"Living in a Time of 'Institutional' Hatred"

 It may seem odd to leave the serenity of south-eastern Connecticut for the bedlam of the north-Jersey coast, but we have been doing this every August for our sixty-one years of marriage. Growing up in New York City, it is where Caroline spent summers. She describes these couple of weeks as “returning to her playpen.” The photograph depicts us on a cool day last summer at the Seabright Beach Club.

 While I will have my laptop and a portable printer, I am bringing light reading, so don’t expect much in terms of essays. However, in the back of my mind I have been thinking of one on the beauty and grandeur of silence, but we shall see. Also, I have just completed Lynne Olson’s newest book, The Sisterhood of Ravensbrück, which deserves an essay. Perhaps it will be too noisy down there!

 

But cloistering with friends, children and grandchildren and reading mysteries, I hope (and expect) to avoid the ugly ramifications of hatred That has become too common.

 

We expect to return to Essex on Saturday, August 23.

 

Sydney M. Williams

www.swtotd.blogspot.com

 

Thought of the Day

“Living in a Time of ‘Institutional’ Hatred”

August 4, 2025

 

“Let no man pull you so low as to hate him.”

                                                                                                                Martin Luther King (1929-1968)

                                                                                                                Sermon: “A Knock at Midnight,” 1958

“I hate you!” Who has not screamed that invective, or had it directed at them? It is generally short-lived, an intense, emotional response to an accusation, characterized by anger, contempt and/or disgust.

 

Such words are usually directed toward specific individuals, things, or ideas. In most cases those feelings are ephemeral. But I write about what I call ‘institutional’ (for lack of a better term) hatred, where an individual or group deliberately foments hatred toward a person, race, ethnicity, or nation. Time is a healer, even of ‘institutional’ hatred. Bill Clinton was despised by Republicans during the 1990s, and as Matthew Hennessey wrote in last Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal: “Hate is too mild a word for how Democrats felt about George W. Bush while he was in the Oval Office.” Today, in both cases, hatred has vanished.

 

But such hatred is not always transient. Blacks were hated by many in this Country for decades, culminating in the white-robed Ku Klux Klan, whose remnants still exist. The consequences were the killings – many by lynchings – of tens of thousands of black Americans. For more than ten years, from the mid 1930s through May 1945, Nazis maintained a nation-wide hatred toward Jews and others they classified as undesirable. The consequence was that between fifteen and twenty million civilians were imprisoned, tortured, mutilated and/or murdered, in a network of over 44,000 Concentration Camps scattered across occupied Europe.

 

Hatred clouds reason. Hatred of Jews is what the Nazis employed to get ordinary citizens to go along with their despicable extermination policies. Reason, on the other hand, is what permitted the Allies to ultimately defeat Nazism. Hatred has returned today, in much of the West, in the anti-Semitism that has infiltrated college campuses, in political speech, and in the language of Podcasters. “Open Jew hatred,” wrote Alvin Rosenfeld in last Monday’s Wall Street Journal, “is also politically mainstream, with ‘free Palestine’ and ‘globalize the intifada’ now a key part of the left’s political agenda.” The call by French President Emmanuel Macron, British Prime minister Keir Starmer, and Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney to have their countries recognize a Palestine state before there is one reflects hatred toward Israel. The meaning of ‘globalize the intifada’ is clear: Kill the Jews. While Israel has been winning militarily, Hamas is winning the public relations war.

 

Here in the U.S., hatred’s most common target today is President Trump, an easy person to demagogue, as his language and actions are often goofy and/or intemperate. This hatred is manifested in opposition to anything he supports or does. In the August 2, 2025 issue of American Greatness, Stephen Soukup wrote: “The left’s hatred [of President Trump] is more powerful than any instinct it might have to do the right thing.” That hatred is displayed by those rallying against the deportation of criminal illegal migrants, and by those opposed to Israel’s war against Hamas. It motivates those who blame man for all climate change and stirs up those who support gender-affirming surgeries. Will Weissert of the Associated Press recently quoted a fifteen-year-old girl from Scotland who was protesting President Trump’s visit to Scotland: “We don’t negotiate with fascists...So many people here loathe him...We’re not divided...We’re just here because we hate him.” One hopes she is instructed on the history of fascism, what its aims, goals and means were. Nevertheless, hatred for Mr. Trump is not new. It began ten years ago when he descended the escalator at Trump Tower in New York City to announce his run for President. It was revealed in the fake accusations by the Clinton campaign about Russian “collusion.” It led to the refusal of the media to acknowledge that Hunter Biden’s lap-top was real. I have friends who, to this today, cannot speak the name Trump without a grimace. He is not my favorite politician, but I do not hate him, and I believe he loves his Country. I experienced hatred nine years ago when I refused to join the cortège of those who wished to bury his nascent political career. But hatred is not the exclusive domain of the Left.  MAGA extremists are equally vituperative. We hear it in the voices of many conservative commentators, and in the expressions of those who rail against all immigrants.  But it is most powerful on the left.

 

Mainstream media, threatened with irrelevance, exploits and encourages this scourge of hatred, falsely seeing it as a means to stay relevant. They know their business models are in trouble. Fifty years ago the daily news viewership of the three main networks – CBS, NBC and ABC – was approximately 70 million people, or roughly 30% of the population. Today combined network and cable news programs capture about 30 million viewers, or less than 10% of the population. Newspapers have suffered similarly. In 1975, approximately 62 million newspapers were printed daily. Today that number is less than 25 million. Now, most get their news from social media accounts, like X, Facebook, Instagram and from Podcasts. People listen to what augments their prejudices and not to what challenges their predilections, so these platforms become breeding grounds for polarization and hatred. It is why Alex Jones on the right and Rachel Maddow on the left remain popular, but only with those who share their views. Ironically, greater choice in news has increased our division.

 

In her novel White Oleander, `Janet Fitch wrote: “Isn’t it funny. I’m enjoying my hatred so much more than I ever enjoyed love. Love is temperamental. Tiring. It makes demands. Love uses you, changes its mind. But hatred, now, that’s something you can use...It’s hard, or soft, however you need it. Love humiliates you, but Hatred cradles you.” I think she is wrong, but her words reflect today’s culture. C.S. Lewis warned in Mere Christianity that there is a tendency among people to cling to bad stories of people they detest, to “wish that black was a little blacker, [then] we shall see grey as black...Finally we shall insist on seeing everything – God and our friends and ourselves included – as bad.” I suspect he is right; it is something to guard against.

 

Can we return to a time when respect and tolerance were common? Thirty-six years after he had been freed from slavery, Booker T. Washington wrote in his autobiographical story, Up from Slavery, a remarkable sentiment we should all feel – and one that anticipated by fifty years Martin Luther King’s words in the epigraph that heads this essay: “I will permit no man to narrow and degrade my soul by making me hate him.” While the Bible advises us to abhor what is evil, it warns against harboring hatred in one’s heart. It tells us to hold fast to what is good. Two and a half years ago I wrote an essay titled, “Hatred and the Curse of Identity Politics: “Man is perhaps the only species that kills and destroys its own kind out of pure hatred.” Man is also the only creature capable of reason and love, so perhaps there is hope.

 

The goal of ‘institutional’ hatred is power, to be rid of those who stand in their way. The consequences are alienation, division, distrust and polarization. As humans, we have been endowed with emotions and with the ability to reason. In our polarized environment, we run the risk that the emotional response of ‘institutional’ hatred supersedes our willingness to listen, to debate – to reason. We must not let that happen.

"Personal Responsibility in an Age of CRT"

 

Sydney M. Williams

 

Thought of the Day

“Personal Responsibility in an Age of CRT[1]”

July 1, 2021

 

“In the long run, we shape our lives, and we shape ourselves. The process never

ends until we die. And the choices we make are ultimately our responsibility.”

                                                                                                                 Eleanor Roosevelt (1884-1962)

                                                                                                                 You Learn by Living, 1960

                                                                                                                                Preface

 

As we near our nation’s 245^th birthday, celebrants could do worse than consider the consequences of an increase in government dependency and a decline in personal responsibility.

 

Among truths that underly my beliefs are two relevant to this essay: One, life is not fair. We are born into different circumstances, with different attributes and abilities. A brother was born with Prader-Willi Syndrome, a condition that adversely affected his physical, emotional and mental development. While he and I were born of the same parents, his life, in the challenges he faced, was far more difficult than mine. And two, we are not equal (and never can be) in looks, physical prowess, emotional and social skills, or mental acuity. It is unlikely Michael Jordan could have developed the theory of relativity, and it is equally unimaginable that Albert Einstein could have played shooting guard for the Chicago Bulls.  The attempt to mandate equity, a dream of Progressives, is a Utopian nightmare. In his novel He Knew He was Right, Anthony Trollope put it like this: “Each created animal must live and get its food by the gifts which the Creator has given it…” No amount of government coercion will make life completely fair and make us equal. We must each work with who and what we are. In his 1901 autobiography, Up from Slavery, Booker T. Washington wrote: “Few things help an individual more than to place responsibility upon him, and to let him know you trust him.”

 

Politicians love to compartmentalize the electorate. It is easier to serve up government offerings to a group than to argue the benefits of a particular political philosophy. Thus, we drift toward the comfort of government dependency and away from the more difficult adherence of personal responsibility. A Washington Post article from September 18, 2012, reported: “In 2011, about 49% of the population lived in a household where at least one member received a direct benefit from the federal government.” According to an op-ed in last Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal by John Cogan and Daniel Bell of the Hoover Institute, the American Families Plan, if it were adopted, would add another 21 million Americans to the roles of government assistance programs. Forget what it does to our debt; think of the effect on our national character.

 

Ironically, Critical Race Theory (CRT) is racist, in that it teaches that one race is inherently superior to another, and in its assumption that blacks are incapable of succeeding without government assistance. It promotes victimization rather than encouraging self-reliance. It ignores individual successes of modern black conservatives like Thomas Sowell, Senator Tim Scott, Clarence Thomas, Candace Owens, Jason Riley, Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice and thousands more. As Martin Luther King taught us, people should be judged by who they are, not the color of their skin. Freedom depends on a responsible individual. Consider the autocracies that demand dependence and obedience and compare that to the Republic whose founding we celebrate Sunday. The Civil Rights activist and founder of the Woodson Institute, Robert Woodson in response to the 1619 Project, created an organization called 1776 Unites, which is designed to highlight “what is best in our national character and what our freedom makes possible even in the most difficult circumstances.” Booker T. Washington (1856-1915) and Frederick Douglass (1817-1895), both believed in personal responsibility. They were born into slavery, yet both became advisors to U.S. Presidents. In what other country would that have been possible? 

 

There is no question that a study of American history should include chapters on slavery and the women’s suffrage movement. But that can be accomplished by reading what has already been written. In 1853, Harriet Beecher Stowe published Uncle Tom’s Cabin. When President Lincoln met her at the White House nine years later, he is reputed to have said: “So this is the little woman that started this great war.” Keep in mind, Ms. Stowe, as a woman, was never able to vote. Yet she wrote a novel that spoke to the curse of slavery and helped bring about its abolition. Mark Twain’s novel Huckleberry Finn (1884) has been removed from many library shelves because some of its words are seen as threatening. Yet it provides modern readers a realistic look at the horrors of slavery, the dignity of the run-away slave Jim, and of the empathy of the uneducated Huck Finn. Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre (1847) and Henry James’ The Bostonians (1886) did much the same for the cause of women.

 

It is a desire for power that causes politicians to place us within the confines of race, religion and gender. They ignore how far we have come in the past 250 years. Man has been around for 160,000 years, but civilization as we know it dates back only about 2,500 years. Progress has been steady, but uneven with two steps forward and one back. The founding of the United States, with all its obvious and known faults, was a giant leap forward in the liberation of men and women from the yoke of authoritarian governments. Slavery has been around as long as man, and it has existed on every continent and involved every race and creed. While it was largely abolished in the West in the 19^th Century, it still exists in parts of the Middle East, Asia and Africa. Consider the plight today of China’s Uyghurs. They are real victims, under the Chinese Communist Party’s real oppressors. 

 

Sixty years ago, interracial marriage was illegal in much of the United States. Today, one in seven marriages are couples of mixed races. In 1960, only 3.1% of adult black Americans had graduated from four-year colleges. Today the number is 20 percent. (The comparable numbers for whites were about 18% in 1960 and 35% today.) While much good came from the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, they were accompanied by a decline in personal responsibility, which led to a diminution of the family, an increase in out-of-wedlock births and a glut in absent fathers. We see its effects in other aspects of our lives. Universities select students, not on merit but on race or gender identification. We are told it is the weapon, not the behavior of the individual, that is responsible for a plethora of black-on-black shootings in inner cities. 

 

As we prepare to celebrate the 4^th, we should consider the costs to a free people of a nation that abjures personal responsibility for the Eloi-like comfort of dependency. As long as it survives, the mission of the United States will never be complete. It will always be a work-in-progress – “An Experiment in Self-Government,” as Senator J. William Fulbright titled a 1955 article. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis once said, “The only title in our democracy superior to that of President is the title citizen.” It is a title that demands the rigors of personal responsibility.

"The 1619 Project"

Sydney M. Williams

swtotd.blogspot.com

Thought of the Day

“The ‘1619 Project’”

September 9, 2019

“The goal of the 1619 Project is to reframe American history,

making explicit how slavery is the foundation on which this country is built.”

                                                                                                New York Times

                                                                                                Sunday, August 18, 2019

“In August 1619, the first enslaved Africans in the English colonies arrived in Virginia.

It was the beginning of a barbaric trade in human lives. Today, in honor, we remember

 every sacred soul who suffered the horrors of slavery and the anguish of bondage.”

                                                                                                President Donald J. Trump

                                                                                                July 30, 2019

                                                                                                Williamsburg, VA

Slavery is barbaric, but to argue that it was the “foundation”on which our country was built is hyperbole and disingenuous. In 1619, Virginia was a colony of Britain. It would be 157 years before the American colonies revolted, and they did so to be free and independent. In that year 1776, Thomas Jefferson wrote that “all men are created equal,” words, as we know, that did not capture the truth of slavery, but which suggested a road map for the banning of international slave trade, which was done in 1808; the freeing of slaves in 1863 under the Proclamation Emancipation, and for the Civil Rights legislation of 1964 and 1965. One might argue that 188 years is too long, but keep in mind slavery has been in existence since before written history. Also, remember, in 1776 slavery existed in all thirteen colonies and throughout Europe. And it persists today, enslaving forty million people, particularly in Asia, Africa and Central Asia.

To suggest that American history be “reframed,” as the New York Timesdid, is the way of totalitarian regimes. Liberal democracies do not re-write history. Certainly, there are, and there have always been, different interpretations of historical events and people. Victors and survivors write post-war histories. Successful and educated nations write histories, not the poor and illiterate. Liberalism recognizes those aberrations, so scholars can better interpret the past. Totalitarianism prefers the narrative to the facts. 

Slavery was a blight on our new Republic’s beginnings and its conscience. Of that there is no question. But history can only be understood within the moral, legal and accepted standards of the time. To apply today’s standards, as the New York Times is wont to do, promotes a narrative and ignores inconvenient facts. In the early 19^thCentury, according to David P. Forsythe, professor of political science at the University of Nebraska, “an estimated three-quarters of all people alive were trapped in bondage against their will, either in some form of slavery or serfdom.” The ubiquity of slavery at the time, however, does not (and did not) justify it, but it provides a framework to better understand this scourge. 

To read and believe the Time’s piece is to accept the notion that slavery existed solely in the American colonies and only involved black Africans. The truth is that slavery was so pervasive four hundred years ago I would venture that there are few of us today who do not descend from someone who was, at one point, a slave or an indentured servant. If the New York Timesis successful in adding the ‘1619 Project’ to high schools’ curriculum, will students be taught that slavery was a curse dating back thousands of years, and involved all races as masters and slaves? Will they condemn African traders who captured and sold fellow Africans to European traders? Will they learn that slaves were first brought to Brazil almost a hundred years before they were transported to Jamestown? Will they be taught that over 90% of African slaves carried across the Atlantic went to Mexico and Central and South America? Will students who study the ‘1619 Project’ learn about the enslaving of an estimated one million white, European Christians by Muslims between 1530 and 1780? Will today’s students confront and condemn slavery where it exists now – in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, China and parts of Africa? It has only been in the past hundred years that slavery was outlawed in much of Africa (Kenya, Northern Nigeria, Botswana, the Sudan, Cameroon, Mauritania, Morocco and Ethiopia), the Middle East (Turkey, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Kuwait, Bahrain and Oman) and parts of Asia (Myanmar, Nepal, Hong Kong, British Malaya and Thailand). The editors of the Times assuredly know this, but will high school students a generation from now?

As any student of history knows, the United States is far from perfect, but, as any student of history also knows, no other country in the world has done as much for liberty, whether providing the rights we citizens have that are embedded in our Bill of Rights or the sacrifices Americans have made in defending liberty in foreign lands. There is a reason why emigrating to the United States is the goal of so many in dictatorial and poor parts of the world. It is not benefits proffered; it is opportunities offered. 

In a recent op-ed in The Wall Street Journal, Jason Riley wrote: “Liberals want to harp on how blacks have been treated, but a focus on how they have progressed in earlier eras, notwithstanding that treatment, would be of far greater use to today’s black underclass.” Examples abound of American men and women who overcame the slavery into which they were born, to succeed as free men and women: Richard Allen, minister, writer and educator, was born a slave in 1760. Frederick Douglass, writer, orator and abolitionist, was born in 1818. Harriet Tubman, abolitionist and political activist, was born circa 1830. Booker T. Washington, educator, author and advisor to Presidents, was born in 1856. Others born after slavery ended but during the Jim Crow period would include Martin Luther King, Jr., Thurgood Marshall, James Baldwin, Clarence Thomas, Oprah Winfrey and dozens more. Consider sports stars like Michael Jordan and Serena Williams; entertainers like Mariah Carey and Jay-Z; businesspeople like Sheila Johnson and Herman Cain; academics like Thomas Sowell and Henry Louis Gates, Jr.; and politicians like Barack Obama, Edward Brooke, Tim Scott and Kamala Harris. As an opinion writer, Mr. Riley belongs among that pantheon. 

Harriet Tubman, who escaped the chains of slavery around 1849, once wrote, “Every great dream begins with a dreamer. Always remember you have within you the strength, the patience and the passion to reach for the stars, to change the world.” In his autobiography Up from Slavery, Booker T. Washington wrote: “I have learned that success is measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life, as by the obstacles he has overcome.” Should we not today celebrate the courage, determination, intellect and will of those who overcame the anguish of bondage and the discrimination of bigots?

Should not those who succeeded in overcoming servitude, segregation and humiliation serve as paragons to be emulated? Is it not better to view life through the positive lens of aspiration and opportunity than through a negative optic of defeat and victimhood? While real victims deserve our sympathy and empathy, we should not assume they have no will or self-motivation to fight back. As well, we blur the distinction between those who truly have been victimized and those who claim to have been.

The ‘1619 Project’ arose because the ‘Russian collusion’ story failed. Executive editor of the Times Dean Baquet admitted the new focus: “To write more deeply about the country, race and divisions.”His message not only does not conform to the Times’ motto, it cannot compete with the optimism and hope offered by Harriet Tubman and Booker T. Washington, former slaves who overcame obstacles that the editors of the New York Timescannot even imagine. Yet they rose to prominence from chains of bondage, and they did so with a belief in God and in themselves, while bearing a positive view of what was possible.