The psychology of hating a marginalized group because they're doing better than you, vs because they're doing worse than you

Great Debates
1

Its kind of hard for me to explain what I mean, but when it comes to bigotry against marginalized groups, I notice that people will hate the marginalized group both because they are doing worse in life than the bigoted person, but also because they are doing better in life.

Like black people. White nationalists will hate them due to the higher per capita rates of unemployment, crime, or use welfare. But then when black people created black wall street in Oklahoma, white people rioted and destroyed everything because they didn’t like it when black people were successful.

White nationalists hated Obama because he was extremely educated, competent and accomplished. Trump is a response to all the rage white nationalists felt by having a black person who was ‘better’ than them be president for 8 years.

Ashkenazi Jews are routinely hated all over the world because they tend to have better life outcomes than other groups (more education, more wealth, more income, more influential and prestigious careers, etc).

Or women. Some misogynists hate women because some of them are dependent on welfare. But now that women have more education, lower unemployment rates and are more likely to own homes, some men are feeling angry because they feel left behind and because women’s standards are too high.

It just seems like when a marginalized group is doing worse than you (from the perspective of the bigot) people feel contempt, disgust and sanctimoniousness.

But when the marginalized group is doing better than ‘you’, then people feel an intense rage and desire to destroy them and get revenge on them. The incel movement, which is full of rage and revenge fantasies, seems to be motivated in large part because women are doing better in life and because of that their standards have increased.

Is there a term for this? Like if a marginalized group is doing worse you feel disgust and contempt, but if they establish any kind of dominance or success then you become filled with rage, revenge fantasies and a desire to put them back in their place (beneath you)?

2

There are all kinds of sociology terms like “resentment-based racism” that deal with only half of what you talk about, but yeah, I can’t think of a single term that encompasses both of what you said - that a minority group is looked down on for being inferior, but then hated for being superior. Most minorities fall into only either one or the other but not both, so I guess a term hasn’t been coined yet.

However…there is a phenomenon where the majority group doesn’t begrudge the minority group success as long as it’s in a way the majority group can “accept.” For instance, white people have, for maybe half a century, accepted and tolerated black dominance in many pro sports like the NBA, NFL, etc. - long after the time of Jackie Robinson - because athletics is considered an “acceptable” field for black people to dominate in - but they might not be okay with black people succeeding in fields that are thought of as white. I’m not sure if there’s a term for this.

3

I feel like this is more of a form of forced cultural acceptance. Jackie Robinson faced a ton of hate in baseball. Jack Johnson faced a ton of hate for being the first black heavyweight boxer. The first black NFL players faced hatred.

So yeah people are accepting of black athletes now, but thats only because their parents and grandparents were filled with impotent rage about black athletes beating white athletes. I feel thats partly why white nationalists get so enraged when people like Obama succeed, because they know that they are changing the culture and future generations will be fine with black presidents the same way people in the modern era are fine with black professional athletes. Lots of people in Gen Z have never lived in a world where a black president was considered unnatural.

I do think you have a point though about how much status and power a job has. A black person who becomes the first pro golfer is not going to face the same hatred as the first black police officer, governor, president, judge, prosecutor, etc.

4

Also with sports it’s still possible to rationalize it away while continuing to hold extreme racist beliefs.

To this day, if you see a video posted of a black athelete performing brilliantly in some sport, virtually all the comments will be about their natural athleticism or genetics. Whereas white athletes will have comments about their skill, hard work or intelligent play. And I am not just talking racists, this is just the common framing that still exists IME.

The bigger challenge for the racist of course is to claim that a group is unable to be doctors, engineers etc despite many such people working in such professions. Hence why so much has been made of DEI, and caricaturing it as lowering standards.

5

This reminds me of a quote by Lyndon Johnson: “If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.”

6

I question all the "because"s in the OP. My guess is that the hatred comes first, rather than being caused by the material circumstances of the group hated.

7

I think what it really comes down to is simply that they are “others”; the dominant group maintains that they are not us, and they can never be us, and we can never be them. So the presence of those seen as alien is a challenge to the hegemony of the dominant group. This is pure ape-brain tribalism, those others intruding on OUR territory! People are jealous of their countries, and don’t take having to share them with non-us’s very well.

8

I agree with Lumpy and Thudlow_Boink. The hate comes first and, once it’s there, any state of affairs vis a vis “us” and “them” is a justification.

9

Well, when we don’t get murdered.

Agreeing with Lumpy, 74westy, and Thudlow_Boink

It’s because the prejudice isn’t based on facts. (Sometimes specific people people will even give entirely contradictory reasons for vilifying the group they’re against.) It’s based on a desire to vilify an out-group. That’s also why groups indistinguishable to outsiders often schism based on minor points and turn on each other, sometimes to the point of slaughter.

This is probably based, very far back in the head, on a desire for safety. But it also endangers the people who do it.

10

It’s funny though because even considering all people of a given ethnicity of one tribe is also quite unnatural.

But I guess how it will work is that such people’s venom is primarily aimed at the “strange” looking people now, but in a hypothetical monoracial, monocultural environment they’ll find other criteria to determine an “out” group that they can discriminate against.

11

To echo what others have already said:

In my work as a HS teacher, I came across the work of research psychologist Dan Olweus. During the 70-90’s he conducted very big longitudinal studies on schoolyard bullying. Some stretched over 15 years and involved many thousand respondents. I could go on at length about the topic, but the relevant part of his research is this:

A bully will look for anyone who is other, even the tiniest bit. “He got bullied because he’s got freckles” will never be said if the freckled guy is 6’5" and ripped. No one will bully him. The bully will seek out a weaker victim, with an identifiable feature that they can rally the other bullies about.

So what I’m saying is: for reason of hatred, their own insecurity or whatever, the bully - and by extension the bigot/racist - will actively look for someone to put down, bully, hate, discriminate against. The detail that supposedly awakens the hatred is of no consequence, it can be so minor that only the bully ever perceives it. But once noticed, it will then become the defining feature of the victim.

“Race” is of course quite easy to use, when trying to find that other to hate, even if that person basically has the same skin color as the bully.

12

" My life is shit, why isn’t his life shit as well? "

13

You don’t need to be hypothetical about it. White European Christians killed quite a lot of each other over exactly what type of Christians they’d schismed into.

14

I completely agree with this too. I’m just wondering how it works in the sense that, the response bigots have varied based on whether the group they hate is doing worse than them or better than them.

Bigots feel contempt, ridicule and disgust when a marginalized person is doing worse than them, but when a marginalized person is doing better than them they don’t feel disgust, they feel rage and impulses for harm and revenge. I’m just wondering about the underlying psychology of it.

Is it because the bigot feels the marginalized group is supposed to be inferior, and when they escape that inferior box the bigot puts them in, their entire worldview starts to collapse and they feel an intense urge to get revenge?

It reminds me of the quote from the movie missisippi burning where one of the FBI agents talks about something his father who was a farmer in Mississippi said. A black farmer had moved in nearby and the black farmer started doing better than the white FBI agent’s dad. So his dad killed off the black farmers livestock. Then the white FBI agent’s dad told his son something like 'Son, if you’re not better than a n*gger, who are you better than?"

Maybe thats why Obama caused so much rage among white conservatives in the US. How are white nationalists supposed to feel superior to black people when a black man is more educated, accomplished and intelligent than them and they are reminded of that fact everyday.

15

Racists aren’t bound by logic. They can, and I think usually do, believe contradictory things simultaneously. The belief system is not only that the out-group are inherently less worthy than the in-group, but that the out-group is being given unfair advantages.

You can believe that Blacks and immigrants are lazy, stupid, and shiftless – while still believing that they are all living in the lap of luxury off government welfare programs.

Likewise, Jews are famously both the secret masters of capitalism and the masterminds of the international Communist conspiracy.

16

At the risk of nitpicking, none of this is contradictory. The racist belief is that black people are given an unfair external advantage (luxury welfare, DEI, affirmative action, lax treatment, etc) - which in no way contradicts the belief that they are internally inferior, more criminal and thuggish, and lazy.

17

Sephardic Jewish posters will indignantly inform you that they’re hated even more than Ashkenazis. :angry:

18

I feel the “logic” is when a white bigot sees a black person doing in a negative situation, like committing a crime or being unemployed, he attributes that to their inherent flaws. And when he sees a black person in a positive situation, like graduating from college or being successful in business, he feels resentment because he believes their success was undeservedly given to them.

19

The in-group/ out-group theory of tribal territorialism I alluded to earlier would fit the fact that successful, educated, middle-class blacks were often seen by extreme racists as more threatening than “niggers”. Take that bizarre creature of the pre-Civil Rights imagination, the Darkie: a degenerate imbecile, as much ape as man. Basically, the incarnation of every way in which black people were different than white people, minus any actual humanity. Yet however much bigots claimed to hold the Darkie in contempt, there was a peculiar comfort or reassurance in believing that African-Americans were indeed Darkies; because obviously such a creature could never, except by white negligence, ever truly threaten whites’ possession of the country. Whereas Black Men would be another matter.

20

With bigots it’s always backwards reasoning. They don’t hate X group because of something X group does or is; they hate X, then come up with justifications for that hatred. The constant factor is “X is hated”, the reasons given are arbitrary and subject to change as proves convenient.