Confronting hate is the first step

Satirical singer Tom Lehrer, when introducing his song "National Brotherhood Week," used to say, "Now, I know there are people who do not love their fellow man -- and I hate people like that!"\nThe word "hate" has become a staple word of diversity education and activism, from IU's slogan "Hate doesn't discriminate" (which is false, by the way), to Bloomington United's "NO Hate Speech / NO Hate Crimes," to the proliferation of "hate crime" laws nationwide.\n The popularity of "hate," it seems to me, fits with a general tendency to see social problems as the result of individual aberration rather than social or (heaven forbid!) political factors.\nIt's not a new trend. A 19th century medical journal published a paper by Dr. S. A. Cartwright on "drapetomania," a disease he had discovered among Southern slaves that caused them to run away from their lawful owners. In the 1970s, clinicians isolated "state benefit neurosis," the refusal to take low-pay, no-benefit jobs when government benefits offered better support for one's children. \nOn the other side of the coin, we have "homophobia," a discomfort with homosexuality and gay people that evidently owes nothing to a society which fosters such discomfort.\nAfter World War II, according to Beth Bailey's useful book "Sex in the Heartland," counseling departments took on the task of social monitoring and education in American higher education, starting with relations between the sexes and moving on to race and other "diversity" issues.\nThe therapeutic flavor of such work on college campuses, then, is not surprising. Administrators and trustees, allergic to controversy, understandably prefer a focus on unhealthy individuals who can be treated or expelled, rather than a focus on institutional structures that maintain inequality and injustice, which might implicate the universities themselves.\nViolence and explicit verbal slurs are only the tip of the iceberg of racism, sexism and heterosexual supremacy. The structures that maintain privilege, sorting out winners from losers in our society, are usually ignored, and their existence denied or explained away as natural. \nIt isn't "hate" that causes (for instance) unemployment to be twice as high among African Americans as among whites: it's complacency, a willingness to let a destructive status quo continue as long as it doesn't make the majority personally uncomfortable. \nBloomington responded to Benjamin Smith's shooting spree of July 4, 1999, with ceremonies of grief and healing. Large numbers of people packed the venues to show their support and compassion for the survivors of the dead. \nThis wasn't a bad thing, but it was too easy: Smith could be seen as a disturbed and violent youth led astray by wicked hatemongers. But when people tried to discuss (for example) the less spectacular forms racism takes in Bloomington, its people-next-door pervasiveness, interest faded quickly. People wanted to heal, to forget and not to pick the wounds open again.\nMuch as I understand this wish, it simply won't do. To heal is to return to the status quo, and the status quo is the problem. Trying to change the status quo makes trouble, which upsets people. If they can, they ignore the troublemakers; if they can't, they get nasty. After the troublemakers are safely dead, they are canonized, history is rewritten and everyone is completely surprised and appalled by the next outbreak of rude epithets or outright violence.\nLet me declare for the record: I hate bigotry, I hate falsehood, I hate the trendy obsession with individual pathology rather than social structure. I am closed-minded about racism, sexism and anti-gay bigotry. \nI don't believe that hate and closed minds are what keep human beings mired in injustice. But the way out is painful, and any demand for healing is the way back in: premature at best, evasive at worst.