The Big Hurt: Hate & Anger

Anger is one of our innate affects, and affects are they're pre written physiological programs that all human beings are born with, and they are automatically triggers under certain condition. In this episode, psychologist Joseph Burgo explains what makes anger tick and why, untended it can be a time bomb of hatred. Heidi Bayrick of the Southern Poverty Law Center walks us through a heat map of hatred and the

United States and who's perpetrating it. It is a big mistake for people to assume you know that that hate group members are sort of teeth missing clansmen, or that you know klansmen are really the only group that's represented

in the white supremacist world in the United States. In his book Consolations, poet David White writes that quote anger is the deepest form of compassion for another, for the world, for the self, for a life, for the body, for a family, and for all our ideals, all vulnerable and

all possibly about to be hurt. And this anger as compassion idea was on full display on January first, two thousand and seventeen, when more than three million men, women and children across the globe participated in the Women's March, galvanized by outrage, united by a sense of purpose, demanding to be sealed, demanding to be heard, and demanding control

of your destiny. State sanctioned violence fueled by racism, sexism, in punophobia, building walls that are borders, constructing jail that our communities, racial profiling of Muslim registering, and even funding cuts were more families restricting health care based on gender, and then now people will go right to control, how, when, and with who would have built their families all act to control of us, not some of us, but all of us. In Washington, d C. We met Juliana A.

Retired nurse from Sikesville, Maryland. She was wrapped in a blanket stitched with sentiments like don't make America sick again, and we the people stand for the rights of all people. I'm here because I fought for all these rights fifty years ago, and I'm not allowed about to let them go down. The dream in the sixties, we fought for this. We had sit ins, we had marches, We worked very hard to get the rights, especially for women, but for all people. And that's what I'm here for. Togo, we

heard this echoed over and over again. For Cathy, a former DC resident who worked for the government for thirty years, this is not the kind of legacy she imagined for her grandchildren. I'm here because I have seven little girls in my immediate family under the age of twelve, and I'm here representing them because we have come too far in the past sixty years to go back one inch, and I don't plan to do it, and I hope those little girls don't plan to do it. I just

hope from here we can march forward. And I think the goal of this administration is to march us right back fifty or sixty years and we're not going there. It's easy to see how at the very core, anger spirals out of caring or as David White calls, the deepest form of compassion. Something clinical psychologist Joseph Burgo echoes, anger has value in two different ways. Personally, it can signal to us that we're overwhelmed and we need some kind of respite or downtime, we need to invest more

in self care. So it signals to us that, you know, we're in a state of overwhelmed. And it sometimes lets us know that we're being mistreated or abused and we need to stand up for ourselves. So if we have a non violent flare up, it can be constructive, even instructive in getting to the bottom of a problem. But when a flare up becomes rage, it can veer into the destructive. Like all affects, anger has an inherent time limit built into it. You know, it has an arc

and it eventually passes away. Um. It could be a very intense response that wanes over time after we calm down, after we're able to calm ourselves. Um. But when it doesn't pass, when it becomes entrenched, intense and unrelenting, then we call it rage or we call it hatred. Um. So, while anger has signal value and be constructive, hatred tends to be a destructive force because it's it is so unrelenting, um and ongoing. It's it's as if you get stuck in the anger loop and you can't get out of it.

You could even say that hate has its own algorithm. Hating is the result of persistent and enduring experiences of stimulus overload and anger that goes unaddressed and just keeps, you know, enduring. So hatred requires you know, time, It requires a lot of experience to develop for up. This is why politics can be a petri dish for hate. A lot of what is going on on the political scene these days can be understood through the lens of shame, contempt,

and hatred. I've written about the profile of the typical Trump supporter these days, who is kind of been left behind by the economic revival, since the downturn has seen standard of living deteriorate, loss of good jobs. Um, and that's a humiliating experience. Eighteen months ago, we never knew. A lot of people didn't know. Some people had a feeling. A lot of people didn't give us much of a chance but we understood what was happening on the campaign.

I called it the forgotten man and the forgotten woman. Well you're not forgotten anymore that I can tell you. Donald Trump really spoke to those people. He really addressed to their shame. UM. He promised to do things to alleviate that shame by bringing back jobs to focus on protecting minority rights, undoubtedly a good thing. Has made the typical disenfranchised white voter feel like, well, what about me. You're not speaking to me. You don't care about my concerns,

and that can feel shaming and humiliating. UM, as if I matter less than those other people whose rights you're trying so hard to protect. I don't think that's the intent at all, but it is the experience, and I think until we developed a more unifying message that speaks to everybody's desires, you know, I think we're going to go on in this way. But to truly understand this dynamic, we're going to need to back up and find out

how shame plays a significant role. Shame and hatred are uh intimately connected, particularly the sort of shame that comes with contempt from the outside. Contempt is a big stimulus for shame and a big stimulus for hateful responses in return. You know, one of the classic ways of dealing with shame um is to try and offload it onto somebody else and make that person feel bad instead of you. Hey, hey, hey said, no, I got you, because black lives don't matter.

There ain't no proof just because you say something don't mean nothing, prove it. I appreciate about hey, I'm talking for you. And as Burgo points out, hate and shame are nonpartisan emotions. There's plenty of it be found on both sides of the political divide. A Trump supporter wearing a build the Wall t shirt was assaulted by several young men. Fearing for his safety, I yelled at him to get away, get that ahead. The methode you get if you listen to the liberal left these days is

pretty much one of contempt and ridicule. That's shaming, it's humiliating, it's making him look ridiculous, which is a way of kind of offloading their own sense of humiliation at loss you onto the other side. Now, a lot of that's well justified, and I'm not criticizing any kinds of political movements that are arising in response to violations of the

political order. But it's just it's fascinating to me to see the way shame um is getting stirred up on both sides, and it's getting traded back and forth between conservatives and liberals. If there's one thing that Burgo wants you to take away from fleeting moments of anger or deeply entrenched rage, it's this we need to look inward and explore more deeply. Well, what's the source of this anger is? Is there some shame behind it? Is there

some sense of humiliation? And might there be a more constructive way to address the anger and humiliation rather than you know, lashing out with contempt and hostility to people who you perceived to be the cause of it. I'm very scared. I see too much of the racism, the putting people down, and I've heard too many tales as already starting in certain small pockets, and I'm really scared of that. I mean, you know, I had friends, I mean, I'm back from the sixties that I remember having friends

whose parents were Holocaust survivors. And you know, we don't need a hat go through this again. There have been more than one thousand documented hate crimes since the election of Donald J. Trump, desecration of Jewish cemeteries, swastika vandalism, and physical attacks with African Americans, Latinos, Arabs, Jews, Muslims, and those in the LGBTQ community as the targets. A March three, a Sikh man was shot outside of his house in Seattle. In February, an Indian man was killed

in a Kansas bar. Both gunmen shouted go back to your country before they pulled the trigger. He did not dissolve a dept like this in two weeks. He would have celebrated his study third body. March not is his birthday. I don't know what to say. We've read many times in newspapers of some kind of shooting happening everywhere, and we always wondered how safe. But I especially I was always concerned are we doing the right thing? Are staying

in the United States of America? But he always assured me that only good things happen to good people always think good, always be good, and good will happen to you. These aren't acts born of anger, the deepest form of compassion for someone or something. These are warped actions of hatred, of shame, burning a hole in the heart until there's

nothing left. Most hate crimes fly under the radar, but they're far more widespread than anyone could ever imagined, and it wasn't until the nineties when the Southern Poverty Law Center stepped in and they began to track them. We were involved in a lawsuit in civil court against a clan group that had murdered a young black man in Mobile and in the course of that case, we came to realize that there were a lot of clan groups operating across the country and people were very much unaware

of that. In fact, police agencies, in particular the FBI were not tracking that activity because they had been barred from doing that in the late cig He's after it was found that the FBI had been investigating people like John Lennon, Martin Luther King. My name is Heidi Birick, and I run the Intelligence Project at the Southern Poverty Law Center. That's the part of the Southern Poverty Law Center that tracks some hate and extremist groups. So at

that time we decided to create an organization. It was then called Clan Watch, it's now Intelligence Project, and we began putting out a map every year of where Clan groups were across the country, and nowadays we put out a list of hate groups. It's a much more sophisticated tool, and that's sort of the bedrock of our work tracking racist, anti Semitic, other forms of hatred and the groups that pushed those ideas and you know, letting the public become

aware of those activities. Yeah, you may say the Clan created a blueprint for the immigrant agenda that's being pushed in the current political climate today. We should never underplay the importance of the Clan in the United States because it's actually the first domestic terrorist organization that this country burst.

This was after the Civil War. The Clan was founded by Confederate general and Clan groups have waxed and waned over the years that they've been very important, for example, in murders against civil rights activists who were fighting for the vote for African Americans in the fifties and the sixties. In a few short months, five murders, alleged members of the ku Klux Klan said to be involved in the killings.

When such an auta as this loose in and takes over the police power, you were all completely at their mercy. And their atrocities, and they have us can be visited on anybody that disagrees with them in any given situation. They were instrumental to restricting immigration in nine four only to what was called Nordics in the law in Northern Europeans. So I don't want to downplay the importance of the clan, but it represents a small share of what white supremacy

looks like today. But what started as a joke a hundred years ago when a group of men donned bedsheets for a romp, has over the years attracted to it persons charged with acts of harassment, intimidation, and violence throughout the South. Even though the nation has been outraged for many years, the Ku Klux Klan persists with its bizarre

ritual and trappings. But a hundred years is a long time for a j Your white, average white supremacist is more likely nowadays to be in a suit and tie um and present themselves almost an academic demeanor or even like a preppy look, even though what they're saying in terms of white people are superior, minorities are more criminal, more terrible things about the minorities, and that white people should run this country it's exactly the same message that

the clan had for years and years and years. In the past, white supremacy was kind of a back room transaction. Then the Internet showed up, and those back rooms mushroomed coded language stand in words for racial slurs. Think of Pepe the Frog, which now doubles as an overt symbol

of hatred. A popular cartoon character turned Internet mean. Pepe the Frog has been added to the Anti Defamation League's database of hate symbols, and a press release the organization wrote the character had been quote used by haters on social media to suggest racist, anti Semitic, or other bigoted notions as a hate symbol. End quote that came after the frog appeared as caricatures including Hitler and a Klansman.

According to the group, these sorts of winks at racism proliferated under sites like bright bart, becoming aggressive news stories

about how America was being destroyed by its inclusivity agenda. Nowadays, white supremacy is front and center under the banner of the more palatable term alt right, and its leaders hold prominent positions in the government or breaking news Knights and or Bernie Sanders adding his voice to a growing chorus calling President Elect Trump to cut ties with Steve benn In, his newly appointed chief White House strategist. Here's what Sanders said tonight. I call upon miss the Trump to rescind

the appointment that he made of Mr Bannon. A President of the United States should not have a racist at his side. Unacceptable. The man has sparked the backlash which Chief Executive Trump's campaign before that, head of the conservative website Brightbart News. Bannett himself is called bright barted platform for the alt right, a movement associated with white nationalism. So how does someone become a white supremacist. Some people grow up in racist homes and are literally born and

bred to be this way. But a lot of people grow up on racist homes and don't turn out this way. The one overriding narrative that I've heard from people about how they ended up in the movement, which is what they called the white supremacist movement, is that they come from families that have great, great difficulties, broken families and whatnot. They tend to live in neighborhoods that are rapidly diversifying, and so they feel as white kids, white young people

that they're sort of under assault. Whether they are or not, this is the impression they get. The movie American History X dramatizes the life of former neo Nazi Frank Mink and the ideology that came to form his worldview. And this scene he rallies his followers before an attack on a Korean grocery store. Don't laugh, there's nothing funny going

on here. This is about your life and mine. It's about decent, hard working Americans falling through the cracks and getting the shaft because their government cares more about the constitutional rights of a bunch of people who aren't even citizens in this country. Well, the Statue of liberty, it says, give me you're tired, you're hungry, you're poor. Well it's Americans who are tired and hungry and poor, and I say,

until you take care of that, close the book. And they seek out empowering ideas which come in the form of racism. In a way, what you're doing is just joining another form of a gang, right, but one that pushes white supremacists belief. To be clear, white supremacists are just one of the groups that the intelligence brought tracks. What we're looking for is does the organization considering an entire other group of people, by their inherent characteristics, to

be lesser. And let me explain because it sounds very general. We list, you know, neo Nazi groups because they want to exterminate Jews. They obviously consider Jews to be lesser forms of life. We list um white nationalist groups because they consider all minorities to be inferior. You know, um big white nationalist groups like American Renaissance right endlessly about

black criminality or psychopathology, really ugly stuff. But we also list black groups because, as far as we're concerned, you know, hate is hate, it doesn't matter the race that's involved. And for example, we list the Nation of Islam as a hate group because their theology meaning they're base ideology, argues that all whites, and the key word here is all whites, right, all white ball are blue eyed devils. In other words, all white people are are Satanic, and

that gets them on our list. So what we're looking for is do you to fame an entire group of people um and propagandize against them in some sort of deleterious way. That's how you get on our list. The reports coming through the intelligence projects, hate watch website, law enforcement sources, and media. Then they're vetted to make sure

that the incidents took place. The reason why this information is so important is that hate crimes are meant to silence, to cow to make people feel as though they should not be seen or heard. It tries to make you scared to stand up for yourself and stand up for your rights and those of your community. Right and and you're already talking about minority groups. When you attack someone who's in a minority community, you are trying to say

to them, you're not part of this society. You need to keep your head down, you need to stay out of this. And because so many of the cases involved Trump, it was almost like punishment from some people who seem to think that the way forward is through this kind of hate, violence and expressions of hatred. And God knows we don't want that in this country. And if you think that hate crimes are a minor problem, just sporadic

outbursts responding to current political ideology, I think again. The FBI every year reports about five to six thousand hate crimes, and there are billion problems with that reporting system, starting with the fact that it's voluntary some states don't have hate crime laws, etcetera, etcetera, which is all self admitted

by the FBI and those collected data. The Department of Justice has done three sets of studies looking at survey data from crime victims, and those three studies have concluded there was one and o five, one and eleven, one and thirteen. They've concluded that the level of hate crime in the United States is actually about two hundred and fifty hate crimes a year. That's in a regular year.

So the FBI data is grotesquely underreported. And if people understood that there's that much hate violence going on, hate crimes literally, we would understand that hate in the society is a much bigger problem than more aware of, and we wouldn't be so surprised with what's, for example, happened since the election. The campaign, of course emboldened people with

views that are racist. That's just a fact. We saw hate groups grow over the course of this last year, hate forums grow, and so this outburst is a manifestation of those emboldened people. But in general, the United States has a hate violence problem that it's not really addressing,

and many people aren't even aware about. And we shouldn't be surprised by that, because it's not that long ago that black people were by law treated as second class citizens, subjected to state violence and all those kinds of things. You know, we're talking until the mid sixth So here we have a social issue that's vastly underreported and yet

fueled by the tendrils of social media. We have allowed white supremacists to essentially colonize many of these social media sites to push out their message, and it led to some intense moments of harassment. Some prominent Jewish journalists, you know, being tweeted at with pictures of Jews being killed. For example, one of the journalists, David French, suffered a personal onslaught so chilling that the details read like a horror movie.

In an interview with MPR, he said, quote, the more you are against Donald Trump, and the more that people feel like people are reading you or listening to what you have to say, then the alt right comes down on you even harder because they really are sort of like the online shot troops of the Trump movement. I mean they are the most aggressive, the most vicious, the most threatening, the most targeted. I mean, it was really notable how much violence was expressed on social media over

over the last year. And you know, I know Twitter has um cracked down on certain forms of hate speech, but it's true that the social media companies essentially don't follow their own terms of service on issues of racism and anti semitism and harassment and so on. And it's not just social media, it's the Internet itself and the way it's structured. The more information that's published about something, the more it's pushed to the top, no matter if

the content is incorrect. So, for example, I visit Google's headquarters last February to show them that if a student were searching Martin Luther King, let's say they're writing a paper on him, on the first page of results of a Google search on Martin Luther King, third there was only one link to a legitimate thing, to a biography site about Martin Luther King. Everything else on that page was coming from hate sites, and so a student would

have no clue. They would be reading about how they wouldn't hear about Martin Luther King and the amazing things he achieved in the civil rights era. Um they would be reading about how he was a communist or a womanizer, and all kinds of crazy racist stuff. And since nine people don't leave the first page of a Google search, that's what most people see when they search for him. And this is anywhere around the world. So it's not

just social media has got a hate problem. It's also the way algorithms at Google and being in these places work. They're they're serious problems there that need to be addressed. So what if you have someone who's young, full of hatred and impressionable, someone who's looking for a shred of

evidence to confirm his beliefs, no matter the source. Dylan Ruth, the young man who shot all those people in the church in Charleston, South Carolina, he came to see that black people were murdering whites out of control through Google searches. He had. It's that in his manifesto. He went online not too long after the Trayvon Martin shooting, started looking into it, began searching for black on white crime, which came up, and he went down a rabbit hole of hate.

That is a met Dylan Roof posted a manifesto on the web a few months before his murderous rampage. He said that he didn't grow up in a racist home or environment. The event that awakened him to racial issues, he said, was the Trayvon Martin case. I kept hearing and seeing his name and eventually decided to look him up. I read the Wikipedia article, and right away I was unable to understand what the big deal was. It was

obvious this Immerman was in the right. But more importantly, this prompted me to type in the words black on white crime into Google, and I have never been the same since that day. The first website I came to was the Council of Conservative Citizens. There were pages upon pages of these brutal black on white murders. I was in disbelief. At this moment. I realized that something was very wrong. How could the news media be blowing up the Trayvon Martin case while hundreds of these black on

white 's got ignored. Had Roof first come to another website, history might have been different. He might have learned the truth instead of the racist lies pushed by the Council of Conservative Citizens. And the truth is that the vast majority of white people who are murdered are killed by other white people, not by black people, as the Council's website suggests, and My position on this to Google essentially is if you're going to be the library of the world,

you need librarians. You know, nobody would walk into a library say I'm looking to write a report about Martin Luther King and be handed a hate track from stormfront dot org, the largest hate site on the Internet. There would be some judgment there, but there is no judgment, and that's how we get things like what Dylan Roof did I mean? And and that kind of violence. It's literally a direct result of these processes, and it has to be acknowledged as such, and somehow this has to

be fixed. All of this is dark and horrific and feels like it's spinning out of control. But putting a dent in it is as simple as speaking up in the least. What you get is someone may feel less emboldened to make bigoted statements and then hurt somebody else right down the road. You might get them to think there's a whole bunch of work by victims advocates as well, that you can make a powerful statement as a bystander.

You may not be the person who is, you know, having slurs thrown at them or racist statements, whatever the case. Might be anti semitism, But if you're there and you hear it, you stand up, you can make a big difference in this situation. First of all, you're supporting the victim and also you're letting this person know that this is unacceptable behavior. The other thing is people really do need to report this stuff to law enforcement. That can

be very hard. Oftentimes people are scared, right they think that maybe they're they or their communities because you know, eight incidents make you feel not just for yourself, but for everybody who you're related to might be targeted. But we need to at least know how much of this

is going on before we can really address it. David White says anger truly felt at its center as the essential living flame of being fully alive and fully Here, he goes on to say, what we call anger on the surface only serves to define its true underlying quality by being a complete but absolute mirror opposite of its true internal essence. I take that true internal essence to mean love, and in this way it really is a

thin line between love and hate. But that we care enough, are passionate enough, is the thing we should recognize, the thing we should use to figure out what's at the bottom of that well of anger that signal that there's something inside of us we need to tend to before it burns out. In the next episode, Escape, we hit the eject button on reality and look for a different

way to live our lives. Then we're trying to teach people to be childlike and play with their bodies from their bodies, and so we do silly exercises like, uh, would you like to see a demonstration? So we were tending like we're making milkshake and then we were like, we're drinking it. We laugh, it looks like this. Yeah, we'd like to thank to make a Campbell for letting us eavesdrop on her destruction of property. And we'd like to thank Rage Room Atlanta for providing us with the

opportunity to legally destroy that property. You can find out more about Rage Room at their website Rush Escape Room dot com and many thanks to Heidi Byrick of the Southern Poverty Law Center. You can find out more at spl center dot org. Forward slash Hate watch audio from the video The mis Education of Dylan Roth is from the Southern Poverty Law Center. The Stuff of Life is written an executive produced by me Julie Douglas and co produced by Noel Brown. Original music is by Noel Brown.

This a eisode also featured music by Tristan McNeil, Aaron Grubbs and Dylan Fagan, and editorial oversight is provided by contributing producer Dylan Fagan and Head of Production Jerry Rowland. Find The Stuff of Life on Facebook and Twitter, and email us at the Stuff of Life at how stuff works dot com. We'd like to hear your thoughts and stories and you can share them with us by calling one eight four four h s W Stuff