The opposite of hate

In the 14 years and 7 months I’ve been writing this blog the major overarching theme (perhaps not expressed in every post) is what I’ve been calling supremacy. That’s one person or group asserting, even enforcing, a high or higher position in the social hierarchy. This is done most visibly through making the lives of the target people worse. This shows up in politics, especially American politics. It also shows up in daily interactions between people. I consider this strive for social position and its corresponding oppression of those lower in the hierarchy to be the definition of sin. I’ve been thinking about writing a book about supremacy to pull all my thoughts together into a cohesive narrative. That would be an improvement over the scattershot mentions and explanations of this blog. Don’t look for that book any time soon. I’ve written three outlines and none of them satisfy. I wrote a series of short chapters and I don’t think they came out well. I tried to write something I could use as a church sermon, which I thought would be appropriate since some of the loudest voices upholding the social hierarchy claim their place in it is ordained by their god. Even though I made a list of Bible verses that show Jesus taught we should not take part in the hierarchy and died for challenging the hierarchy, the sermon remains unfinished. I went through about 10 months of this blog to gather up sources. This blog can supply lots of sources – I expect to reach 5000 posts by the end of the year. The sources cover 30 categories of ways American policy and politics asserts and enforces the social hierarchy. But just writing the list of those 30 categories felt like I was missing part of the narrative. And still I haven’t started the book. When I started reading the book The Opposite of Hate, a Field Guide to Repairing Our Humanity by Sally Kohn I thought this looks pretty good, maybe I don’t have to write my book after all. By the time I got to the end I thought, well... maybe there is still room for a book of my ideas. Sally Kohn first gained fame as the liberal commentator on conservative Fox News. She has since gone on to be the political commentator on CNN. She is Jewish and lesbian and has a wife and daughter. I think her book is wonderful! It delves into and explains a great deal of the hate in our country and our world. I highly recommend it. I urge you to read it. Alas, I think there were a few more steps she could have taken. There are a couple times she mentions supremacy has something to do with hate. I wish she could have discussed that connection in more detail. Let’s look at the good stuff of this book. In the prologue she talks about an incident in upper elementary school when she was the bully, making fun of another girl. Her point, which she repeated several times through the book, is that through her broad definition of the term all of us have hated. We may claim we’re not acting out of hate, but we do and Kohn explains why we do that through the book. In chapter one Kohn tries to find out what’s going on with internet trolls. Being the liberal commentator on Fox they responded to her a lot. So she had her Twitter replies analyzed to see which users most often posted derogatory comments. Then she asked several of them if she could meet them in person. A few agreed. And they seemed pretty nice in person. This discrepancy of nice in person and a troll online brought up the fundamental attribution error. When we read something fundamentally hateful online we believe the writer is a fundamentally hateful person. When we write something fundamentally hateful we believe we’re a nice person who was provoked – by them! – so are words are justified. You’re a liar and a hatemonger, I’m truthful and civil. Along with that we tend to divide people into in-groups and out-groups and direct the hate towards the out-group. Kohl found who is put into which group can change as the situation changes. Added to the attribution error is essentialism. That’s assigning attributes to everyone in the out-group. An example is traits that are thought of as “essentially male” which implies all males are like that. The next step in the logic is to say those attributes are “natural” and – of course – considered superior to “essentially female” attributes. This sounds like a polite way of calling these traits stereotypes. Some of the trolls admit they are responding as they do for personal entertainment and out of boredom. Or they’re working through low self esteem – a study showed people are more likely to troll after losing a video game. The internet – where everyone is at a distance and mostly unseen – make it seem the target of their trolling is not a real person. So no harm done. They would never do that when faced with a real person. The internet also means no one is monitoring behavior (unless it gets really bad) so users shed some of their inhibitions. Kohl describes a way out of trolling, which should also work with fact-free relatives. She says it is ABC. A stands for affirm – find a part of the statement your feelings can agree with – “I’m also worried about the economy.” B stands for bridge – and definitely not “but” as in “I agree, but...” Leave that word and similar words out of the conversation. C stands for convince where one adds a factual detail (and probably only one at a time) appropriate for the conversation. Yes, it is hard. It can also be effective. Another way forward is what Kohl calls “connection speech.” Instead of answering hate with hate try to forge a deeper connection. Say something nice. Turn it into a joke (but be careful there). Try to get to know the other person beyond their tweets. Work to see them as a person. In chapter two she looks at the Israeli/Palestinian problem, one of those situations that had gone on for decades and appears to have no solution. Her guide is Bassam Aramin, a Palestinian who became a terrorist, with understandable reasons, and has renounced that life to try to bring the two sides together. He left the terrorist life after seeing a documentary of the Holocaust. A driver of these intractable conflicts is “competitive victimhood” in which both sides believe they are the victims, that they are suffering more because of the other. In response each side tries to make the other suffer because of how much they are suffering. Palestinians say they were peaceful until the Zionists pushed their way in and took their land. Israelis say they have been persecuted all over the world and especially in Europe during the Holocaust. They need a homeland of their own. Each feels justified in their violence against the other. Alas, we’re all victims. And we’re all perpetrators of hate. We hate because we feel we’re under siege, and hate is the response. We’re back to the attribution error – our hate and terror is rational. Theirs isn’t. The way out is to have compassion for your enemies. Yes, they’re still enemies because they hate you. That does not mean you hate in return. The way to compassion is understanding. Chen Alon, an Israeli and co-founder of Bassam’s group, does that through a theater of the oppressed. They stage performances in public places to dramatize the violence. This is connection speech. They want each side to have knowledge of the other side. The goal is to say, I’m suffering, I want to use my suffering to understand your suffering. In chapter three Kohn has a discussion with Arno Michaelis a former white supremacist skinhead. He got involved in a skinhead group because he needed a place where he belonged. These types of groups know this and when they recruit they make sure the new people feel like they belong. The ideology comes much later. And when it does the recruit accepts it as a way to stay with people who make him feel like he belongs. He gets into violence to keep the approval of the group. Kohn says a lot of people in these hate organizations slide into it sideways. They search for belonging, a sense of purpose, and a sense of meaning, not for the ideology. Wrote Kohn, “Still, why not join a chess club?” We need to be a part of a group. But being a part of one group does not necessarily mean hating those not of the group. A couple things got Arno out of the skinhead movement. First he became a dad and the child’s mother split. Then one close friend in the skinhead movement went to prison and another was killed. He found another group to which he can belong. It’s the rave scene filled with every ethnicity and the whole rainbow of the LGBTQ community – people he as a skinhead would have hated. He loves his new group. Our need to belong, to be part of a community, can be harnessed for hate or for good. To build community for good we need connection spaces. These are places where we can encounter others not like us and build connections with them. Kohn warns that building connections is not the same as not seeing the color, the differences of others. That makes us blind to internal biases. Internal biases is the topic for chapter four. Kohn calls it unconscious hate. She says it is indeed hate. And we’re all guilty of it. It isn’t just a “few bad apples.” It is everyone. It’s us. Kohn discussed research done by Jennifer Kubota, a professor of neuroscience at the University of Chicago. Her research focused on the amygdala, an area of the brain. It is involved when we learn about important, threatening, or novel things. It is an efficient filing cabinet. When a situation arises the amygdala quickly recalls similar situations to help us decide if a threat is present. The amygdala soaks up every message around it – including all the ethnic, racial, gender, etc. stereotypes that saturate our families, education, media, and every other aspect of our lives. We breathe these stereotypes throughout our lives. And when we’re in unfamiliar situations these stereotypes are what our amygdala hands us. The news over reports black crime, so the amygdala absorbs links between black and crime and is ready to hand us that association when it feels appropriate – as when we see an unknown black man in front of us. Kohl wrote that she sometimes wonders to herself whether female colleagues are qualified. She never thinks that about male colleagues. This plays out in all sorts of ways. Black people are assumed to be more tolerant of pain so doctors underprescribe pain meds for them. Police treat black residents differently from white residents. Teachers devote less time to black students. An employer will be less likely to interview a candidate with a “black” name than a “white” one. Black doctors will have their credentials questioned if they’re first responders in an emergency. When the driver of a Mercedes is white we assume he’s a lawyer, if he’s black we wonder about theft or drug deals. A white student with a scholarship is thought to deserve it, a black student must have gotten it because she’s black. And that’s just a tiny way implicit bias causes us to hate. Since this bias is saturated in the culture, since the US has a racist and hate-filled history, we are all affected by it. We’re all guilty of it. No exceptions. Kohn examined the case of the black girl with a scholarship. Many white students think it is unfair because it means a white student didn’t get that scholarship. They don’t see the history of racism that benefit the white students. An example is the University of Tennessee. It was founded in 1927. Until 1961 they admitted only white students. They didn’t get in because they were better than black students but because they benefited from a racist system. Because black students didn’t get in they were blocked from the higher paying jobs and were much less likely to leave an inheritance to their children. So it makes sense to rework rules to to allow more black students to participate. To which the modern white student says, “Why is that my fault?” The problem is the story white people tell themselves. In this case it looks like the black person is cutting the line, jumping to the front as we all try to get to the American Dream. It looks like the white people are being punished for being white. But this story ignores how white people were already ahead of black people in the line. To which white people say their starting place in the line shouldn’t matter. And they resent being told that inherited advantage isn’t supposed to matter. And that resentment is what elected the nasty guy. So what do we do? The first step is to recognize those biases within you. You’ve lived in this society. I’ve lived in this society and have them within me. They’re there. But they can’t be counteracted until recognize they’re there. The problem is not in having them. The problem is not acknowledging them and counteracting them. Kohn says to counteract them we need to use “connection thinking.” That means to consciously create other kinds of associations with other kinds of people we can store in our amygdala. Though a good place to do it is in our connection spaces, it can be done where we are. The fifth chapter is about the Rwanda Genocide of 1994. Yeah, Kohn goes for the heavy topics. In the course of 100 days the ethnic Hutu majority killed 800,000 Tutsi minority. It is a lot of dead. It is also a lot of people, not just a few, doing the killing. This is described as the fastest genocide in history. Why did they do it? Why did friend murder friend? Short answer: because they were told to. That means obedience to authority accounts for a lot. They’re told to harm another. They’re told they should be happy about it. They’re told it is a celebration that this other person is killed. See the many times in the American South when a person was lynched and the town came out, bringing their kids, to this public celebration. Kohn told about an experiment done by psychologist Stanley Milgram. His subjects were told to apply an increasingly strong shock whenever a colleague (actually research staff not connected to anything) got a question wrong. He found 65% of the subjects applied what they were told was a lethal shock. People are quite willing to be obedient to authority. Some people say the Rwanda genocide was a spontaneous event. But the whole thing had been worked out far ahead of time. For a couple years before the attack the Rwandan authorities broadcast messages that said Tutsis are not human and are worthy of being killed. The population was primed for a particular way of thinking. There were, of course, Hutus who did not participate in the killing and some of those even tried to stop it (at least their local version of it). These tended to be on the margins of society, such as Muslims and those who were multiethnic. What to do about this, what to do to stop genocidal thinking, is a tall order. We need our connection spaces and connection thinking to forge links to those not like us. We need to see others not as stereotypes of a group but as people. We also need to learn to think independently, to not rely solely on the messages of society, to have our own well grounded ethics. Doing both together can be hard. A Tutsi survivor who had lost everyone else in a large family said he had forgiven the Hutus who had murdered his family. That prompted a discussion of forgiveness. If a guy forgives is he a hero or a sucker? Is forgiveness a weakness? Does this imply the oppressed have an expectation to educate their oppressors? Does forgiving others put a burden on the forgiver and let the killers off the hook? Or does forgiving remove the burden? Some who survived the genocide have taken steps to make sure the burden of hate has fallen away. The topic of chapter six is systems of hate. An example of that is the ability to vote. Grace Bell Hardison is a black woman born in North Carolina in 1916. She was four when women were allowed to vote. But in 1934, when she came of age, she still could not. The first time she could vote was after the Voting Rights Act of 1965. We’re good, right? In 2013 the Supreme Court began gutting the VRA and various states quickly tightened voting access. In 2016 Hardison was removed from the voting rolls and asked President Obama to intervene on her behalf. She did vote that year, at age 100. This is hate. It extends back to slavery when black people were not considered human with full rights of citizenship. It continues through whose vote is questioned (see the action outside Detroit’s counting room in 2020), who has a harder time fulfilling the requirements to vote, and who gets threatened with violence. It is a system that suppresses votes. Similar systems are embedded in education, health care, criminal justice, housing, and much more. But it is more than officials acting out of hate or just implicit bias in an incident happening today. It is a system that replicates and maintans the hate of the past. Yet, we look at the incident and rarely look at the system. Kohn wrote:

For example, the way that voting-rights laws, local elections-office practices, popular culture around voting, the history of violence against black voters, and the history of racism and white supremacy and black oppression in the United States all interact and interlock. The system not only shapes the individual voting patterns but the entirety of our democracy. Which in turn means that when we see problems like low voter turnout, it’s wise to widen our analysis to see not only individual behavior and factors but the systemic variables.

After another example Kohn wrote, “Systems that are shaped by hate produce hateful results. Unless we stop them.” We as a community can pull the levers to force change. But only if we see the levers. Kohn showed the example of Omaha Public Schools that was consistently underfunded compared to the school districts in the white suburbs around it – formed, of course, to avoid integration. Using a little known law plus a lot of discussion and cajoling the area school districts were able to unite to equalize funding. Both white and black students received benefits. Kohn discussed an incident at a preparatory school on the campus of the Air Force Academy. In 2017 racial slurs were found on message boards. The head of the Academy, Lieutenant General Jay Silveria denounced and condemned the slurs. That’s great! But Kohn said that didn’t go far enough. It didn’t address the systems within the Air Force (and the military as a whole) that perpetuate inequality and injustice. Patriarchy is embedded in the military hierarchy. The whole premise of the military is dehumanizing the other. A soldier is trained to overcome the disinclination to harm another human. The military encourages hate. In another example Kohn discussed broadcaster Glenn Beck. When broadcasting was deregulated in the 1980s and they no longer had to present opposing viewpoints the audiences of conservative stations became smaller. To attract the attention of a smaller audience they promoted the biases of that audience. That means the system had an incentive to be hateful. Beck was ousted because a large number of people changed the incentives in his case. They convinced advertisers to pull their ads. Beck’s show was canceled. To dismantle systems of hate we need to understand them. Then we need to make them visible and help others to understand them. These systems shape us and our society. And we can shape the systems. In the title of the book Kohn said there is an opposite to hate. She said it isn’t love, because it is possible to not hate, yet not love. The opposite is also not some mushy middle zone without passion. One must still have strong beliefs and can disagree with the strong beliefs of others. The opposite of hate is connection. We face and challenge the hate within ourselves – we all have it. We also go to connection places and use our connection speech to create connection systems. Yeah, a lot of easy slogans requiring a lot of hard work. As I said there is a lot of great stuff here. I appreciate her understanding of trolls and how many people slide sideways into white supremacy while looking for groups to which they can belong. Let’s work to make good connection groups happen. I especially appreciate her description of systems of hate. I admire her willingness to explore the Rwanda genocide and the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. I’m glad Kohn wrote the book and included much more than I could share here. I’m glad I read it and I strongly recommend it. And, as I mentioned at the top, I don’t think she went far enough. Here are some of my questions this book didn’t address: What about the trolls who aren’t so nice in person? I understand that might have been difficult to research because they likely wouldn’t want to give up their anonymity. What about those who operate troll farms that can attack a person’s online presence with swarms of hateful responses, rendering the target person’s account unusable (at least for a while) and sometimes driving a person off social media. These trolls don’t sound like lonely and bored people tossing vicious comments at a person who doesn’t seem to be really there. What about the leaders of white supremacist movements? Yeah, the underlings might slip in sideways, looking for a place to belong. What about the ones who develop the hateful ideology and make the effort to provide the place for the underlings to belong and then radicalize them for hate? What about the leaders of the Rwanda genocide, that for two years laid the groundwork for the hundred days of hate that killed thousands a day? Why did they do what they did? What about those who design and incentivize the systems of hate? They know full well the “side effects” of their rules and laws oppress people. They may claim they are for election security knowing full well their policies will more severely suppress the votes of a particular target group. What about the leaders in American politics who use hate to further personal goals? Why do they stir up grievances and a sense of victimization to advance a cause? Why do they not have any decency to condemn these actions in others, even in others in their own party? Why do they give every indication they want to end democracy in America? What about those political leaders who seem blind and unconcerned about the destruction of democracy, human rights, the country, and the environment going on around them? I see a great deal of We must do this! And when one person says no the response is a meek, Oh well, we tried. What about the members of the Supreme Court who seem to be doing all they can as quickly as they can to revoke rights and not caring of the pain, oppression, and death that result from their rulings? What about the owners of gun manufacturing companies? Are they, as any capitalist, truly in the business just for the profit? Why aren’t they embarrassed that their products are causing so much death and trauma across the country? Perhaps they want the death and trauma? What’s driving the richest men in the world? Why do they exploit their employees? Why do they buy politicians? Why do they drive competition out of business? Why do they work to hasten our global environmental collapse? Why do they demand laws that make themselves richer and poor people poorer? Why do they fund the end of democracy? Saying the answer is greed seems simplistic. Why has Russia invaded Ukraine? All that I’ve read indicates the war started and is happening because of one man, a man who doesn’t care at all about how his commands affect his soldiers, his citizens, the soldiers and citizens of Ukraine, and the rest of the world. Of course, if I really wanted to spend time I could come up with a much longer list of the types of leaders who promote or act out of hate. Kohn says many wise things about the underlings caught up in hate. But what about the leaders? What drives them? Is it just hate? Does hate describe it well enough? As I said at the top I look at a lot of issues from the viewpoint of supremacy. I define this as an idea or action in which one person claims, “I’m better than you.” Related sentences are: I can do this and you can’t. I’m going to heaven and you aren’t. My life is better than yours. I have this privilege and you don’t. I can do things I won’t let you do. I can remake my society so that you are oppressed (physically, mentally, spiritually, or economically). I can control you and make you dance to my tune. I can kill you and face little consequence. My position in the social hierarchy – above you! – is of high importance to me. I will give up a lot of money to maintain my position in the hierarchy. I would rather die than lose my position in the hierarchy. I can give you a middle position in the hierarchy and give you power to oppress those below you. Of course, most the actions of a supremacist will, to the target, feel a great deal like hate. The online troll responding to a post is making a supremacist move – I can make you feel bad by insulting you. The troll farms are also making a supremacist move – overwhelming a target to make them think twice about challenging a supremacist ideology. Skinhead leaders want white people to be the supreme race. The want to oppress others to prevent them from challenging the high spot in the hierarchy. The Hutu leaders of Rwanda are declaring their supremacy over the Tutsis, partly as payback when Tutsis were considered to be in a higher social position. The Hutus took it to an extreme point of declaring we’re so far above you we consider you cockroaches and we can kill you. American politicians have harnessed hate to keep people like themselves in a superior social position. They can do it by getting those lower in the hierarchy fighting those who are lower still. Other American politicians do little in response because of donations from those even higher in the hierarchy who tell them we’ll give you lots of status if you let us oppress these other people. And on and on. Supremacy plays a role in the actions of all the leaders I listed above. They make their lives look better by making the lives of others worse. Supremacy doesn’t just affect the leaders. Kohn got that part right. Supremacy affects every one from the guy who invaded Ukraine to show he’s king of the world, to the schoolyard bully. Kohn is also right in that it affects the actions of all of us through our unconscious biases. Did Kohn simply not go far enough? Or is there a working difference between supremacy and hate? Does supremacy explain things where hate does not? Since I think supremacy is the root of all sin I don’t think it is possible to have hate without supremacy. Is it possible to have supremacy without hate? I think supremacy drives the leaders I mentioned above and their actions show it to us as hate. I think supremacy is a better description of what drives them than hate does. As for supremacy without hate... Just at the start of the pandemic – when it was still possible to have 500 people packed into a room – I attended a five state handbell event. The 500 of us spent an evening and a day together to rehearse and perform a massed ringing concert. It’s an amazing sound, a wonderful experience. I didn’t take any bells, and didn’t travel with members of my community or church ensembles. I had arranged ahead of time to be placed in an open position within an ensemble who brought bells but not all their members. We had a good time in our short amount of time together – of course, bell people always have a good time when playing bells. Once home and with my community ensemble (our last rehearsal before shutdown) I commented to another member that I (with decades of handbell experience) played better with just a day with the music than those around me (with years of experience) who had spent a lot of time learning the music ahead of time. From the expression on my colleague’s I quickly realized I had made a supremacist statement. I’ve been thinking about supremacy long enough that I could recognize it as such – though that didn’t stop me from making the comment. But was it a hateful statement? One could argue either way. The people at the event didn’t feel the hate. On reflection, it probably was hateful. As Kohn wrote, supremacy and hate are in all of us. It takes self examination to root it out of our lives. I’ve been thinking about supremacy for many years and I still say supremacist things. I’ve got more work to do. And a book to write. Just don’t expect it soon.