It’s Easier To Hate What You Don’t Understand

Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash

I am not the most educated person and I will admit that. I can only speak from my own experience. I am living in a country taking a nosedive towards the darkest outward expression of prejudice and racism we have seen in decades. I don’t believe for a second that the issue of hatred towards marginalized peoples was ever truly resolved but in recent years it has suddenly become permissible to openly endorse it publicly for the first time in my lifetime. I want to acknowledge early in this article that I am not a person of color and that I know that I can never truly understand the suffering from an outside perspective. But I do believe I have a perspective that is still worth mentioning today and more importantly, I have the desire to improve the misinformed thoughts I inherited with my privilege.

I grew up in a Northern state and my family has lived in the same area for centuries. What I’ve come to understand is the North can be just as racist as the South; we just serve it up behind a veil of fake moral superiority in comparison. No one, until recent years, would actually admit that they held hateful beliefs and if it was insinuated that they did, that was insulting. But still, growing up you’d hear grandma and aunt so-and-so use slurs in the kitchen and you’d be told as a small child not to play with the kids from the only family of color on your block because “they can’t be trusted”. The message still gets relayed loud and clear. I would like to be able to frame my own divergence from the beliefs of my elder family members as being of my own virtue, but I realize that is extremely self-congratulatory and also puts me on a dangerous path of becoming self-assured that there isn’t still much for me to learn (obviously not true). But what I can do, is speak to where my life experiences were night-and-day from the rest of my family, and how that shaped my mindset.

Photo by Clay Banks on Unsplash

My parents were extremely abusive when I was a kid. They were addicts and trafficked me and one of my siblings to provide for their drugs. There is a lot more to this story but that is enough to get my point across that home was never a safe place for me. I was placed in foster care when I was 14 and remained there until I aged out, and that is precisely where my eyes were irreversibly opened to what life was like for people that were both different from my White family… yet still remarkably the same. I lived with foster parents and foster siblings of every age, color, religion, gender identity, sexual orientation, etc., I could imagine. And while we certainly came from different backgrounds and had different experiences, we were all just… human. We had the same hopes, the same feelings, the same fears, the same desire to be loved and to belong. And I know it sounds ridiculous that even shocked me, but honestly, I didn’t know what to expect. And this sameness is something that I found even into my 30s every time I entered new life circumstances like safe houses, homeless shelters, and crisis centers. We are all different, yes, but we are far more alike than we ever were different.

We had the same hopes, the same feelings, the same fears, the same desire to be loved and to belong.

There was a time in my youth where I became fascinated with different kinds of music. I noticed that whether listening to someone rapping bars, screaming to metal, or twanging along with a banjo, everyone was basically saying the same things or at the very least expressing the same human emotions. I couldn’t understand why people said they hated an entire genre of music based off preconceived notions of what it was, when they had never actually tried listening to it. That reminded me of a small microcosm of life itself. People said they didn’t like a certain group of people when they had never actually met them. I’m not saying this is right or sympathizing with peoples’ harmful belief systems but I could almost see how this state of the world happened. When people, especially older people, grew up in a world where people of color were segregated formally and legally, or through redlining in cities, they often never even met each other. Then the media portrayed a very stereotyped image of certain races and cultures that was often the only version of those groups of people that the other groups were ever exposed to. And of course, every one of us has the capability to challenge what were are told to believe, and that’s where ignorance becomes a choice, but also we were set up to fail from the beginning. Imagine a world where we all knew each other better. It’s a lot easier to hate what you don’t understand.

As always, if anything I said was accidentally harmful, I stand totally open to constructive criticism.