Communities around the world are writhing in pain and confusion, bewildered about how to solve the violence resulting from hate–the hatred expressed around racism in America, sectarian violence in the Middle East, religion-centered violence in Myanmar and cartel-created chaos in Central America. Hate springs eternal or so it seems. Sadly, solutions elude our long-suffering humanity.
In 1968 Jane Elliott had an idea for an experiential learning exercise to teach her third graders the truth about racism. “‘Racism is ignorance based on being mis-educated,’ Ms. Elliott said. ‘Racism is a result of being indoctrinated instead of educated. I don’t sugarcoat racism.’”[i] Indeed she does not and neither do we.
Ms. Elliott’s insight brought her a good deal of notoriety and soon teachers across the U.S. adopted her lesson plan. She split her all-white class of third graders into two groups based on the color of their irises, brown-eyed students in one and blue-eyed students in the other. “Over the course of two days of instruction, she convinced the blue-eyed students that they were not as smart, worthy or human as their brown-eyed peers, who were rewarded for their supposed superiority. The exercise demonstrated for the students how easily prejudice could be learned.”[ii]
And yet, a half century later, despite the efforts of teachers like Jane Elliott, author Seward Darby had no trouble finding ample material for her book Sisters in Hate: American Women on the Front Lines of White Nationalism. In an interview with Darby, Corinna Olsen reviewed an old online post revealing her thinking before she had a change of heart. “‘I’ve been trying to decide which is the lesser of two evils, blacks or Mexicans,’ she wrote in a post on Stormfront, the hate movement’s oldest online forum, in 2008. She went on to describe racist stereotypes, tarring Black people as criminals and saying Mexicans have too many kids.”[iii]
We, of course, have an intellect that can analyze the causes of racism and come up with explanations. “People who are drawn to the hate movement have an acute desire to make sense of their place in the world. There’s a gap between who they are and who they think they should be, what they have and what they want. They want to seize or regain what they believe is a rightful status. They want empowerment, with minimal effort. Hate promises them that.”[iv]
However, our endless analysis and resulting solutions and policies have not reduced the hatred in the American community. “There are nearly 1,000 hate groups in America, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, and the distribution of white-supremacist propaganda is ever widening. We know little about how to combat hate effectively; the federal government has cut funding for programs to counter right-wing extremism [under the Trump administration] and blocked the dissemination of data on the subject. Only last year [2019] did the Department of Homeland Security acknowledge that white supremacy is a national security threat.”[v]
Again, as our essays attempt to make clear, we are capable of solving all of our problems but we have to find the courage to take a fearless look at Reality.
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Supplemental Reading: Feeling and Emotion, The ABC’s of Simple Reality, Vol 1
#28 Healing Hate
[i] Holt, Brianna. “‘Blue Eyes, Brown Eyes,’ a ‘60s Lesson Revived.” The New York Times. July 19, 2020, p. 2.
[ii] Ibid.
[iii] Darby, Seyward. “One Woman’s Descent into Hate.” The New York Times. July 19, 2020, p. 6.
[iv] Ibid.
[v] Ibid.
