The Opposite of Hate

My first real project as a community organizer was helping LGBT employees in businesses and government agencies lobby their employers to create domestic partnership benefits plans—so that LGBT employees could include their partners on their health insurance and other workplace benefits. This wasn’t something individuals could do alone—they couldn’t just, one by one, create exceptions to corporate and government policies. But when they came together to press their case, employees were able to win change. Those victories were important, but even they were limited to one employer at a time. One of the many reasons to push for marriage equality was to achieve equal benefits not just company by company, or local government by local government, but all at once, for everyone. But that took even more people pushing.

Community organizing is premised on the belief that collective problems can be solved only through collective action that pushes for collective solutions. The solutions throughout this book—connection-speech, connection-spaces, and connection-thinking—get us part of the way toward the opposite of hate, but we also need big-picture solutions that broadly change policies, institutions, and cultural norms. That’s where “connection-systems” come in. We need to enact laws and institutional practices—and promote social and cultural norms more broadly—that recognize we’re all fundamentally equal and, at the same time, help us respect and relate to each other’s differences.

Those of us who aren’t subject to biased mistreatment often rationalize mistreatment as justified.

I tried to contact more than a dozen trolls, including all of my worst offenders, and I heard back from about half.

Building on the theories of Harvard University psychologist Gordon Allport, who pioneered human personality research and wrote the influential book The Nature of Prejudice, the Anti-Defamation League argues that different kinds and severities of hate build on one another. The organization classifies five overall categories in its “pyramid of hate.” At the base of the pyramid are things like stereotyping, the use of exclusionary language, and the belief in the inherent superiority of some groups and the inferiority of others. The next level includes individual acts of prejudice, like bullying, name-calling, and unspoken but harmful acts of social avoidance—like the way I and other kids in fifth grade moved to the other side of the hallway when Sticky Vicky walked by. Then there are institutional forms of discrimination, whether in employment or housing policy or the political system—the kind of hate baked into our institutions and our norms, and actually encouraged by them and taught to generation after generation. One step further is bias-motivated violence, such as terrorism or hate crimes, and at the top comes genocide.

Personally, I haven’t figured out how to stop hating, let alone how to consistently pursue meaningful, mutually respectful connections. I’m constantly catching myself hating someone or something, and not at the casual broccoli-hating level but in more significant and consequential ways. From being pissed at a slow driver and thinking he’s Asian. To saying that maybe most Trump voters are deplorable racists. To wondering if the trans person I just met is a “real woman.” My own hate constantly oozes out in small and big ways. In other words, I haven’t arrived at some place of enlightenment. I’ve simply realized I need to turn on the light—and start noticing things differently and trying to be different.

We think we’re good people, but we don’t see how that sphere of moral concern is constricted by hate, by the history and habits and culture of who matters and who doesn’t in our society, which we have all bought into, whether we mean to or not. So we shake our heads about excessive corporate greed and we shake our fists against neo-Nazis marching in the streets, but not enough of us admit that they’re reflections of the society we’ve all created, let alone acknowledge that they’re reflections of ourselves.

Many people in the wealthier districts resent the program and continue to fight it. The lawyer representing OPS in ongoing legal battles told journalist Sharon Lerner a story of a white parent who, after a presentation defending the Learning Community, came up to the lawyer and said, “If I understood correctly, you’re telling me that my child has 10 crayons and these kids have no crayons. And you want us to give some of our crayons to those kids. Now that’s probably fair. But as a parent, I’m never going to get behind anything that takes away my child’s crayons.”

Remember that Thomas Jefferson—he who wrote in the Declaration of Independence that “all men are created equal”—owned more than six hundred black men, women, and children as slaves, apparently not seeing a contradiction between what he wrote and what he did

for much of US history, Irish and Italian and Jewish immigrants weren’t seen as white. Now they are

Having reasons to hate doesn’t make hate reasonable.