What we can do about the culture of hate Sally Kohn
So people tell me I’m a nice person …
to the point where it’s part
of my personal and professional identity
that I’m so nice
and able to get along with anyone,
even my most fierce opponents.
It’s like my “thing,”
it’s what I’m known for.
(Laughter)
But what no one knows …
is that I was a bully.
Honestly, I didn’t think
about it much myself.
I buried the memories for years,
and even still, a lot of it’s really hazy.
Denial, by the way, apparently
is also one of my things.
(Laughter)
But the more people started to praise me
for being a liberal who could
get along with conservatives,
and the more I wrote articles
about being nice
and gave talks about being nice,
the more I felt this hypocrisy
creeping up inside me.
What if I was actually really mean?
When I was 10 years old,
there was a girl in my class
at school named Vicky.
(Sigh)
And I tormented her …
mercilessly.
I mean, everyone did.
Even the teachers picked on her.
It doesn’t make it any better, does it?
Vicky was clearly a troubled kid.
She would hit herself
and give herself bloody noses
and she had hygiene problems –
she had big hygiene problems.
But instead of helping this girl,
who was plainly suffering
from hardships in her life …
we called her “Sticky Vicky.”
I called her “Sticky Vicky.”
My clearest memory
is standing in the empty hallway
outside the fifth grade classrooms
waiting for Vicky
to come out of the bathroom,
and I have a clipboard and a pen
and a survey I’ve made up,
asking about shampoo preferences,
like I’m doing a study
for science class or something.
And when Vicky comes out of the bathroom,
I pounce on her and I ask her
what shampoo she uses.
Now, to put this in perspective,
I can’t remember the names of my teachers,
I can’t remember the names
of any of the books I read that year,
I pretty much can’t remember
anything from fifth grade,
but I remember that Vicky told me
she used White Rain shampoo.
Clear as yesterday,
like it just happened.
And as classes let out,
I ran down the hall shouting
at all the other kids,
“Sticky Vicky uses White Rain shampoo.
Don’t use White Rain shampoo
or you’ll smell like Sticky Vicky.”
I forgot about this memory
for a long time.
When I finally started remembering it,
I immediately needed to know more.
I reached out to friends
and eventually social media,
and I did everything I could
to try to find Vicky.
I needed to know that she was OK,
and that I hadn’t ruined her life.
(Sigh)
But what I quickly realized
was I wasn’t just trying to figure out
what happened to Vicky.
I was trying to figure out
what happened to me.
When I was 10 years old,
I treated another human being
like some worthless other …
like I was better than her,
and she was garbage.
What kind of a nice person does that?
I mean, I know I was only a kid,
but not all kids do that.
Most kids don’t do that, right?
So, what if I wasn’t nice after all?
I was really just a hateful monster.
Then I started to notice myself
having these mean impulses,
thinking mean thoughts
and wanting to say them.
Admittedly, most of my mean thoughts
were about conservatives.
(Laughter)
But not just conservatives.
I also caught myself thinking mean things
about mushy, centrist liberals
and greedy Wall Street bankers
and Islamophobes
and slow drivers,
because I really hate slow drivers.
(Laughter)
And as I’d catch myself
in these moments of hypocrisy,
either I was just noticing them
or they were getting worse,
especially in the last few years.
And as I felt more hateful –
rageful, really –
I noticed the world around me
seemed to be getting more hateful, too.
Like there was this steady
undercurrent of hate
bubbling up all around us
and increasingly overflowing.
So the plus side, I guess,
is that I realized that hate
was not just my problem,
which is like, the most
selfish plus side ever –
(Laughter)
because now instead of just my own hate
and cruelty to try to figure out,
I had a whole world of hate
I wanted to unravel
and understand and fix.
So I did what all overly intellectual
people do when they have a problem
that they want to understand,
and I wrote a book.
(Laughter)
I wrote a book about hate.
Spoiler alert:
I’m against it.
(Laughter)
Now at this point,
you might be thinking to yourself,
“Why are y’all worried about hate?
You didn’t hate Vicky.
Bullying isn’t hate.”
Isn’t it?
Gordon Allport,
the psychologist who pioneered
the study of hate in the early 1900s,
developed what he called
a “scale of prejudice.”
At one end are things like genocide
and other bias-motivated violence.
But at the other end
are things like believing
that your in-group
is inherently superior to some out-group,
or avoiding social interaction
with those others.
Isn’t that all hate?
I mean, it wasn’t an accident
that I was a rich kid
picking on a poor kid,
or that Vicky, it turns out,
would eventually end up being gay.
Poor kids and gay kids
are more likely to be bullied,
even by kids who also end up being gay.
I know there was a lot going on
in my little 10-year-old mind.
I’m not saying hate was the only
reason I picked on Vicky
or even that I was consciously
hateful or anything,
but the fact is,
the people we discriminate against
in our public policies and in our culture
are also the groups of people
most likely to be bullied in school.
That is not just a coincidence.
That’s hate.
I am defining hate in a broad way
because I think we have a big problem.
And we need to solve all of it,
not just the most extremes.
So for instance,
we probably all agree
that marching down the street,
chanting about you should take away
rights from some group of people
because of their skin color
or their gender,
we’d all agree that’s hate, right? OK.
What if you believe
that group of people is inferior,
but you don’t say it?
Is that hate?
Or what if you believe
that group of people is inferior
but you aren’t aware
that you believe it –
what’s known as implicit bias.
Is that hate?
I mean they all have
the same roots, don’t they?
In the historic patterns
of racism and sexism
that have shaped our history
and still infect our society today.
Isn’t it all hate?
I’m not saying they’re the same thing,
just like I am not saying
that being a bully
is as bad as being a Nazi,
just like I’m not saying that being a Nazi
is the same thing as punching a Nazi …
(Laughter)
But hating a Nazi is still hate, right?
What about hating someone
who isn’t as enlightened as you?
See, what I learned
is that we all are against hate
and we all think hate is a problem.
We think it’s their problem,
not our problem.
They’re hateful.
I mean, if I think the people
who didn’t vote like me
are stupid racist monsters who don’t
deserve to call themselves Americans,
alright, fine, I’m not being nice,
I get it.
(Laughter)
I’m not hateful, I’m just right, right?
(Laughter)
Wrong.
We all hate.
And I do not mean that
in some abstract, generic sense.
I mean all of us …
me and you.
That sanctimonious pedestal of superiority
on which we all place ourselves,
that they are hateful and we are not,
is a manifestation
of the essential root of hate:
that we are fundamentally good
and they are not,
which is what needs to change.
So in trying to understand and solve hate,
I read every book
and every research study I could find,
but I also went and talked
to some former Nazis
and some former terrorists
and some former genocidal killers,
because I figured if they could
figure out how to escape hate,
surely the rest of us could.
Let me give you just one example
of the former terrorist I spent time with
in the West Bank.
When Bassam Aramin was 16 years old,
he tried to blow up an Israeli
military convoy with a grenade.
He failed, fortunately,
but he was still sentenced
to seven years in prison.
When he was in prison,
they showed a film about the Holocaust.
Up until that point,
Bassam had thought the Holocaust
was mostly a myth.
He went to go watch the film
because he thought he would enjoy
seeing Jews get killed.
But when he saw what really happened,
he broke down crying.
And eventually, after prison,
Bassam went on to get
a master’s degree in Holocaust studies
and he founded an organization
where former Palestinian combatants
and Israeli combatants come together,
work together, try to find common ground.
By his own account,
Bassam used to hate Israelis,
but through knowing Israelis
and learning their stories
and working together for peace,
he overcame his hate.
Bassam says he still
doesn’t hate Israelis,
even after the Israeli military –
shot and killed his [10]-year-old
daughter, Abir,
while she was walking to school.
(Sigh)
Bassam even forgave the soldier
who killed his daughter.
That soldier, he taught me,
was just a product
of the same hateful system as he was.
If a former terrorist …
if a terrorist can learn to stop hating
and still not hate
when their child is killed,
surely the rest of us can stop our habits
of demeaning and dehumanizing each other.
And I will tell you there are stories
like Bassam’s all over the world,
plus study after study after study
that says, no, we are neither designed
nor destined as human beings to hate,
but rather taught to hate
by the world around us.
I promise you,
none of us pops out of the womb
hating black people or Republicans.
There is nothing in our DNA
that makes us hate Muslims or Mexicans.
For better or for worse,
we are all a product
of the culture around us.
And the good news is,
we’re also the ones
who shape that culture,
which means we can change it.
The first step is starting to recognize
the hate inside ourselves.
We need to catch ourselves
and our hateful thoughts
in all their forms
in all of us …
and work to challenge
our ideas and assumptions.
That doesn’t happen overnight,
I am telling you right here,
it is a lifelong journey,
but it’s one we all need to take.
And then second:
if we want to challenge
the hate in our societies,
we need to promote policies
and institutions and practices
that connect us as communities.
Literally, like integrated
neighborhoods and schools.
That by the way is the reason
to support integration.
Not just because
it’s the right thing to do,
but because integration
systematically combats hate.
There are studies
that teenagers who participate
in racially integrated classes
and activities reduce their racial bias.
And when little kids go to racially
integrated kindergartens
and elementary schools –
they develop less bias to begin with.
But the fact is in so many ways
and in so many places around our world,
we are separated from each other.
In the United States, for instance,
three-quarters of white people
don’t have any non-white friends.
So in addition to promoting
those proactive solutions,
the other thing we need to do
is upend the hate in our institutions
and our policies
that perpetuate dehumanization
and difference
and otherizing and hate,
like systems of sexual harassment
and sexual assault in the workplace,
or our deeply racially imbalanced
and deeply racially biased
criminal “justice” system.
We need to change that.
Again, it will not happen overnight.
It needs to happen.
And then …
when we connect together
in these connection spaces,
facilitated by connection systems,
we need to change the way
we talk to each other
and connect with one another
and relate with generosity
and open-mindedness
and kindness and compassion
and not hate.
And that’s it.
That’s it.
(Applause)
I have solved it all, right?
That’s it.
That is pretty much –
there’s a few details –
but that’s pretty much all we have to do.
It’s not that complicated, right?
But it’s hard.
The hate that we feel
towards certain groups of people
because of who they are
or what they believe
is so ingrained in our minds
and in our society
that it can feel inevitable
and impossible to change.
Change is possible.
Just look at the terrorist
who became a peace activist.
Or look at the bully who learned
to apologize to her victim.
The entire time I was traveling
around the Middle East and Rwanda
and across the United States,
hearing these unbelievable stories
of people in communities
who had left entire histories
of hate behind,
I was still looking for Vicky.
It was so hard find her that I hired
a private investigator
and he found her.
I mean, he sort of found her.
The truth is, it became clear
that the person I’m calling Vicky
had gone to extraordinary lengths
to hide her identity.
But anyway, a year after
I began my journey,
I wrote Vicky an apology.
And a few months later,
she wrote back.
(Sigh)
I’m not going to lie,
I wanted to be forgiven.
I wasn’t.
(Sigh)
She offered me sort of
conditional forgiveness.
What she wrote was …
“Messages such as yours
cannot absolve you of your past actions.
The only way to do that
is to improve the world,
prevent others
from behaving in similar ways
and foster compassion.”
And Vicky’s right.
Which is why I’m here.
Thank you.
(Applause)