Why is hate so easy?

It's February, the month of love, heart health and of course, it's Black History Month. In an unplanned coincidence, I'm also reading The Help by Kathryn Stockett and I find myself gripping my kindle with tachycardia as I'm reading her pages. I couldn’t help but feel surges of fear for the people in the book, I felt indignation that someone could be treated so poorly and in the end I had to come to terms with the fact that this is the history of the country I’ve lived in for so long and come to love. It’s not so different from the history and present day reality of my own country and others in the world.

Racism takes many ugly forms and the main question I am left with is:

Why is hatred so easy for people to feel? Why is it so easy for it to embed itself in society?

I’ve wondered this most of my life. I don’t seem to understand why it’s easy to hate things that are different, to place people into categories based on arbitrary traits and assign qualify them based on these simple things, things that no one can control. Who decided that being black meant something negative?

I wonder if people realize what they generate with such judgments. African slavery took place in the “New World” for over 400

hundred years, marking an entire race of people for generations to come.

Modern day racism is based on something visual, on the most basic of human traits. It’s not based on the integrity of a human being, on their thoughts or their actions.

The book takes place in the 1960’s in a post slavery world where black women mostly worked as maids in southern homes, raising white children. It explores the difficult relationships between the white families and the help. Stockett gives us an insight into a black woman raising and loving the white child of her employer, knowing that one day this girl will grow to be just like the world that surrounds her, racist.

It amazes me how today I can still hear people make racist comments in front of their children, staining them with this ugly sentiment that has never brought anything positive in the world. It’s just perpetuated separation, ingraining poverty, poor education that’s further fueled by a broken system that doesn’t provide neglected populations with the tools they need to surpass their history.

In spite of all of this, the African American community has provided us some of the most impressive professionals, artists, politicians, humanitarians, athletes and scholars. Just goes to show how resilient human beings can be. I celebrate Black History Month with pride in supporting another minority community and hoping that one day humans can find a way to forget hate and move forward without fear of the unknown.