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Battling Hate
An early lesson that not everyone gets
One of the earliest lessons I remember being taught by my parents was that I should never hate anyone or anything. Sure, an easy, an almost-taken-for-granted, lesson to write on a blackboard or instruct a three-year old child using words whose many faceted-complexity they don’t quite understand.
As a little child, I didn’t hate anything. But at some point in 1959 or 1960, someone outside my family told me that I ought to hate Black people (the word they used I’m sure you can imagine, because this was Alabama after all). Those who taught me that I should hate didn’t explain why other than that some people weren’t equal to others, and those who weren’t equal to “us” were only equatable to monkeys.
These people also told me that I and my family ought to hope Richard Nixon defeated John Kennedy in the 1960 Presidential election, because whatever else Nixon was, he was no n****r-lover like Kennedy was. Kennedy, it seemed, was mildly supportive of civil rights and integration. Not that I understood any of this, but that word “hate” got used a lot by these people. And often.
I didn’t understand the emotion, and for the life of me, I don’t know at what point I began understanding it. What was my first hate? What motivated it, and how did I even express that extreme emotion?