The Hatred


Hatred is tangible.
I’ve been able to see it ever since I was young, starting as a dark, irritated pulsing in someone’s throats, pushing and clawing out. I watch it escape every time, thick smoke pushing through teeth. It rushes through, covering the ground in a thick that covers our eyes - covers our sense of humanity. Two hands that blind us and start to push and prod, molding us to fit into a role of attacker, a role of violence. 


The first time I saw it was when I was a kid, playing in my apartment’s parking lot. My mom was sitting on the stairs, watching me enjoy myself. I had yet to see these monsters form, until this day, when I watched the haze begin. I could see the putrid smog start to roll in, seeping from a source I didn’t see until she had opened her mouth. 
“Your kids shouldn’t be playing here.”
A woman started speaking to my mother. I saw the smoke start to take form - It was like a reflection in a pool, constantly morphing - easily changed, and easily riled.


“Can’t you see the sign? No scooters, no playing out here.” 
As far as I could tell, the sign said nothing about simply playing in the parking lot - but I could see the smoke rising, twisting the letters and making it illegible, turning this meeting into not a simple suggestion, but something far worse. 
“Can you not read english? Go back to your own country, we speak english here, not spanish.”
I could see this hatred crawling its way towards my mom, across the floor like some sort of sick arachnid.


My mother could see the hatred too, but, in an almost saddening way, she had experience with it. There was no way to fight the hatred with more of itself - it would simply twist and morph until it was one, larger dark cloud, and then there would be no way of dissipating it. So, she simply waved it off. It seemed like it was as easy as that, but I already knew it was a temporary fix. The hatred still hung around the woman, dark and storming - I never knew someone could hold so much vileness inside them, something so sick that I figured it must be tearing the woman apart as well.


I began to notice the hatred more often as I grew, though it wasn’t always as intense. I found that it broke itself down into separate beings, little monsters that took the form of ignorance, aggression, and a lack of acceptance. Whenever someone assumed that my mother was my nanny, whenever employees would follow us around in stores, clouds of smoke that as much as I tried to escape them, I found myself creating in the form of shame. I would never tell anyone that my mother worked as a cleaning lady, in fear that they make a reference to the stereotype, that they take advantage of this information to feed the hatred that they carried around, almost like a pet. Hatred was now normalized - it was no longer the horrific creature I saw as a child. 


I watched it as it continued to destroy communities. I watched hatred rise and kill, as lines were drawn between neighborhoods in the form of thick smoke barriers that people chose to ignore. The hatred is unbearable, bursting through chests and grabbing hair, tugging and throwing, peeling people away from a sense of community. I find that the hatred does not limit itself to race; It feasts on any marginalized group. Within these groups, hatred’s sibling also grows - fear. Fear of ostracization that nurtures this emotion until it evolves into hatred.


Fear, causing those who do not want to be attacked either hide or make themselves appeal to it. We begin to follow the rules of this being; the hatred doesn’t want to hear about you being gay, but the hatred will turn a blind eye if you are profitable. The hatred will only allow you to fit into stereotypes that are appealing. The hatred loves the sexualization of women of color, and the dumbing down of races to comedy - it bares its teeth and begins to growl if you try to point out that these are people with dimensions, not just punchlines or prizes. 

There are people who have found a way to fight the hatred, to clear the smoke. The abandonment of presumptions, the acknowledgement of microaggressions. When the hatred begins to crawl out, you shake your finger and shoo it right back in. The hatred is afraid of knowledge, it cringes when you do not laugh at a racist joke, when you question the morality of stereotypes. The hatred grows weaker when you grow smarter. 


Knowledge and unity go hand in hand -  and I’ve found it's the most effective way to fight these monsters that have become so normalized in our society. That experience as a child, seeing the hatred for the first time - it did not weaken me - I have learned to stop crying at the sight of these monsters, and instead, clear the smoke so that others may see. One by one, together, one day our neighborhoods won’t have hatred prowling the streets, one day we may stop creating it as a whole, but only if there is unity - the thing that the hatred fears most.