The film tells the story of Derek Vinyard (Norton), taking place in the late 1980s and early 1990s. An extremely bright and charismatic student, Derek is drawn into the neo-Nazi underground after his father, a firefighter, is shot and killed by a black drug dealer while fighting a fire in a crack house. Derek had already been influenced by his father's critical views on black culture and affirmative action (his father refers to it as "affirmative blacktion"), and his outlook was so galvanized by the circumstances of the murder that when asked how he felt about his fathers death by a news reporter, he launched a racist tirade on a local TV station.