An Open Letter to Hateful White Americans

Dear Hateful White Americans,

For a long time, I misunderstood my feelings toward you.

You would pop up on my social media feed, drive past me in traffic, say something over Thanksgiving dinner, or I'd overhear you at a restaurant, and what seemed like rage would rise quickly within me. I thought it was abject hatred.

Recently, I realized that I don't hate you—I feel sorry for you.

I grieve over whatever in your story made you this way; for the painful path you must have walked to arrive here so fully wounded, that you now feel so compelled to wound others.

My heart breaks for a journey so filled with injury, that it has yielded someone that addled by fear, that vulnerable to vitriol, and that easily manipulated into contempt for another human being whose pigmentation or nation of origin or image of God or primary language may not match you own.

I wonder how someone with so many advantages and so much privilege and such a comfortable seat at the table, still manages to feel themselves oppressed, still imagines they are marginalized, still feels perpetually under siege by the world around them—a world that has always favored them.

And I'm sorry.
I'm sorry you are this afflicted with toxic anger.
I'm sorry you are so burdened with this crippling addiction to cruelty.
I'm sorry you simply don't care about the people around you.
I’m sorry you have embraced a man and a movement that are predatory toward you.

I wish you felt compassion for the humanity around you: not just those you love,
not just those who look, sound, worship, vote, and think like you. I wish you could find empathy beyond those you believe are your people: your family, your tribe, your party, your country.

I want these things for you, certainly because that would surely help whoever you see as those people; the billions of human beings sharing this planet with you whose journeys could be lightened by your presence: for the multitudes you keep at a distance or settle for false stories about; for the mothers and best friends and children and good neighbors and young couples you are segregating yourself from; for the beautiful and complex people you have made into caricatures, enemies, and monsters, by a religion or a political worldview or a learned narrative that demands it.

But as much as for these people, I am sorry for how hateful you are because of what it is doing to you.

I can see the toll it takes on you. It is difficult, taxing work, hating people, and I wish something better for you.

If you could reach into those hidden recesses of your humanity, if you could tap into the reservoir of kindness that lies deep beneath all this manufactured anger, if you could rediscover the goodness in other people, you would be released. Life would get bigger. The world would open up for you. It would reach beyond your whiteness and further than America.

You'd realize that someone else's gain is not automatically your loss.
You'd realize that everyone is working as hard as you are to get through this life.
You'd realize how fortunate you are, not to know the kind of heartache that some people live with as their default daily existence.

If you cared about people this way, you would not live with such a closed fist, not be so quick to lock them out or wall them off or send them back or damn them to hell.

And the fact that you are still there, trapped in this kind of unnecessary enmity, means you are never going to know the lightness that comes with love as your default setting. While you have such bitterness toward other human beings, actual joy will always evade you.

And the saddest thing is that I can't change you. I can't convince you how much better it is to live with empathy. I can't force you to give a damn.

But I refuse to hate you because I don't want to become you, I don't want to perpetuate the illness that afflicts you seems to be spreading quickly.

Which is why I feel sorry for the world and the people around you, because of how your hatred is hurting them.

And as much as anything, I'm sorry for how hateful you are—because it is wasting your time here, it is squandering your gifts, and it is limiting the good you could do with your life.

May you find something better to move you and to live than hatred.