Dear Hateful White People, I'm Sorry
Dear Hateful White People, I’m sorry.
I was wrong about you.
For a long time I thought I hated you.
I may have even made you feel that way, too.
You would pop up on my social media feed, drive past me in traffic, say something at Thanksgiving, or I'd overhear you at a restaurant—and what seemed like rage would rise up quickly within me. I thought it was abject hatred.
Today 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 hurt or disregard complete strangers.
My heart breaks for a journey so filled with injury, that it has yielded someone that addled by fear, that vulnerable to vitriol, 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 your 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 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 so many people around you.
I wish you felt compassion for the humanity in your path: not just those you
love,
not just those who look like you,
sound like you,
worship like you,
vote like you,
love like you.
I wish you could find empathy beyond those you believe are your people; your family, your tribe, your party, your pigment.
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 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, despising people, and I want 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 unearned enmity, if you could rediscover the inherent goodness in other people—you would be released. Life would get bigger. The world would open up for you. It would reach far beyond your whiteness and much 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 daily condition.
You’d realize that there is no competition you need to win, no brutal fight you need
to be in.
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 malice, 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 true 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. I can’t shout you into compassion or demand that you wake up to the reality that diversity makes us better.
And yes, I hate your racism and your supremacy and all that it drives you to 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 that seems to be spreading quickly.
Which is why I feel sorry for the world and for 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 for.
Beautifully stated, John. I view such people as enslaved by their own unwillingness or inability to change. Can't imagine being burdened by such heavy chains.
To understand deeply the problem behavior being so lovingly described and lamented here, I recommend reading "White Rage" by Carol Anderson, "White Rural Rage" by Timothy Schaller and Paul Waldman, and many of the outstanding and insightful essays and other works published over the past 40 years by Wendell Berry, who described the problems, the government's structural mischief and counterproductive, misguided involvement (starting with Earl Butz's Ag Dept debacles), and potential remedies without the hatred, prejudice, and diversionary tactics used by so many of rural folks' congressional representatives over the past decades (and continuing today). Sadly, the years of structural changes wrought by global capitalism have been a boon to the more developed parts of the country, but the havoc wreacked upon rural areas (closed hospitals, rusting infrastructure, lack of economic opportunity, reliance upon extractive economic industries, loss of the younger generation, as well as technological, cultural, social and geographic isolation generally) has been largely ignored by the very representatives who they elected to fix them. Instead, they divert attention by repeating ad nausem multiple tropes designed to create blame and focus animosity against people and groups wholly uninvolved in and innocent of the genesis of their problems (e.g., black and brown-skinned people, gay people, transgender people, drag performers, and anyone not subscribing to their flavor of the thousand worship choices available for comfort or, sadly, self-righteous justification). Indeed, have MTG, Matt Gaetz, Ted Cruz, Mike Johnson, or anyone in MAGA proposed or even discussed the host of rural problems addressed by their constituents? Thus, emotion substitutes for reason and we get the seemingly intractable mess in which we currently find ourselves. Although "one cannot reason a person out of a position they did not use reason to adopt", eventually, when a breakthrough occurs - and I must believe that it will - we need to be armed with facts and a proactive programmatic focused and specific set of responses to inform and guide a real world solution. The references provided above support both the diagnosis and that response. Good luck to all of us - we shall need it. Thank you, John, for your recent flurry of articles addressing these existential issues.