How can you hate someone you don't even know?

One of the most interesting aspects of blogging is when my readers ask questions which take me by surprise as it does remind me that there are some things which I think are obvious or that I just take for granted but others may have a totally different point of view. In this case, I wrote that my father really hated white people and was a racist - my reader Amanda wondered why he hated white people so much, like did his path ever cross with some white people who had caused him grave offence? I had to point out to her that my father lived in Ang Mo Kio and he didn't speak English, so the first time he actually met a real white person was when I introduced him to my husband. (I'm totally out to my parents but they're quite neutral on the issue of my sexuality as we're not close.) But growing up in Singapore, my father spouted so much racist rhetoric about white people despite never actually met one before - yeah I'm sure he must have walked past foreign tourists who were white in somewhere like Chinatown or Orchard Road before but that doesn't really count as 'meeting' a white person if you don't actually talk to them. Thus my reader Amanda found it really puzzling how my father can hate white people so much when he has actually only met one white person before (my husband)? Ironically, as my husband is polite and respectful, my father is quite happy to welcome my husband into the family home and we would go out for dinner together in Ang Mo Kio as a family. There was no racist hostility directed at my husband for the colour of his skin, which is bizarre and surprising, given the amount of nasty racist rhetoric my father has spouted over the years. 

Thus I had to point out to Amanda that my father's behaviour really isn't that unique - if you were to look at homophobia for example, a lot of the most homophobic people have never met a real gay person before as they would simply mix in totally different social circles. Yet their hatred of gay people is not because a gay person has once done something terrible or disrespectful to offend them, no - it is a bizarre form of one-sided hatred because if you're not hating an individual who has wronged you or offended you, you're hating someone you have never ever met and probably will never met. Likewise, there is a lot of anti-Muslim hatred in the West, yet those who hate Muslims are the least likely to mix with Muslim friends and thus they are hating people they have never ever met. I find this rather weird of course, because there are people I do hate. As my regular readers will know, I left my old job because I totally fell out with the people there - now it is not the time and place to discuss what happened but it suffices to say that yeah, I do hate a few people there because on how they had behaved towards me. Likewise, if we were to go back to my previous few jobs, I can name individuals there whom I do hate - that's the problem with work, you're placed in a situation with people you wouldn't normally choose as friends and you have to work with them; that's when conflicts can occur. So yes, when I hate someone, it is personal, I can tell you exactly why I hate him/her because of what s/he has done. I'm not above hate, there are people whom I do hate but the reasons for harboring that hatred can always be traced back to some argument or conflict and that's quite different from the way my father has mastered the art of hating people he has never ever met. 

The way I see it, there are enough nasty people around doing awful things and I have enough people in my life to hate already, I don't have the time, energy or inclination to hate people whom I don't know. Now don't get me wrong, it doesn't stop me from being judgmental - let me give you an example, I was watching the news on Youtube about the Queen's funeral and a reporter turned up rather poorly dressed at a formal event. I thought, for crying out aloud, I know you're a reporter but this is the Queen's funeral and you're not dressed appropriately, how disrespectful. Either you're too poor to afford anything more formal for the occasion or you're hopelessly ignorant of social norms and protocol for such an occasion but either way, neither poverty or ignorance is an acceptable excuse for turning up dressed so casually at the Queen's funeral as you come across as a poor, ignorant commoner. He was hopelessly common. Yes, I was very judgmental about this young journalist but do I hate him? No, that would be personal - I don't hate the journalist per se even if I thought his choice of attire was wholly inappropriate for the occasion. I may judge people for their mistakes and poor judgment, but I don't hate them. If I may admit, I judge people who make dumb mistakes like that because I then remind myself that I'm more intelligent, richer and would so never make that same mistake of turning up at the Queen's funeral being so inappropriately dressed. When I judge people, I tell myself, "I'm better than this person/these people" and that makes me feel superior. Thus feeling superior to others I judge isn't hatred, even if in this case, it is indeed personal; I am judging that young journalist for his social faux pas but I don't hate him, that is a different kind of emotion.  

But why does my father hate white people then? Mind you, he doesn't just hate white people, he hates Indian people but he especially hates Muslims. I can't bring myself to repeat some of the awful things he has said about Muslims but it is truly hate speech/hate crime rhetoric. So the reason why my father hates so many different groups of people is that he actually hates himself - he had an older brother who was good looking and smart. Big brother went on to excel at school, start his own business and became insanely rich whilst my father did none of that, he ended up being a primary school teacher as he couldn't understand anything beyond the primary school curriculum and when Chinese-medium schools were phased out in Singapore, he could only teach the Chinese language at primary schools. Whilst working at a local primary school is a perfectly normal, working class job, however when you have a super rich, good looking big brother who is a multi-millionaire then yeah, you would look like a real loser in stark contrast. I earn more than my two siblings and I often wonder how I might feel if I actually learned less than one or both of them? Would I care or would the comparison drive me nuts? Would I give in to jealousy in this case? If my father were to admit that he is angry and disappointed with himself, that he hates himself for being such a loser compared to his super successful big brother, then oh dear, that would be a slippery slope you can't afford to fall down. Giving in to this kind of self-hatred could lead to depression and suicide, thus by father learnt to externalize that hatred by projecting it outwards to hate everyone else. It is a form of coping mechanism of sorts, that much hatred cannot be bottled up forever, it has to be diverted somewhere. 

Now a far more rational, sensible and logical approach to this would be to deal with the problem at source and solve it, rather than allow this self-hatred to build up and then explode when it is diverted in the wrong direction. In my father's case, he had two choices: he earned a lot less than his brother and that made him feel inadequate and inferior. He could either find a way to earn more (which would have meant a change of career) or he could simply accept that he was earning less because of his choice of career and be content with the situation. I suppose trying to earn more or at least as much as my uncle would have been a really tall order given how successful my uncle was as a businessman - it would be like trying to take on Usain Bolt in sprint, losing under such circumstances would be inevitable. Then I suppose there would be the question of if my father didn't work as a teacher, what could he do? I'm not sure if there was any obvious answer to that question, given that it was clear that unlike my uncle, my father simply had no business acumen at all. Then there's the second option of simply accepting your fate in life - he chose to be a teacher, that's the decision he has made. But he found that impossible to do as those feelings of jealousy overwhelmed him, he didn't have a way to come to terms with it and find a resolution. Learning to deal with complex human emotions take a lot of social skills - often we think of social skills in the way we interact with others, but we also need those same skills to manage our many emotions like anger, grief, jealousy, frustration, fear and anxiety. What we see in my father is a result of a man who isn't good at handling and processing those feelings appropriately and whilst I can see how his racism is a result of diverted hatred, it is a terrible way to process those feelings. Unfortunately, many adults don't know how to handle their feelings. 

So let's look at the three groups of people my father really hate: Indians, Malays/Muslims and white people. Well, my father doesn't have any friends from people of any of those categories because of the language barrier, given that he doesn't speak English. In a recent post, I talked about how many people mourning the death of the Queen have a one way relationship with her - they know every single minute detail of the Queen's life but the Queen doesn't know them at all. Even if they have ever met the Queen very briefly, the Queen would never remember them because she has to meet so many people as part of her royal duties but for these people, meeting the Queen might probably be the best day of their lives. Likewise in the case of my father, his hatred is one way as he doesn't know any Indian, Muslim or white people at all. That's just as well as I don't really trust my father to behave himself if he is actually in a situation whereby he has to deal with a Muslim colleague (he has retired over 20 years ago). However if he was forced to encounter a real Muslim person, say if a Muslim family moves in next door, then they might challenge a lot of the negative stereotypes that my father uses to justify his hatred of Muslims. Such one way relationships based on hatred can only be perpetuated if the person harboring the hatred doesn't actually meet the object of the hatred: that way, that hatred is an abstract projection not based on reality, but entirely a work of fiction. A well-educated person wouldn't need to wait for a Muslim family to move in next door to get hold of very accurate information about Muslims to form a well-informed opinion but my father isn't educated, thus he has no concept of how to do any kind of research to help him make sense of the situation. 

I do feel that my father's way of processing hatred is deeply flawed: allow me to give you an example of how it has gone badly wrong in this example. Around the period 1984 - 1985, we had a neighbour on our street who were a white family from New Zealand. My sister and I used to go play with their kids as we were approximately the same age then. I was so young then, I couldn't understand the concept of racism - I just thought this family were so nice: I was welcomed into their home to play with their kids and I was always well-fed with cake, ice cream and other delicious treats when I was there. I didn't care about the colour of their skin or what country they were from, they were just nice people and I liked them very much. Obviously, this Kiwi family didn't speak any Chinese so there was no way my father could have even had a basic conversation with them but that didn't stop him from spouting some really nasty, hateful racist rhetoric about that family. That confused me of course - what have they done to make my father hate them so much? Absolutely nothing. Yet my father treated them as if they were the enemy, as if they were nasty people who were determined to make life hell for him and harm him. My father has a younger brother (not to be confused with the super rich older brother) who has done some really horrible things to my father and I also remember one of my father's colleague who went out of her way to make life difficult for my father. Certainly, my father has very good reasons to hate both of these people because of how they treated him. I thought my father was totally wrong to put that Kiwi family in the same category as those two individuals who have wronged him, it just didn't make sense at all - then again my father was neither logical nor rational.

I do have a theory about why my father doesn't project hate in the right direction. Let's look at those two people who have wronged him in the past and have done horrible things to him: the first person was his younger brother (it's a long story, my uncle is a nasty piece of work who is pure evil). Even I can say unequivocally that I hate him for what he did to my father, but that's another story for another day. The other person was a colleague, a fellow Chinese teacher at the school where my father worked and she went out of her way to pick fights with him. Yeah she was a miserable old witch but she was remarkably similar to my father in terms of their social and cultural background. Most of us want to imagine that nasty, horrible people come from far away, like another country where they practice a different religion and speak a different language; but in my father's case, these two bad people causing him grief were from his own family and in his workplace - they weren't foreigners from halfway around the world, no - in fact, they were as local as you could get. That's an inconvenient truth for my father, so rather than deal with the fact that the people who hate him the most were so incredibly close to him, he simply shoves that into a massive blind spot and pursue an alternate version of the truth, where he insists that the bad people to be feared are foreigners (rather than your own evil brother or that nasty bitch at work). Unfortunately for my father, there was no way he could remove the threats posed by those two nasty people from his life, so he buried his head in the sand like an ostrich and pretended that the real enemies were people like Muslims and white people. It was a coping mechanism of sorts (and not a very good one) but the whole sad situation was dismal. 

Allow me to give you an example which is quite common with older Singaporeans of my father's generation. My father was very obsessed about "Angmoh kwasway tiongkok lang/白人看不起华人" (white people looking down on Chinese people). His justification was that it was a colonial mindset, that white people from places like America and Europe would always look down on Chinese people because they felt they were superior and richer. Now as a British Chinese person, I can tell you that's not true at all, whether someone looks down on you depends on your individual circumstances, whether you are rich or poor - it has nothing to do with racism. In any case, given that my father didn't know a single white person until he met my husband, that theory was at best an assumption that was completely untested. It seemed bizarre that my father was so upset about the possibility of a white person (whom he has never met and will never meet) from America looking down on him for being poor, when in reality, it was his own parents, sibling, wife and children who were looking at him and thinking, "you're a lot poorer than your big brother." The people looking down on him weren't in white people in New York or Paris, no they were his own family members! Confronting that reality was simply too much for him to deal with - he didn't know to cope with it, so he conveniently swept that under the carpet to ignore it whilst pretending that the real threat of people looking down on him came from far away in America and Europe. He creates an imaginary problem to divert attention away from a very real problem he cannot solve, that is utterly bizarre and illogical. 

Once again, a big thank you to Amanda for that question which led to me exploring why my father's pattern of hatred is so bizarre and illogical. He hates all these people he has never met for two reasons: it is an outward projection of the self-hatred and self-loathing he feels and also there were at least two people very close to him in his life whom he had every reason to hate. But hating them would only reveal just how miserable his life is - being attacked by his own younger brother and being stuck in a job he hated, with nasty colleagues who made life hell for him but without any prospect of finding a better job, he simply had no choice but to keep on working at that school despite the terrible conflicts he faced at work . Put those two reasons together and you have created a perfect storm for my father to create an imaginary threat that originates from a foreign land far, far away and project all that hatred towards them as if they are the real threat despite never ever even meeting any of these white foreigners before (whilst ignoring the very real threats that were on his doorstep like his brother and colleagues). It may sound bizarre, but if you look at the kind of people who hate Muslims, gays, immigrants, liberals, poor people, rich people etc - you'll probably find a lot of similar patterns as well in terms of the reasons why they have chosen to hate people they've never crossed paths with instead of focusing on the real enemies they cannot avoid. So what do you think? Have you ever come across this kind of hatred before and would my theory apply? Are you in full control of your emotions? Please leave a comment below and many thanks for reading.