beginning to shift his perspective.
Themes
Gradually, Derek wants people to find out about him—he can’t stand the anxiety of waiting to be exposed. One day, at the end of his first semester of college in 2010, he sets a 2009 issue of Details magazine, with a two-page profile on him, in a magazine rack at the gym. It has the potential to expose him on campus.
Derek’s choice to put out a magazine that could potentially expose him shows that he is already struggling with the values he holds. They are causing so much tension in his life that a part of him would rather be outed and ostracized on campus than to continue pretending as though he fits into New College’s progressive community.
Themes
For a few months, no one notices. Derek wonders if someone threw out the magazine. During his spring semester abroad in Europe, Derek returns to his double life. He publicizes polling data on white people experiencing racism while also writing to Rose every few days about his time in Ireland and Germany. He ends his letters with song lyrics, which seem to convey Derek’s uncertainty and inner conflict.
The song lyrics that Derek writes to Rose illustrates that he’s already undergone a certain degree of transformation at school. He’s no longer fully entrenched in and certain about white nationalism; having open dialogue with other students instead makes him feel conflicted about his beliefs. This highlights the effectiveness of open dialogue in providing people with alternate perspectives.
Themes
Derek continues to write to Rose about the different places he visits as he perfects his German. But one night in April, Derek gets a flurry of messages. At the top of the email thread, a senior sent a message to all New College students, asking if anyone had seen Derek. The email has a picture of him and notes that he is a white supremacist and a radio host.
Derek’s identity reveal is a major turning point in both his social life at college and his life in general. The book creates suspense by leaving it uncertain as to how the rest of the students will react to this information, and whether Derek can truly remain part of the community on campus given his incongruous values.
Themes
