A review by emiged
The Opposite of Hate: A Field Guide to Repairing Our Humanity by Sally Kohn
3.0
"The bad news is: we all hate. All of us. That includes me--and I'm afraid it also includes you. I promise that although this is a book about hate, it will end on an uplifting and positive note. But we first have to face the hard truth. In different ways and to different degrees, consciously or unconsciously, all of us, in one way or another, sometimes treat other individuals and entire groups of human beings as though they are fundamentally less deserving than we are." (5)
****
"Attribution errors and essentialism are like blinders, which stop us from truly seeing others accurately and fairly scrutinizing ourselves." (31)
****
"Before I went to the Middle East, I brushed up on the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and also read social science on the dynamics of what are called 'intractable conflicts.' In particular, I delved into the concept of competitive victimhood...and discovered the work of Israeli psychologist Daniel Bar-Tal. 'Very often both sides believe that they are the victim,' writes Bar-Tal with his colleagues in a paper on competitive victimhood. 'The struggle over the status of the sole victim can enhance aggressiveness and lead to the employment of harsher means against the rival out-group.' It's related to scapegoating, where one group perceives that its problems are the result of the other group, even if the group being scapegoated is in fact the group that is suffering more than and even because of the other.
"This is how we have a dynamic in the United States today in which Christian conservatives claim they are being oppressed by the nation's incremental progress toward queer rights, despite the reality that, over decades, it was the disproportionate power and influence of those same Christian conservatives that kept basic rights from queer people. And that actually still do--it is legal for same-sex couples to marry but still also legal in most states to fire someone for being gay or gender-nonconforming. Yet the sense of competitive victimhood keeps the tension brewing--including, yes, smears from the gay community against Christian conservatives. Each side literally makes the other side suffer more to express anger over how much their side is suffering. Which is ridiculous, but there you have it." (59)
****
"What makes competitive victimhood so pernicious in intractable conflicts and in general is that whatever side you're on, your arguments for being the worse victim and blaming the other side seem so rational. Of course, hate isn't rational, but it feels rational, and therefore it feels justified. That's why we keep doing it. It's not that we're irrational; our hate is a rational reaction to our often one-sided and deeply biased perceptions." (62)
****
"The vast majority of people who hate--even extremists who commit violence in the name of hate--are ordinary people who also love and worry and fear and care, and who can point to a number of what to them feel like well-justified reasons for their hatred. We don't just hate for the sake of hating. We hate because we feel under siege, and hate is our response. That's a s true of terrorists as it is of bullies." (68)
****
"Our identities aren't the problem. The choices we make around those identities--the meanings that we and society give them--that's the problem." (117)
****
"White families don't have twice as much wealth on average today as black families because white people are smarter or harder-working but because of slavery and segregation and discrimination, through with generations of white people exploited black people for their sole gain. And, yeah, their great-great-grandkids don't own slaves or believe in separate water fountains, but they're still born at the top of the pile because of their race. It's not necessarily that their parents and grandparents handed them places on top because of their disproportionate wealth or education or good jobs, though that certainly happens for some. But the shape of the hill, and who is generally on top versus on the bottom, has been contoured by that bias, which, in turn, actively shapes our lives today.
"The people who aren't at the bottom of the dog pile think they got where they are not because of history or luck but because they deserve to be there. And the irony is that these are the people who believe the other 'deep story ' myth, the one about the orderly line. The people in the middle and top of the dog pile often believe life is an orderly line--when in fact, that's all the people at the bottom are asking for. The people at the bottom are desperate for the world to work the way that the people at the top insist it already does, for opportunity to be truly equal and for achievement to be merit-based. It seems we can all agree on the ideal. What we disagree on is whether we've already achieved it or not." (143-144)
****
"Such mass atrocities can happen only because many fundamentally decent human beings participate and many other decent people fail to intervene. When we take that in, we realize that genocide is terrifying not only because it happened to them but because it could also happen to us--and that we could just as easily be the victims or the perpetrators." (160)
****
"...the way to stop us from discriminating against or hating various identity groups isn't actually to pretend that those different identities don't exist. The lesson is not that we need some people who feel like outsiders or who haven't fully integrated their sense of cultural affiliation into a seamless whole--indeed, having low bicultural identity integration is associated with greater rates of anxiety and depression. The lesson is that we need to combat negative otherizing without forcing assimilation or conformity. We can still have groups--the problem is when they are pitted against one another as dominant versus inferior." (178)
****
"We must foster group bonds not by imposing a homogenous identity on everyone but by building a sense of shared humanity that not only respects but actively appreciate everyone's differences, especially because those differences help us resist dangerous groupthink banisters." (189)
****
"What I've learned is that all hate is premised on a mind-set of otherizing. The sanctimonious pedestal of superiority on which we all put ourselves while we systematically dehumanize others is the essential root of hate. In big and small ways, consciously and unconsciously, we constantly filter the world around us through the lens of our explicit and implicit biases. This abets rationalization and looking the other way about widespread injustices, such as dismissing entire communities that don't have access to health care, or entire nations locked in civil war because they fall outside the sphere of our moral concern.
"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." (226-227)
****
"Attribution errors and essentialism are like blinders, which stop us from truly seeing others accurately and fairly scrutinizing ourselves." (31)
****
"Before I went to the Middle East, I brushed up on the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and also read social science on the dynamics of what are called 'intractable conflicts.' In particular, I delved into the concept of competitive victimhood...and discovered the work of Israeli psychologist Daniel Bar-Tal. 'Very often both sides believe that they are the victim,' writes Bar-Tal with his colleagues in a paper on competitive victimhood. 'The struggle over the status of the sole victim can enhance aggressiveness and lead to the employment of harsher means against the rival out-group.' It's related to scapegoating, where one group perceives that its problems are the result of the other group, even if the group being scapegoated is in fact the group that is suffering more than and even because of the other.
"This is how we have a dynamic in the United States today in which Christian conservatives claim they are being oppressed by the nation's incremental progress toward queer rights, despite the reality that, over decades, it was the disproportionate power and influence of those same Christian conservatives that kept basic rights from queer people. And that actually still do--it is legal for same-sex couples to marry but still also legal in most states to fire someone for being gay or gender-nonconforming. Yet the sense of competitive victimhood keeps the tension brewing--including, yes, smears from the gay community against Christian conservatives. Each side literally makes the other side suffer more to express anger over how much their side is suffering. Which is ridiculous, but there you have it." (59)
****
"What makes competitive victimhood so pernicious in intractable conflicts and in general is that whatever side you're on, your arguments for being the worse victim and blaming the other side seem so rational. Of course, hate isn't rational, but it feels rational, and therefore it feels justified. That's why we keep doing it. It's not that we're irrational; our hate is a rational reaction to our often one-sided and deeply biased perceptions." (62)
****
"The vast majority of people who hate--even extremists who commit violence in the name of hate--are ordinary people who also love and worry and fear and care, and who can point to a number of what to them feel like well-justified reasons for their hatred. We don't just hate for the sake of hating. We hate because we feel under siege, and hate is our response. That's a s true of terrorists as it is of bullies." (68)
****
"Our identities aren't the problem. The choices we make around those identities--the meanings that we and society give them--that's the problem." (117)
****
"White families don't have twice as much wealth on average today as black families because white people are smarter or harder-working but because of slavery and segregation and discrimination, through with generations of white people exploited black people for their sole gain. And, yeah, their great-great-grandkids don't own slaves or believe in separate water fountains, but they're still born at the top of the pile because of their race. It's not necessarily that their parents and grandparents handed them places on top because of their disproportionate wealth or education or good jobs, though that certainly happens for some. But the shape of the hill, and who is generally on top versus on the bottom, has been contoured by that bias, which, in turn, actively shapes our lives today.
"The people who aren't at the bottom of the dog pile think they got where they are not because of history or luck but because they deserve to be there. And the irony is that these are the people who believe the other 'deep story ' myth, the one about the orderly line. The people in the middle and top of the dog pile often believe life is an orderly line--when in fact, that's all the people at the bottom are asking for. The people at the bottom are desperate for the world to work the way that the people at the top insist it already does, for opportunity to be truly equal and for achievement to be merit-based. It seems we can all agree on the ideal. What we disagree on is whether we've already achieved it or not." (143-144)
****
"Such mass atrocities can happen only because many fundamentally decent human beings participate and many other decent people fail to intervene. When we take that in, we realize that genocide is terrifying not only because it happened to them but because it could also happen to us--and that we could just as easily be the victims or the perpetrators." (160)
****
"...the way to stop us from discriminating against or hating various identity groups isn't actually to pretend that those different identities don't exist. The lesson is not that we need some people who feel like outsiders or who haven't fully integrated their sense of cultural affiliation into a seamless whole--indeed, having low bicultural identity integration is associated with greater rates of anxiety and depression. The lesson is that we need to combat negative otherizing without forcing assimilation or conformity. We can still have groups--the problem is when they are pitted against one another as dominant versus inferior." (178)
****
"We must foster group bonds not by imposing a homogenous identity on everyone but by building a sense of shared humanity that not only respects but actively appreciate everyone's differences, especially because those differences help us resist dangerous groupthink banisters." (189)
****
"What I've learned is that all hate is premised on a mind-set of otherizing. The sanctimonious pedestal of superiority on which we all put ourselves while we systematically dehumanize others is the essential root of hate. In big and small ways, consciously and unconsciously, we constantly filter the world around us through the lens of our explicit and implicit biases. This abets rationalization and looking the other way about widespread injustices, such as dismissing entire communities that don't have access to health care, or entire nations locked in civil war because they fall outside the sphere of our moral concern.
"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." (226-227)