People often describe Algerians as hateful of Europeans. Europeans have an easier time in Algeria. They're considered better looking and treated well- it's the Black people who are hated and suffer, not the Europeans😅when people refer to Algerian antiFrench hatred they are decontextualising the genocidal settler colonialism that Algerians lived through and the dynamic of occupation and apartheid and ethnic cleansing/forcible displacement- Algerians hate white supremacists. That's a decision unlike being white. Forgive me if I misunderstood your point. It's just I've read the anglophone literature on algeria- it's appalling. Many europeans automatically side with the civilised french against the barbaric algerian and accept french propaganda easily. I'll be releasing an article on the genocide that my grandad survived on 5 july. You have a beautiful writing style but this reads a little like depoliticised psychology.
That's ok. I'm sorry the word makes you uncomfortable. This is exactly about that discomfort. I can be wrong, I'm not Algerian. But I think all oppressed people invariably experience hatred of the oppressor and we have to destigmatize talking about it openly.
I just think there is a degree of false conflation. I feel like when something like genocide is spoken about then those dynamics mentioned in my initial comment should be explicitly stated, not least when our revolution for instance is characterised as coming from a place of racial and religious hate. How things are understood are based on the discursive context
Maybe I am speaking also from my experience of expressing my haarrowing experiences with whites only to be promptly shut down with depolticised psycholgy. You are consistent, but the overwhelming majority of individuals who have a lot to say about antiwhite hate/prejudice/racism don't have much to say at all about the structural hates- I know you touch on this. It means the priority for these people isn't actualt combatting hate.
My dear friend, this is exactly why this essay is written, this exchange is so valuable and precious to me. I hear you, totally.I'm not asking you to adopt a term that has been weaponized against you, that's ludicrous. I'm trying to create a space to openly express these fundamental experiences, like yours or mine. We really can't talk about these things openly, and the silence operates as permission for more oppressive colonial behavior. I reclaimed the word hate for myself, not everybody has to do that. When we express any negative emotion we are immediately disqualified. Gone from discourse. I'm not trying to flatten your experience, God forbid, and I truly apologize if that's what happened. I'm trying to make it possible to even have the conversation without shame.
💡💡💡thanks for your kind response and clarification. I hear your points now. Yes I think I agree then- hate signals that you've been violated at some point in some way imo. It becomes bad when it is targeted to the wrong group. But it's still information that needs listening to. My hero emir abdelkader waged resistance against the french in the 19th century. Yet he protected the christians in syria from sectarian violence, pointing out that there is a difference between an occupier and innocent person. I guess hate becomes bad when you can't think straight or you're acting from that place eg killing nonmilitary targets. But at the same time it tells you something and you should listen to it. I'm sorry if my initial comments were offensive- i'm doing emdr therapy for my ptsd and this post touches on my triggers. Thank you for being kind.
I would distinguish the generative potential of rage from the poisonous effects of hate. But I haven’t suffered under colonization and racial discrimination, so who am I to judge? Thank you for this writing, which gave me much to reflect on…
That was a lot to unpack. I read the article three times, as well as the Algeria-related comments; found myself agreeing and disagreeing, and then agreeing again, and then spent the next three hours thinking about it and trying to find the answers to some questions and talking points you raised, so thanks for that - genuinely, because it sent me into such a weirdly obsessive rabbit hole.
My intention was mainly to try and find the answers to the question of what we're supposed to do with hate, how do we "cure" it and whether we should at all, but then in the process I quickly realised that to do that, first I needed an entirely new framework. As you mentioned, the English word "hate" seems to encompass an enormous range of psychologically distinct phenomena that share surface features but also differ enormously. So if you continue reading, I apologise in advance, because this is going to be much longer than it has any right to be... I basically tried to synthesise all the points you raised and my own thoughts about it, and what I ended up is this model of hate with two components - the first one asks what produces the hatred (categories), while the second one explores a set of independent questions that can be asked of any hatred regardless of which category it belongs to (dimensions).
The five distinctive categories I came up with are as follows:
- Intergroup hate: hatred of someone as a representative of a group they belong to; the individual is interchangeable with any other group member (e.g., hating someone because they're a member of a rival ethnic group)
- Interpersonal hate: hatred rooted in a specific history/relationship between two (or more) individuals; the target matters as that person, not a stand-in for anything else (e.g., hating an ex-partner who betrayed you)
- Structural hate: hatred produced by an asymmetric relationship in which the position itself, not the individual occupying it, assigns the emotional role (e.g., colonised/coloniser, oppressed/oppressor, prisoner/jailor, etc.) - I think this is the category where the philosophical question of justification is the sharpest
- Abstract hate: hatred directed at a system, institution, or idea rather than a person; the target has no single face or body (e.g., hating "the bureaucracy" or "capitalism")
- Self-directed hate: hatred turned inward at oneself; hater and hated are the same person (e.g., hating yourself for a past failure). *I included this one because it feels like a distinctive category, but it likely has entirely different mechanism of action, it may belong here only by analogy, closer to self-contempt or self-disgust than to the rest, so I will ignore it for now*
For clarification, perhaps it's also worth mentioning that two categories here often run together historically without being identical: intergroup and structural hate co-occur constantly (e.g. colonialism, slavery, occupation) because power asymmetries are usually organised along group lines, but they're separable; structural and intergroup hate are independent variables that are correlated for historical/institutional reasons, not definitionally linked.
As for dimensions, I also identified five in some sort of a binary axis:
- Origin/trigger: whether the hatred is firsthand, or inherited/transmitted with no personal injury at all, or arose with no clear external trigger (an internally generated need, as in some defensive cases)
- Accuracy of appraisal: whether the hatred correctly tracks a real, current harm (veridical) or has become distorted/displaced relative to the target's actual conduct. This is the dimension that carries the most moral weight
- Temporal structure: whether the hatred is a short-lived episode tied to a single triggering event, or a durable standing sentiment that persists independent of any ongoing trigger
- Function: not "is this hatred self-preserving" (because almost all hatred is, momentarily, by definition), but what is it *aimed* at - whether it does anything beyond managing the hater's internal state (build identity, motivate real action, sustain a project), or is it purely defensive and inert, existing only to regulate shame or ambivalence?
- Effect: separate from function - what the hatred actually *produces*, regardless of what it was aimed at. A hatred can be accurate, constructively aimed at real resistance, and still leave the person who carried it fragmented and damaged (i.e. justification and cost are independent variables, not opposites)
One thing I noticed is that the model isn't static - hatred can drift along the categories over time, and one of the clearest patterns is that destabilised hatred (a structural relationship that's ended, an interpersonal grudge that's outlived its proportion, an abstraction with nowhere to land, etc.) tends to drift toward the intergroup category and toward distortion, because group-based categorisation is one of the oldest, cheapest pieces of human social cognition and is always available as a place for unanchored hatred to settle.
But anyway, it's not worth dwelling on here, I think the more important question is what to do with hatred once you have it. Or, perhaps, is hate ever actually useful? And I think the honest answer here is yes, sometimes. It can be useful as an accurate information of an ongoing threat or harm - e.g. the prisoner's hatred of an actively cruel jailor is real and accurate and not a malfunction, and thus dismissing all hatred as irrational or pathological would be both intellectually and emotionally dishonest. It can also be useful as motivation - help mobilise resistance, hold a group together under threat (e.g. social cohesion in wartime), or give a person the resolve to leave a genuinely harmful relationship. I think one could argue that the right kind of hatred, focused and accurately targeted, is sometimes the only emotional posture with enough staying power to sustain costly, long-term opposition to a real injustice. However, it's also probably worth accepting that even fully veridical, fully constructive hatred can be corrosive to carry, fragment the person sustaining it, narrow their identity to the conflict, and outlast its own usefulness once the original threat is gone. In other words, justification doesn't buy immunity from cost. So I think "useful" has to be asked three separate times - is it accurate, does it do something, and what does it do to the person carrying it?
And this leads me (finally) to searching for the "cure", which I'd argue is only needed for not useful, unresolved hatred. If the problem is accuracy (distorted/displaced hatred): the work is re-attaching the feeling to its real object, or discovering it has none. Scapegoated or inherited hatred, directed at a group that didn't actually cause the harm, doesn't respond well to being told to "let go"; it responds to being shown, concretely, that the appraisal doesn't match reality. I.e. it requires cognitive correction instead of an emotional release.
If the problem is temporal structure (a durable sentiment that has outlived its trigger): the work is closer to what grief or trauma processing does; not erasing the original event's reality, but allowing the standing disposition to deactivate once it's no longer doing anything, rather than letting it run on inertia.
If the problem is function (purely defensive, accomplishing nothing beyond internal-state management): the underlying wound is the actual target, not the hatred itself. I.e. this kind of hatred is a symptom; and resolving it means addressing what it's defending against, since the hatred will simply regenerate against a new target if the underlying need persists.
If the problem is purely cost, with accuracy and function both intact: the honest answer may be that there's a real acceptable trade-off rather than a clean fix. The hatred may need to be carried for as long as the structural harm persists, with the cost managed rather than eliminated, and only fully resolvable once the actual asymmetric relationship producing it ends.
Once again, forgive me for my ramblings. This is probably way too long for a comment, but your article gave me a lot of food for thought and I needed to put it on paper in some way.
"Verbal Bruce Lee, but only in my head!" - you defined perfectly how do I feel in this very moment of my life.
In german there is a powerful word to describe this mental process, Grübeln, in italian "Rimuginare" you can feel the power of thees words in their cacophony, which render exactly what happens in the mind.
I do not argue internally with someone in particular, it is rather against "system of values" that betrayed me. Rationally I'm convinced that it's better I let it go, but it is not the just thing to do on a more humanistic standpoint.
Sorry, just a rant, but it was inspired by your brilliant analysis and I wanted to tell you it really resonated in me, particularly the above.
Super interesting piece. I don’t want to argue with the many thought-provoking points you raise but to simply point out something folks seem to forget. One can’t fight hatred with hatred for the simple reason that if you do so, at the end of the day and on the other side of the equation, you’ll end up with more hatred. So if your objective or goal is to lessen the force of hate, you have no choice but to love. (That’s on a personal level, ofc since I don’t believe that there is any sense in channeling negative affects for “positive” use. I don’t think there is any sense in the rather popular notion that there can be a constructive use of anger or hatred. The historical examples you give are apropos but in those cases I’d wager a guess that the affective core of the matter is the use of hatred as a rhetorical tool and for the purpose of demagoguery or mass mobilization…)
I love that your so open in exploring all its positives and negatives.
People often describe Algerians as hateful of Europeans. Europeans have an easier time in Algeria. They're considered better looking and treated well- it's the Black people who are hated and suffer, not the Europeans😅when people refer to Algerian antiFrench hatred they are decontextualising the genocidal settler colonialism that Algerians lived through and the dynamic of occupation and apartheid and ethnic cleansing/forcible displacement- Algerians hate white supremacists. That's a decision unlike being white. Forgive me if I misunderstood your point. It's just I've read the anglophone literature on algeria- it's appalling. Many europeans automatically side with the civilised french against the barbaric algerian and accept french propaganda easily. I'll be releasing an article on the genocide that my grandad survived on 5 july. You have a beautiful writing style but this reads a little like depoliticised psychology.
My point was that Algerian hatred was historically and materially justified and propelled resistance. Idk if that didn’t come across.
It did kind of. I'm just uncomfortable with it being caled hate.
That's ok. I'm sorry the word makes you uncomfortable. This is exactly about that discomfort. I can be wrong, I'm not Algerian. But I think all oppressed people invariably experience hatred of the oppressor and we have to destigmatize talking about it openly.
I just think there is a degree of false conflation. I feel like when something like genocide is spoken about then those dynamics mentioned in my initial comment should be explicitly stated, not least when our revolution for instance is characterised as coming from a place of racial and religious hate. How things are understood are based on the discursive context
Maybe I am speaking also from my experience of expressing my haarrowing experiences with whites only to be promptly shut down with depolticised psycholgy. You are consistent, but the overwhelming majority of individuals who have a lot to say about antiwhite hate/prejudice/racism don't have much to say at all about the structural hates- I know you touch on this. It means the priority for these people isn't actualt combatting hate.
My dear friend, this is exactly why this essay is written, this exchange is so valuable and precious to me. I hear you, totally.I'm not asking you to adopt a term that has been weaponized against you, that's ludicrous. I'm trying to create a space to openly express these fundamental experiences, like yours or mine. We really can't talk about these things openly, and the silence operates as permission for more oppressive colonial behavior. I reclaimed the word hate for myself, not everybody has to do that. When we express any negative emotion we are immediately disqualified. Gone from discourse. I'm not trying to flatten your experience, God forbid, and I truly apologize if that's what happened. I'm trying to make it possible to even have the conversation without shame.
💡💡💡thanks for your kind response and clarification. I hear your points now. Yes I think I agree then- hate signals that you've been violated at some point in some way imo. It becomes bad when it is targeted to the wrong group. But it's still information that needs listening to. My hero emir abdelkader waged resistance against the french in the 19th century. Yet he protected the christians in syria from sectarian violence, pointing out that there is a difference between an occupier and innocent person. I guess hate becomes bad when you can't think straight or you're acting from that place eg killing nonmilitary targets. But at the same time it tells you something and you should listen to it. I'm sorry if my initial comments were offensive- i'm doing emdr therapy for my ptsd and this post touches on my triggers. Thank you for being kind.
I would distinguish the generative potential of rage from the poisonous effects of hate. But I haven’t suffered under colonization and racial discrimination, so who am I to judge? Thank you for this writing, which gave me much to reflect on…
That was a lot to unpack. I read the article three times, as well as the Algeria-related comments; found myself agreeing and disagreeing, and then agreeing again, and then spent the next three hours thinking about it and trying to find the answers to some questions and talking points you raised, so thanks for that - genuinely, because it sent me into such a weirdly obsessive rabbit hole.
My intention was mainly to try and find the answers to the question of what we're supposed to do with hate, how do we "cure" it and whether we should at all, but then in the process I quickly realised that to do that, first I needed an entirely new framework. As you mentioned, the English word "hate" seems to encompass an enormous range of psychologically distinct phenomena that share surface features but also differ enormously. So if you continue reading, I apologise in advance, because this is going to be much longer than it has any right to be... I basically tried to synthesise all the points you raised and my own thoughts about it, and what I ended up is this model of hate with two components - the first one asks what produces the hatred (categories), while the second one explores a set of independent questions that can be asked of any hatred regardless of which category it belongs to (dimensions).
The five distinctive categories I came up with are as follows:
- Intergroup hate: hatred of someone as a representative of a group they belong to; the individual is interchangeable with any other group member (e.g., hating someone because they're a member of a rival ethnic group)
- Interpersonal hate: hatred rooted in a specific history/relationship between two (or more) individuals; the target matters as that person, not a stand-in for anything else (e.g., hating an ex-partner who betrayed you)
- Structural hate: hatred produced by an asymmetric relationship in which the position itself, not the individual occupying it, assigns the emotional role (e.g., colonised/coloniser, oppressed/oppressor, prisoner/jailor, etc.) - I think this is the category where the philosophical question of justification is the sharpest
- Abstract hate: hatred directed at a system, institution, or idea rather than a person; the target has no single face or body (e.g., hating "the bureaucracy" or "capitalism")
- Self-directed hate: hatred turned inward at oneself; hater and hated are the same person (e.g., hating yourself for a past failure). *I included this one because it feels like a distinctive category, but it likely has entirely different mechanism of action, it may belong here only by analogy, closer to self-contempt or self-disgust than to the rest, so I will ignore it for now*
For clarification, perhaps it's also worth mentioning that two categories here often run together historically without being identical: intergroup and structural hate co-occur constantly (e.g. colonialism, slavery, occupation) because power asymmetries are usually organised along group lines, but they're separable; structural and intergroup hate are independent variables that are correlated for historical/institutional reasons, not definitionally linked.
As for dimensions, I also identified five in some sort of a binary axis:
- Origin/trigger: whether the hatred is firsthand, or inherited/transmitted with no personal injury at all, or arose with no clear external trigger (an internally generated need, as in some defensive cases)
- Accuracy of appraisal: whether the hatred correctly tracks a real, current harm (veridical) or has become distorted/displaced relative to the target's actual conduct. This is the dimension that carries the most moral weight
- Temporal structure: whether the hatred is a short-lived episode tied to a single triggering event, or a durable standing sentiment that persists independent of any ongoing trigger
- Function: not "is this hatred self-preserving" (because almost all hatred is, momentarily, by definition), but what is it *aimed* at - whether it does anything beyond managing the hater's internal state (build identity, motivate real action, sustain a project), or is it purely defensive and inert, existing only to regulate shame or ambivalence?
- Effect: separate from function - what the hatred actually *produces*, regardless of what it was aimed at. A hatred can be accurate, constructively aimed at real resistance, and still leave the person who carried it fragmented and damaged (i.e. justification and cost are independent variables, not opposites)
One thing I noticed is that the model isn't static - hatred can drift along the categories over time, and one of the clearest patterns is that destabilised hatred (a structural relationship that's ended, an interpersonal grudge that's outlived its proportion, an abstraction with nowhere to land, etc.) tends to drift toward the intergroup category and toward distortion, because group-based categorisation is one of the oldest, cheapest pieces of human social cognition and is always available as a place for unanchored hatred to settle.
But anyway, it's not worth dwelling on here, I think the more important question is what to do with hatred once you have it. Or, perhaps, is hate ever actually useful? And I think the honest answer here is yes, sometimes. It can be useful as an accurate information of an ongoing threat or harm - e.g. the prisoner's hatred of an actively cruel jailor is real and accurate and not a malfunction, and thus dismissing all hatred as irrational or pathological would be both intellectually and emotionally dishonest. It can also be useful as motivation - help mobilise resistance, hold a group together under threat (e.g. social cohesion in wartime), or give a person the resolve to leave a genuinely harmful relationship. I think one could argue that the right kind of hatred, focused and accurately targeted, is sometimes the only emotional posture with enough staying power to sustain costly, long-term opposition to a real injustice. However, it's also probably worth accepting that even fully veridical, fully constructive hatred can be corrosive to carry, fragment the person sustaining it, narrow their identity to the conflict, and outlast its own usefulness once the original threat is gone. In other words, justification doesn't buy immunity from cost. So I think "useful" has to be asked three separate times - is it accurate, does it do something, and what does it do to the person carrying it?
And this leads me (finally) to searching for the "cure", which I'd argue is only needed for not useful, unresolved hatred. If the problem is accuracy (distorted/displaced hatred): the work is re-attaching the feeling to its real object, or discovering it has none. Scapegoated or inherited hatred, directed at a group that didn't actually cause the harm, doesn't respond well to being told to "let go"; it responds to being shown, concretely, that the appraisal doesn't match reality. I.e. it requires cognitive correction instead of an emotional release.
If the problem is temporal structure (a durable sentiment that has outlived its trigger): the work is closer to what grief or trauma processing does; not erasing the original event's reality, but allowing the standing disposition to deactivate once it's no longer doing anything, rather than letting it run on inertia.
If the problem is function (purely defensive, accomplishing nothing beyond internal-state management): the underlying wound is the actual target, not the hatred itself. I.e. this kind of hatred is a symptom; and resolving it means addressing what it's defending against, since the hatred will simply regenerate against a new target if the underlying need persists.
If the problem is purely cost, with accuracy and function both intact: the honest answer may be that there's a real acceptable trade-off rather than a clean fix. The hatred may need to be carried for as long as the structural harm persists, with the cost managed rather than eliminated, and only fully resolvable once the actual asymmetric relationship producing it ends.
Once again, forgive me for my ramblings. This is probably way too long for a comment, but your article gave me a lot of food for thought and I needed to put it on paper in some way.
I love this, now I have to reread everything you wrote several times, but I think you outlined some tensions and fuzzy areas better than I could!
Once again, you are a genius. ❤️
Either that, or just trying to avoid working the best I can, I'm not too sure 😂
It’s both, I’m the one who knows best haha
Profoundly thought provoking piece. Thank you.
Thank you so much for reading!
The taboo is utilized as a deterrent for expressing justifiable emotions on the deserving.
I guess the majority should understand the science[?] of psychology is a weapon… to manipulate.
Khatoun, you’re an incredibly talented writer. I’m sure this will be the highlight of my week.
Thank you so much, you know how much I love your writing and respect your work, so I'm really humbled. ❤️
"Verbal Bruce Lee, but only in my head!" - you defined perfectly how do I feel in this very moment of my life.
In german there is a powerful word to describe this mental process, Grübeln, in italian "Rimuginare" you can feel the power of thees words in their cacophony, which render exactly what happens in the mind.
I do not argue internally with someone in particular, it is rather against "system of values" that betrayed me. Rationally I'm convinced that it's better I let it go, but it is not the just thing to do on a more humanistic standpoint.
Sorry, just a rant, but it was inspired by your brilliant analysis and I wanted to tell you it really resonated in me, particularly the above.
Wow. Fantastic meditation. I have to agree. I do wonder if there is another non-English word that would be more fully expressive. ☮️
the way your mind works is so impressive to me
Oh, that's the nicest compliment I got in forever, thank you so so much ♥️
It's important that you're loved in Sarajevo...
...few places in the world are as loved as Sarajevo, city that defeated agresion and occupation mainly thru love and sacrifice of its citizens.
Since Sarajevo loves you, and you love us, hate is hard for you to truly understand.
You mainly despise haters.
A person who can not love Sarajevo has something wrong in their head
Since you know that, you already know more than most...
Super interesting piece. I don’t want to argue with the many thought-provoking points you raise but to simply point out something folks seem to forget. One can’t fight hatred with hatred for the simple reason that if you do so, at the end of the day and on the other side of the equation, you’ll end up with more hatred. So if your objective or goal is to lessen the force of hate, you have no choice but to love. (That’s on a personal level, ofc since I don’t believe that there is any sense in channeling negative affects for “positive” use. I don’t think there is any sense in the rather popular notion that there can be a constructive use of anger or hatred. The historical examples you give are apropos but in those cases I’d wager a guess that the affective core of the matter is the use of hatred as a rhetorical tool and for the purpose of demagoguery or mass mobilization…)
I hate nobody. Not even the people who hurt me the most. People need to be taught to hate. I was always taught to be kind🤷♀️