Rising Out of Hatred: Chapter 6 Summary & Analysis

In April 2012, Mike Long—the popular student body president—stops Derek as he’s walking out of the library. Mike is in a golf cart and instructs Derek to get on, and Derek can’t think of an excuse not to. He and Mike were friends before Derek was outed as a white nationalist. Mike is very charismatic, works hard, and cares little what other people think. Mike takes Derek out on a sailboat along with a half-dozen other students.

One of the students is Allison, Matthew’s roommate, who avoided Derek for some time when he joined for Shabbat dinner. Slowly, though, she had acclimated to his presence. On the boat, they talk about their mutual friends and their mutual interest in ecology. At the end of the trip, Derek gives Allison his phone number and offers to teach her how to sail. Allison thinks that he seems quirky, gentle, and interesting—not at all what she expected. She is always fascinated by people’s motivations, behaviors, and beliefs. She wonders how there can be such a chasm between how he acts and what he believes.

A few weeks later, Derek invites Allison to a contra dance along with a few other friends, and she enjoys it. When they rotate around to become partners, Derek helps her work through the moves, and she trusts him to lead, even closing her eyes. But later, she wonders if she can actually trust Derek.

Allison begins doing research on Derek’s posts on Stormfront, which included discussing the trial of a Norwegian right-wing terrorist named Breivik who massacred 77 people to attract attention to white genocide. Derek and Don both publicly condemned Breivik’s massacre, but they also sympathize with his assertion that the Norwegian government was at fault for not keeping the races more separate.

Allison herself was shaped by subdued versions of the same racial beliefs. Her mother, Julie, grew up in an impoverished neighborhood in Cleveland that was half white and half Black. Racial tensions erupted in high schools like Collinwood, where 400 white students threw rocks at the building while 200 Black students huddled inside in 1970. With this danger everywhere, Julie ran home every day from school. She also worked so that she could propel her family into the middle class and not worry about this kind of violence. Thus, Allison grew up in one of the whitest suburbs in Ohio. Julie taught her that everyone had equal rights and equal opportunities and that hard work was the primary determinant of success.

Julie provided Allison with a safe childhood, but when Allison went to college, she learned about “privilege, systematic oppression, and structural bias”—essentially, how white people were unfairly advantaged and how the U.S. was not a meritocracy. Returning home, Allison helped Julie recognize her own prejudices. Now, she wonders if she could foster the same transformation in Derek—but she’s unsure if it’s morally right to befriend him to do so. A close friend counsels her that if she likes spending time with him, and because she’s in no danger of becoming a white nationalist herself, her influence can only do him good.

Allison and Derek’s friendship grows, and they go on spontaneous adventures together, exploring nearby parts of Florida. Over this time, Allison is planning to earn a doctorate in clinical psychology. Derek sometimes still wants to be the leader of white nationalism, but sometimes he wants to give it all up to get a doctorate in medieval history or work as a scuba-diving instructor. Most of the time he does what seems interesting or fun, and he invites Allison on spontaneous road trips he takes.

Together, Allison and Derek continue to go on adventures, but Allison realizes that the more time she spends with Derek, the more other people drift away from her. They warn her about enabling a white supremacist. But she likes him, though she refuses to let their relationship become romantic. Meanwhile, Derek is infatuated with Allison, and it seems to him that she understands him. They never talk about his background, but he feels increasingly conflicted about white nationalism.

Allison has built trust and intimacy with many classmates by discussing issues rather than avoiding them. So, one night just before summer vacation, she decides to talk to Derek about his beliefs. Derek finds that he has virtually no practice talking about white nationalism with people who explicitly disagree with his ideology. Instead, he has spent most of his life convincing white people who naturally gravitated toward it. Derek’s tendency is also to avoid conflict, and he dreads a confrontation with Allison. But alone on her dorm roof, he agrees to talk—secretly hoping he can learn more about how to hone his views with people who disagree with him.

Allison discovers that Derek believes in the Holocaust to some degree but would never have a mixed-race marriage or biracial children. He doesn’t use any slurs and respects all people, and he has begun to like and accept Jewish people, now considering them white. He says he isn’t a white supremacist because he no longer believes that white people are necessarily better—just that races are better when separate and that the white race needs protecting. Allison can see that his views are already softening from the ones he used to espouse on Stormfront.

Derek continues, saying that there are differences between the races, like white people having a slightly higher average IQ or Black people having higher levels of testosterone, which he thinks leads to a greater propensity for violence. He is afraid of white genocide, and he bases his prejudice not on gut feeling but on logical theory. Allison realizes that if she can show him the illogic of his beliefs, she can convince him otherwise. Their conversation remains civil and productive, largely because Allison is also white; she presents herself as a confused and curious friend. Derek agrees to talk more, admitting that he’s never talked about this with anyone like Allison, and that he has conflicting feelings about the ideology.

Over the summer, Allison and Derek continue their conversation over phone calls and instant messages, getting to know each other better. They send each other music, short stories, and pictures of the ocean, and they plot out adventures for the next school year. But Allison also starts to listen to his radio show; when Derek realizes this, he often calls in sick or offers only filler while Don speaks. Allison also reads up on the history of racism and parses through posts on Stormfront, which usually make her angry that Derek could associate with such reprehensible beliefs. She grows particularly upset when a man targets a Sikh temple in Wisconsin, radicalized by the message board on Stormfront.

Stormfront has spawned at least half a dozen murderers, which Don writes off as coincidences. But instead of empathizing with the victims of these shootings—like five men and one woman who were killed in the Sikh temple, Don rationalizes the shooter’s motives, saying that “third-world immigrants belong back in their own countries instead of here.” They say that if Punjab was being overrun with tens of millions of non-Indians, the Sikhs likely would have snapped, too.

A student sends a message to Allison about these justifications, and Allison then emails Derek telling him to be careful of what he says. Derek explains that he hasn’t said anything about the situation, but that he doesn’t disagree with anything his dad said. He wonders why she puts up with being his friend when so many people at the school are pitting her against him. She replies that he’s never clarified his views, and so it only makes sense that other students associate him with racist beliefs. He thinks about how he can clarify his views further and invites her to an upcoming white nationalism conference, where he is leading one of the seminars.