Hatred Willard Gaylin (classic novels TXT) 📖

prejudice in the United States is the Ralph Ellison novel published in 1952 and appropriately titled The Invisible Man. Here the protagonist struggles to be seen, to become part of the community that seems always oblivious to his needs or his pain.

It should be clear that by distinguishing prejudice from hatred, I am not defining prejudice as less destructive than hatred. Less evil, perhaps, but not less dangerous. The lack of passion and hatred in typical prejudice may contribute to equally great affronts to human dignity. Whereas the hater must demonize the object of its hatred, the prejudiced individual is more likely to dehumanize the object. Slavery, the most iniquitous of human institutions, is a result of such dehumanizing. The slave for the most part was neither loved nor hated. He was chattel at worst. At best, he was treated like a domesticated animal that could be loved as a pet and often more easily disposed of. Slavery demands a violation of that central moral condition, the Kantian imperative never to treat any human being as a means rather than an end. The end result of slavery is as indecent and evil as the cruelty that hatred would produce in the madness of the Holocaust.

Compounding the evil, slavery was accepted by the good citizens in some cultures without shame or apology. Because of this ability to detach the population of the oppressed from membership in the human race, even the most extreme cruelty often went unrecognized. Prejudice turned to hatred in the United States with the liberation of the slaves; when their humanity was reclaimed; when the slaves become a human force; when the fear, if not the guilt, of the white populations was triggered.

For the quintessential statement on how prejudice plays out without hatred one must turn to America’s great moral master-piece, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. In a scene so brief as to invite being passed over, Mark Twain captured the essence of prejudice.

In a confusing event of mistaken identity that resists replication here, Huck attempts to flimflam kindly and maternal Aunt Sally by passing himself off as Tom Sawyer. In order to explain his delayed arrival he confabulates an explosion aboard a steamboat:

“We blowed out a cylinder head.”

“Good gracious! Anybody hurt?”

“No’m. Killed a Nigger.”

“Well it’s lucky; because sometimes people do get hurt.”11

Readers of the novel know that Huck has been on an adventure in which he has risked imprisonment for aiding the runaway slave, Jim, to gain his freedom. Worse, since Jim is clearly property, Huck believes that in abetting Jim’s escape to freedom he is stealing. According to all the grown-ups of his community, Huck’s behavior is immoral and un-Christian—a sin as well as a crime. But his love and compassion for Jim overcome his “conscience.” Huck shares the prejudices of his day, but in his capacity to love a slave, he demonstrates that he is certainly no bigot.

When one moves from prejudice to “bigotry,” one enters the world of the bigot: “one who is strongly partial to one’s own group, religion, race, or politics and is intolerant of those who differ.” Intolerance suggests an unwillingness to accept the right of the other to be different or to live differently. The bigot will support legislation and social conditions that deprive the minority of its autonomy and its right to be respected. The bigot is prepared to defend a discriminatory environment as extreme as existed in the American South before the civil rights movement or as the apartheid of South Africa until recently. Still, even among members of the Ku Klux Klan, only a minority could participate in burning black children or lynching black men.

Racism may be endemic in white populations, but most whites who embrace it do so with prejudice or bigotry—still short of active hatred. Most racists would not take joy in dragging a chained black man behind the wheels of a truck. They would be appalled. In order to enter into an engagement of hatred, a feeling of being threatened or humiliated by the very presence of the black man as a free member of one’s society is essential. The white man must fear the black, must perceive him as a danger. The skinheads among us are such a hating population. They are “attached” to their victims; they are obsessed with them. In saying this, I am not exonerating those who are “only” bigots, for there may be significant slippage between the two groups, that is, those who are bigots and those who are consumed by hatred. Bigotry is a transition point to hatred. Prejudice and bigotry also facilitate the agendas of a hating population. They take advantage of the passivity of the larger community of bigots, a passivity that is essential for that minority who truly hate to carry out their malicious destruction. Even among haters, there will be degrees. There will be those who can torture and kill and those who can only passively approve such actions.

Raul Hilberg, in one of his admirable studies of the Holocaust, drew a distinction between perpetrators and bystanders:

Most contemporaries of the Jewish catastrophe were neither perpetrators nor victims. Many people, however, saw or heard something of the event. Those of them who lived in Adolf Hitler’s Europe would have described themselves, with few exceptions, as bystanders. They were not “involved,” not willing to hurt the victims and not wishing to be hurt by the perpetrators. Yet the reality was not so uncomplicated.12

We draw a significant distinction between bigotry and hatred. That distinction is the boundary that separates those who passively observed while the Jews were being slaughtered in the death camps of the Nazis and those who did the slaughtering and enjoyed it. I grant that passivity in the face of evil is a form of moral “activity” and must be held morally accountable. Still, before passing judgment, one must understand what motivated the passivity. It may have been prompted by a lack of courage in those who actually disapproved of