Rising Out of Hatred: Chapter 9 Summary & Analysis

By the time Derek receives the SPLC’s email, he is on his way to David Duke’s apartment in the Alps, where he plans to celebrate Christmas break. He writes to Allison, torn about how to deal with it. He doesn’t know what to do, realizing that hedging against his white nationalist beliefs while sitting on Duke’s couch is terrifying. Derek recently took the GRE and scored in the 97th percentile for verbal reasoning. His professors regard him as a promising historian and talented linguist. He applies for several graduate schools and imagines the possibilities of an anonymous life removed from white nationalism.

But at the same time, Derek considers the ambitions he always had, the way he emulated Duke growing up, and how he was the face of the young white nationalist movement for more than a decade. Now, at Duke’s apartment, Duke continues to instruct Derek on how to embody the European ideal. He has a new radio show and a YouTube channel, and the movement seems energized by Obama’s reelection. They are trying to co-opt the Tea Party movement by making it more explicitly racial, cashing in on white grievance and resentment. He believes that many Tea Partyers identify with white nationalism, and so he announces a tour aimed at connecting the two groups.

Duke’s new certainty about the movement reminds Derek of some of his own former certainty about white genocide. Derek also realizes again how many friends and family he risks losing if he turns away from white nationalism. He thinks of this as he responds to the SPLC. He writes that his forum post and racial ideology are not mutually exclusive. He writes, “everything I said is true, and I also believe in White Nationalism.”

With this response, Derek seems to have appeased both groups in his life. Allison is disappointed in his commitment to white nationalism, but she knows rejecting the label will probably be the last and most difficult part of his transformation. Allison also confesses that she was the one who emailed the SPLC, saying that she wanted to protect him. Derek is surprised, but he doesn’t feel betrayed; he also knows that her intentions were good and that his views are softening.

Over the next weeks, Allison is in Australia for a winter internship, while Derek is attending a three-week language school in Europe. Meanwhile, classmates finally start to argue about his quote in the SPLC story. People begin to accuse Derek of sanitizing his ideology to appease them. Allison writes to Derek, saying how angry this makes her. Usually, she feels he's safe and supportive, but not when things like this happen. She knows that he makes her laugh and smile, but when they have to deal with white nationalism and racism it makes her sick and want to cry. Derek replies that he doesn’t want to cause her pain. She responds that she wishes he weren’t involved in white nationalism.

Allison tries to put what’s happening aside, but her conscience nags at him. If Derek were a men’s rights activist, she’d probably never speak to him; she hates that sexism is a dealbreaker for her, while racism doesn’t seem to be. She reads the forum again, where dozens of people are ridiculing Derek.

James, the organizer, has been writing on the forum, feeling vindicated. Despite all the suggestions for open-mindedness and inclusion, Derek is still a white nationalist. James knows that people who are systematically oppressed often bear the brunt of educating others and always have to work harder to get their ideas heard. He knows that “civil discourse” is rarely the way to change minds. He doesn’t advocate for violent tactics, but he simply thinks that calm arguments rarely lead to radical change.

Allison replies, however, explaining that she thinks Derek’s dinners with Matthew and Moshe have begun to change his mind. She repeats that it’s more important to fight oppressive structures than to attack a single person, which won’t help anyone—and which Allison privately knows will likely push Derek back into a corner, more rigidly set in his beliefs.

Derek reads the forum posts alone in a hotel in Belgrade. He’s extremely hurt. He took the risk of posting about his ideology to his classmates, and now their rejection is more personal. He wonders if his ideology is worth so much exclusion, and he wonders if his classmates’ criticism and anger is valid. If he’s not a white supremacist, neo-Nazi, racist, or a bigot, what is he? When he falls back to talking about white genocide and oppression, Allison points out how the people in control of the government and the wealthiest segment of the U.S. are all overwhelmingly white.

Derek realizes how callous and ill-conceived his points start to sound, and he wonders if there’s really anything holding him to white nationalism beyond loyalty. He messages Allison, frustrated that he opened up to explain his intellectual ideas to the other students and that now they’re using his vulnerability against him. Allison notes that what he believes in are not simply “intellectual ideas”—they are abhorrent and dangerous, and he’s spreading this ideology with radio shows and Stormfront threads. He’s a public figure and not a victim, and she agrees with the things the students are saying.

Derek continues his trek through Europe as he thinks about how he’s changed. White nationalism is embedded in all of his childhood memories, his sense of self, and most of his relationships. But if loyalty is holding his identity in place, his thoughts are moving in a new direction. For example, he came to New College to study medieval history, which he chose because white nationalist mythology centered on the Middle Ages and the Europeans’ conquering spirit. Now, his classes made him question that idea. If white Europeans are really a genetically superior race, why had Europe lagged behind Islamic culture in technology, art, and science in the Middle Ages? And if races were better off segregated, why was one of the greatest territories Al-Andalus in Spain, where Muslims, Jews, and Christians lived together?

Derek also realizes on his trip that he can’t trace back the modern concepts of whiteness: European warriors didn’t even think of themselves as white. They thought skin color was not a hard biological fact but a condition that changed over time and geography. They fought not for race but for religion, culture, power, and money. The fact that white people conquered the world wasn’t proof of fate but a fluke of history, he realized. And if he had been wrong about history, he could be wrong about so much else.

Derek reads more studies on race in the U.S., realizing that white people have advantages in how much wealth they accumulate, in whether they own their homes, in their health, and in the ability to gain top management jobs. Derek sees that white supremacy remains very much in place; they are not oppressed but advantaged. He also more fully starts to recognize and appreciate his friends’ experiences: the anti-Semitism and racism they and their families have faced, particularly in comparison to him, a straight white man with his tuition fully paid for.

At the beginning of 2013, Derek feels more and more disconnected from white nationalism. And as he starts a French-immersion class, other American students figure out who he is and uninvite him to parties, talking about him loudly in school. He realizes how many potential friendships he’s sacrificing for an ideology he no longer really believes in. He wishes he could spend the rest of his life anonymously, but he knows that’s impossible. So, he tells Allison he wants to withdraw from white nationalism and disappear from public life.