Wednesday, January 16, 2019 // The Statement
7B
Wednesday, April 1, 2020 // The Statement
H
ave you ever hated someone? If so, did you feel it
consume or distract you? Did it eat away at your
thoughts in the hours before falling asleep or
as you daydreamed in class? Did you avoid going to certain
places or partaking in certain activities because you knew
that person would be present?
Most of us have or will hate someone else in our lives. Hate
appears in many forms, from hating entire groups of people
down to individuals. It is an intense and raw emotional
state that requires focus, energy and dedication. If you
actively choose to say you hate someone, you have to really
concentrate on how and where your hate is being directed.
The strange, fluid nature of human hatred leads me to
frequently wonder if anyone out in the world is brooding
around, hating me. It’s an unhealthy concept to dwell upon,
but I’m a curious person by nature.
The only story of substance I ever received about being
truly hated by someone was told to me from a friend in
middle school. In the seventh grade, her friend started hating
me because I did not apologize after letting a loose basketball
hit her in the face. I distinctly remember asking if she was
OK, but I guess I didn’t say “sorry.”
Hindsight is 20/20, and I definitely should’ve been smarter
and apologized. Children can be petty, but was that one
moment of being unapologetic enough for me to be perceived
as the villain in another’s eyes? Can a single moment of neglect
forever define how you can be viewed by someone? Surely,
there are countless times where I was painfully singled out
in middle school dodgeball, but I can’t claim that those who
threw those rubber balls at my own head were my enemies.
Though childhood hatred is a natural aspect of growing up,
feelings of contempt can permeate into adulthood.
Looking back, I’ve definitely disliked people before. A
physics teacher who never called me by my full first name.
An ex-girlfriend who didn’t like it when I danced in public.
Some colleagues after a fallout about work. A family member,
maybe for a day or two. Individuals in college with whom I
desperately wanted to be friends, only they didn’t give me
the time of day only because I didn’t go to the same church
as them.
Over time, I questioned whether outright avoiding
confrontation with those whom I dislike would eventually
just lead me down a deep road to truly hating them. If you
spend enough time with someone, you
eventually realize they’re not really so
terrible, and it’s harder to full-heartedly
hate them. But if you actively choose not
to encounter them, it’s easier to let your
mind run wild, creating feelings and
ideas and memories that might make it
easier to hate the person.
Despite all these experiences, I can’t
honestly say I’ve ever “hated” anyone.
But it would be unfair to myself and my
experienced emotions to move these
people from the “dislike” side of my brain
to the “like” side as if it were nothing.
I’m fighting against a human instinct to
want to separate individuals into mental
boxes of good and bad. I definitely have
friends who have no problem separating
individuals into categories with varying
degrees of hate: This person is on my side,
but this person did me wrong. This friend
from graduate school can come to the
wedding. This family member can’t see
my baby.
When we initially see someone as different than us, the
amygdala region of the brain affiliated with fear begins to
spike. Our emotions can be unknowingly validated by our
brain if those fears are substantiated by a negative interaction.
As negative feelings toward someone increase, our fight-or-
flight instincts become the only way to deal with such a large
irritant. But people’s actions are more gray and less two-sided
than what our primal social instincts want to let on. Everyone
has someone who loves them, but everyone has their own
faults. Most people claim to be for civil rights, but nobody is
born woke. People contain multitudes.
Whether you’re an ideological extremist or just a normal
person learning how to navigate the world, learning how
to un-hate — or recognize hate in the first place — can be a
difficult process. I feel the bumps of this journey myself:
I know I have to learn to accept that no matter how hard I
might try to appease everyone, some people in my own life
will just dislike me. But what about the people who claim to
hate me? What about my actions caused them to cross the line
between general distaste to focused, meaningful hate? Was it
a moment of carelessness that they chose to remember? Was
it a habit that I didn’t have the perspective to correct? Was I
sexist? Too political? Flat-out annoying?
Learning to let go of those worries is a difficult
commitment. In time, you may begin to realize how letting
go of anger makes it easier to embrace love; not necessarily
the romantic kind of love, but the fraternal kind as well.
There’s a similar relationship with hate that exists with
the concept of love. The two emotional states, love and hate,
rest on placing people, objects and ideas into subjective
categories — black and white binaries of good and bad. Both
hate and love requires care and some sort of reasoning for
why you choose to treat that person, thing or abstract thought
differently than others. Does the sight of your grandmother’s
empty rocking chair bring up intense, confusing emotions?
Even if your feelings are mixed, you might have to resort to
either “loving” it or “hating” it due to colloquial constraints.
In the end, the only difference in how strongly one feels
regarding their love versus their hate is that hatred is much
easier to practice.
Another aspect that links love and hate is how their usage
in the English language has evolved superficially. From
an idiomatic standpoint, “hate” is a word that is thrown
around pretty loosely among young people. It has become so
entrenched in our hyperbolic descriptions of the world that
after a while, it kind of loses its meaning. I hate kale. I hate
going to the gym. I hate Donald Trump. The word’s own
substance dissipates when it’s used to equally describe one’s
feelings toward a bitter salad base and the leader of the free
world.
The blurred lines of defining our distaste for petty
misdeeds come in tandem with the limitations of the English
language. There are very few ways to express a strong dislike
without coming across as explicit or serious. If you look up
the word “hate” on thesaurus.com, chances are you’ll find
that the synonyms that come up come across as far too
pompous and bombastic for daily usage. Hate becomes one
of the softest words in its own category. You could mention
that you dislike something. You dislike school. You dislike a
particular restaurant. But if you dislike something more than
normal, how do you articulate that feeling? You’d prefer not
to eat at Quiznos? That sounds even weirder. Your resentment
has to come across as stronger if you want to make a point.
Would you tell others that you loathe hummus? Do you hold
hummus in animosity? No, you simply resort to telling people
you hate hummus out of the simplicity that we’ve associated
with the word.
There will never be a time in life where you won’t have
to deal with difficult people. It’s a truth most will have to
learn the hard way by virtue of simply growing up, through
first heartbreaks, being on the e-board of a club or trying to
start out at a job. However, there lies trouble with how we
use the word “hate” in our vernacular and usage: If we use
such a powerful word so frequently, it will only diminish its
meaning where it’s needed most. In addition to lessening our
fundamental understandings of hate speech and hate crimes,
we numb ourselves to the emotional weight that a word like
“hate” carries. If our perception of hate becomes so skewed,
we’ll be unable to recognize the truly perverse and evil kinds
of hate that seek to pull us apart.
The most important concept to grasp in learning to let go
of anger is learning to acknowledge your ego. Hatred often
arises when we have been wronged in a way that lowers
our self-esteem. We want to protect ourselves by projecting
emotions on others. What steps can I take to ensure there
are no “me versus them” mentalities lingering along in my
subconscious?
I don’t intend to proclaim I’ve figured out how to stop
hating; nobody has. Even though I’m able to boast about not
personally hating anyone, I desperately crave the mental
capacity to open up and become aware of what I may still
be overlooking. I think we can all take small steps forward
to improve our understanding of hatred and how our
casualization of language might end up hurting it.
We come to college to challenge our ideas and assumptions,
and more importantly, to grow through thought. But how
do we begin to recognize when we might find ourselves
putting groups into boxes? How can I work harder to extend
myself beyond the communities in which I’ve been brought
up and confined to? What clubs haven’t I explored? What
events might help me meet new people? Through consistent
engagement with social settings that we might individually
deem uncomfortable, the hard path to letting go of hate just
might become easier.
Maxwell Barnes is studying Communication and Media in
LSA and is a Daily Staff Writer for Arts. He can be reached
at mxwell@umich.edu.
7B
I hate the word “hate”
BY MAXWELL BARNES, STATEMENT CONTRIBUTOR
BY ELI RALLO, STATEMENT COLUMNIST
ILLUSTRATION BY MAGGIE WIEBE