We seem to be veering toward why people hate others or consider themselves superior. The OP is asking why people who hate others or feel superior have turned to violence, an even stickier question. Here’s an excellent article on that very topic.
Hope this helps.
Actually, yes there was; there was no such state and no such nation-state (the two concepts are different), but then, the very concept of nation-state is quite recent.
The same applies to Germany, Switzerland or Spain, all of which existed as cultural concepts for centuries before becoming a single political entity, which is a nation or a nation-state depending on your concept of nation and on the names used by the political organization in question for its subdivisions.
And it’s “moral” precisely because that sense of good is rooted in our tribal tendencies. People are social animals. People aren’t inherently racist or bigoted against people of other faiths or nationalities - they learn that. But what we don’t learn, what is inside of us is a desire to connect, to belong to something bigger and more important than ourselves. We learn very early to self-identify as something.
I think people are vastly overstating the idea that we’re born to be tribal (see the paragraph below), and understating the cultural influences. In particular, how effective and useful “othering” minorities can be for political manipulation purposes.
I agree that there’s a strong instinct to be part of a group, but I think that can be “used” against racism just as much as it can be used for it. People can quite plainly be taught that they belong to the tolerant, welcoming, and open group, and to shun racists and the intolerant. It’s because hatred is simpler and works so well for politics that it’s so common.
What’s interesting, and in my view telling, is how in antebellum New Orleans, there were actually free blacks living within the city who were actually left alone for the most part. Some even owned slaves themselves. These black families may have been mostly of mixed ancestry but they were hardly considered white.
After the civil war, however, it was a different story. When the Union army occupied the city and tried to impose racial equality and empower black politicians, the reaction was swift, and violent. It resulted in the New Orleans race riot of 1866. At around that time, white terrorist organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan and the White League formed and terrorized blacks throughout the south. The red line that was crossed, and what compelled whites to view all blacks as the enemy was their desire to pursue equal status. In a society that was founded on white supremacy, and whose economy depended on it, there was no way they were about to tolerate the idea of black equality. And it was worth killing people to stop it, in their view. That meant not only blacks but also white sympathizers to the black cause, who in their view were traitors to their race (or their tribe, if you will).
It is incredibly easy to dehumanize a group of people.
Someone mentioned dogs and how a feeling of superiority doesn’t equate to violence. I gotta say, if dogs started walking upright, talking like humans, and expecting courtesies I only grant to humans (like eating at the same table, sitting on the same toilet, etc.), I might feel some kind of way. And if there enough stories going around that bad dogs were raping women or biting children’s faces off, I might really feel some kind of way. Even if the dogs I’ve befriended are all “good doggos”. And if there was a verified report of a dog in my neighborhood doing something bad, I wouldn’t shed a tear if a lynch mob went after him. I can’t say I wouldn’t be in that lynch mob my damn self if that uppity dog attacked someone I know.
I’m not a violent person, but there’s a part of me that loves violence. I say this because I love Game of Thrones. I fast-forward through all the gooey kissing/sex scenes so I can see some white walkers (or whomever) getting their asses kicked. So I can’t say that if I was in the real-live version of the Game of Thrones I would be protesting on the sidelines like a good little pacifist.
I think there’s a part in many of us that enjoy the idea of mass deaths–whether natural or anthropogenic. Perhaps it is a lust that can be traced to intraspecific/interspecific competition. When our competitors get wiped out, that translates into more resources for us. Not all of us will act on the lust, but many of us will sit back and quietly cheer on the “purge”. Doesn’t even matter if people who look just like us are the ones being purged. As long as we aren’t the ones being killed, it’s OK.
I’m gonna guess that in the heyday of American racism, most white folks weren’t violent towards blacks. They just didn’t find it necessary to condemn the ones who were. Perhaps they rationalized riots and lynch mobs by telling themselves that only the “bad” blacks were harmed. Or they told themselves that the violence would deter future “uppityness” and law-breaking. We hear such arguments being made today.
The hatred is caused by the overpowering desire to feel oneself to be a decent moral person. There is no more tenacious a hatred than that directed at those to whom you have been unjust and to whom you have done wrong. By hating the people who are your victims, you absolve yourself from self-reflection and the horror that would cause you.
Related: the age-old human need for a scapegoat – an innocent victim upon whom your own sins may be piled, who is then done to death in a ritual of cleansing. See: Jesus.
Sorry IMHO that is purely rubbish. Every rapist will have you believe they did it because sexual attraction is in their DNA. They are not born rapists either.
There are societies which welcomed foreigners and gave them sanctuary to prosper. Read about the Parsees who were murdered/chased away by Muslims from Iran. They found sanctuary in India and prospered and did even better economically than the locals.
The Cochin Jews in India have lived there since the time of King Solomon.
Cite : Cochin Jews - Wikipedia
In their 800+ years of living, there has been no anti-semitism.
I don’t dispute any of this, and I’m not sure what you find to be rubbish: as I said, people aren’t born racist; it is a learned behavior.
My comment about tribalism doesn’t mean that because we’re tribal, we all eventually learn to discriminate. I absolutely agree that racism and other ‘isms’ aren’t necessarily omnipresent. Some societies are more tolerant than others. Some societies value equality and are more inclusive than others.
But some tribes don’t teach these things, and when they don’t, we can see the worst aspects of tribalism on full display, which is what we have observed in places like Nazi Germany and in the American South. America society reinforced tribalism by creating an economic and political system based on white supremacy. America’s experience doesn’t speak for all humanity, however.
Bingo.
And it operated in much the same way with how Germans treated the Jews during the rise of Nazism. Mass violence isn’t just one individual killing another; it is a social act, a celebration of total domination over another group of people. In Nazi Germany, there were of course mass shootings, mass graves, concentration camps with emaciated victims being burned in ovens. Before that, though, there were definitely manifestations of violent thought. Putting yellow stars that say “Jude” so as to paint individuals and brand them for targeted collective hatred – that’s violent thought. That’s priming people to go on a rampage.
Another factor is horizontal oppression, although it’s not obvious at first glance how it applies here.
Consider children. They can be truly horrid and nasty to the misfits, indeed to anyone who is different. Why the excessive hostility and viciousness? Because children, all children, are kept powerless and are coerced and controlled all the damn time, so they have a lot of stoked fury on tap, so give them a target to unleash on and you’re going to see vicious behavior.
Well, it’s also true of citizens, ordinary adults. We call this a “democracy” but we’re all subjected to lots of coercive treatment, to being controlled without being consulted, with being bossed around in our place of employment, etc. So once again there’s a lot of fury on tap available to be unleashed.
Some politicians deliberately exploit it. That German dude from the 20th century? His rule was about authoritarian dictatorship; the shoah was not his purpose so much as his means of operation; it could have been (and indeed also was) other out-groups. Tapping into that bottled-up resentment and making it work for them.
Because they’re juvenile humans who haven’t learned self-control and tolerance, and for whom bullying and low-level violence doesn’t have the consequences seen in the adult world.
People rationalize their biases to make them seem logically justified. No one wants to see themselves as bigoted and evil, right? If you want to discriminate against someone without bothering your conscience, vilification and/or dehumanization of the “other” becomes necessary, particularly if complex, sophisticated thinking is not your strength.
There was a Black Mirror episode that poignantly illustrated this quirk in our psychology.
I’ve been wondering about that too- why was the desire for equal status so threatening to whites, that they were willing to respond with such violence?
That’s the part I don’t get- was it some sort of expectation that if the black population got equal status that they were going to somehow visit terrible retribution upon the white population? Was that even a reasonable expectation? Was the black proportion of the population significantly higher than the 32% in today’s Louisiana?
Maybe I’m looking at this from a distinctly 21st century viewpoint…
For generations white people believed that blacks were an intellectually and morally inferior species, filthy and diseased. Why wouldn’t whites react violently to the notion of black-white equality? It makes perfect sense to want to kill the monster you have been taught to fear.
And 32% of the population could do a lot of damage if they wanted to. If you were told that 30% of your neighbors were rapists and murderers, wouldn’t you be a little on edge?
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Well as a white person bad stuff is happening to you. Not particularly bad stuff, and not for any particular reason, but just because bad stuff happens to everyone has always happened to everyone and will continue to happen to everyone. Someone needs to be blamed. You can’t blame yourself, your family, your friends or other people like you, because that means you’re bad. And you can’t just chalk it up to life because that means that it will just keep happening and you are powerless to stop it. So you find someone else to blame. And if there is a particular someone who you percieve as doing better now than they were before, than its a good bet that their improvement is because they caused this bad stuff that happened to you. Thus it’s perfectly natural to hate them, and take back what they stole from you.
I don’t get the hate, either but here’s a stream of consciousness reply: The program that you watched, I have not viewed. However, evidently that sentiment is perhaps front and center more now than ever because most terrorists are white guys - they’s the ones doin’ the shootin’, after all. So much so, there is new class being offered at the University of Kansas - it is entitled Angry White Men. Some folks are angry about that - oh the irony. Now to give some perspective to your inquiry - based on my upbringing as anglo and another minority - my observation is anglo people don’t have anyone to blame anymore and don’t have coping/survival skills like minority people do.
How would you treat dogs if they fought for equal rights? If they demanded to be paid for their work? If putting them in a confined space without their permission was a crime?
I think there were two reasons:
First of all, ever since the slave revolt in Haiti (1793), slave-owning whites everywhere in the Western Hemisphere were terrified that they would meet the same fate. These fears exploded into full-on paranoia at the end of the Civil War when black people in some areas outnumbered whites and were now being encouraged by visiting union troops to do radical things like vote and negotiate fair labor contracts. They were terrified at the idea of black retribution. While most black people were simply looking to elevate themselves above slavery, whites projected onto them an insatiable desire to get even, which quickly led to black codes. So fear of black vengeance was a thing and the initial waves of white terrorism were focused on driving out the Freedman’s Bureau and terrorizing black people so that they not only stopped running for political office but also stopped voting as well.
But beyond that, white capitalism was race-based, and white land owners in the south (and industrialists in the north for that matter) wanted cheap labor. And they assumed that black people, with limited education and low socioeconomic status relative to whites, were relatively easy to exploit. Some of the worst racial violence was as much about black people fighting for better working conditions as much as it was about racial hatred. Whites just hated the idea that former slaves would dare to challenge the white man and demand a share of the economic production. Thus, it wasn’t enough to simply drive black people out of office. The whites believed that to be sufficiently reminded of their ex-slave status, they had to be stomped into the ground. The Thibodeaux, LA riot in the late 1880s was in response to black sugarcane workers going on strike. The East St. Louis riot of 1917 was also very much over economic pressures, and a response to white laborers having to compete with black migrants fleeing the South.
America is a society that has been forged on brutal economic competition, and our economic system was built on a model of race-based exploitation, in which it was legally and morally okay for whites to exploit and abuse non-whites. Moreover, when you introduce the notion of scarcity, that resources are finite, these underlying conditions make it very easy for those old racial fault lines to reappear.