The Dynamics of Minority Hatred

Men and women carry beneath the burden of their impotence a spark of life, however buried, that flares at the sight of the Stranger. And in this blind light they see his strangeness as the mark of a terrifying freedom.

ALL HATREDS of minorities are produced by the same psychological dynamic. In all cases the energy involved is, to begin with, a healthy energy. It is the irrepressible energy that beats against the wall of our Judaeo-Christian antisexual ethos. (All those who have overmended Freud are asked to remember the sexual anguish, of, at least, their teen-age years.)

Minority hatred is produced by a corruption of primary, creative, biological energy. This process of corruption has two phases, which develop over a period of many years and which are related to the growth of the typical neurotic personality structures of our society. In the first phase, the primary energy is blocked and largely transformed into an energy of rebellion. In this phase the energy is s...