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I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.
Nineteen-year-old James Baldwin was reluctant to visit his dying father, who had inflicted much harm on his family over the years. Baldwin wrote of this feeling a little over a decade later, in 1955, recognizing his wish to hold onto hatred for his father so as not to “look on him as a ruin” (p. 103). His father's mind and body had been devastated by tuberculosis, paranoia, and racial trauma. Baldwin decided to write an autobiographical piece referencing his desire to nurse a grievance, but also as a means of making contact with the hatred inside his white readers during the burgeoning civil rights movement. While his approach was controversial, and even Baldwin later recognized an element of handholding of white audiences in this essay, he was making a good faith effort to speak to the ubiquity of destructive elements, specifically their racialized manifestations. If he could touch on the hate and underlying pain in some of his readers, perhaps circumstances in the world would shift.
Nearly 70 years after Baldwin wrote this, the United States Supreme Court and members of Congress are making deliberate attempts to erode the progress achieved through the civil rights movement and equity-focused initiatives borne out of that struggle. Women in several states are being stripped of their rights to make decisions about their bodies. Police brutality and hate crimes are on the rise. A global pandemic has left millions dead, many of whom did not have access to adequate healthcare due to structural inequalities. A group stormed the Capitol and justified its violence as an imperative to protect the nation. Educators in several states risk losing their positions if they teach students that slavery happened. Reality is up for debate. It seems that people are clinging to their hatred not only to