Monday, December 31, 2018

Rising Out of Hatred by Eli Saslow

Rising Out of Hatred by Eli Saslow was a good book about Derek Black, godson of David Duke and son of Don Black, founder of the site Stormfront, the largest racist community on the Internet and one that Derek contributed to starting when he a youth and was expected to one day take the leadership of.

The book is subtitled The Awakening of a Former White Nationalist and details the gradual transformation of Derek that began in his first year as a student at New College of Florida, a liberal four-year university. Derek arrived on campus with his views about and against blacks, Jews, and other minorities unknown to to his classmates and for a time, lived a sort of double life, spewing racism online and via a radio show while also befriending a diverse group of people. After having his beliefs and activities outed on campus while studying in Europe for a semester, Derek returned and was largely ostracized at New College, but then reached out to by some, invited by an Orthodox Jew classmate to attend his weekly Shabbat dinner, and developing a close friendship with a woman who helped change his views, through both her challenging his beliefs and he seeing how they made her feel.

Derek prior to and when he first arrived at New College talked and wrote a great deal about the the concept of anti-privilege for whites, how they under attack and fighting for basic rights as a minority group. He gradually went from being a White Supremacist, who felt whites better than others, to a White Nationalist, who felt races should be kept separate and whites needed protection, to someone who both abandoned his prior notion of whites under attack and saw the damage forcing people apart would cause. Derek after graduation from New College and prior to starting graduate school in Michigan wrote a letter to the Southern Poverty Law Center repudiating his prior views, leading to his family basically disowning him. Additionally, he wrote several opinion pieces for the New York Times, warning about the dangers Trump bringing in and the story that Saslow tells of Black is a really profound one well told.