Hatred by Willard Gaylin (best autobiographies to read TXT) 📕

them. Leopold II, the King of the Belgians, would not even have been known to them and certainly not available. Instead, the resentment might have been deflected onto those who were innocent of cheating them, but in some unfathomable way could have been considered the agents of their deprivation. They might have been a traditional enemy, a neighboring tribe, who by its proximity could afford a convenient outlet for this rage. These local battles became diversions from the true sources of deprivation in the economy or the culture of colonial Africa.

The smoldering rage that results from feeling cheated is always a component of deprivation. Who deprived us is not particularly important. We know deprivation when we see a disparity between that which we have and that which, by observing the standard of some others, we assume to be our due.

Inequity, Unfairness, and Injustice

A sense that the world we occupy operates according to principles of equity and fairness is essential for peace of mind and a relative contentment with the state of authority. The moral sensibility of a child is born within the concept of fairness. “It’s not fair” is so often the first statement of moral outrage that one is inclined to believe that some concept of equity or justice must be a part of our genetic inheritance.

Often, this outcry is first heard in the context of sibling rivalry, the sibling “got away with” something, was given something more or better, or was allowed a privilege or indulgence that we were denied. It may be equally present when the parent seems to be changing the rules of the game, violating the standards they, themselves, had previously seemed to endorse. To have played the game according to the rules and still be penalized carries the grievance beyond unfairness to the more generalized feeling of injustice. If the social order is corrupt, outrage and rebellion are justified. This is why the downbeat endings that fascinate so many novelists and movie directors prove to be anathema to the public at large. We want the good guys to triumph and the villains brought to justice. We believe in just deserts.

The anomie that infected some sections of the white working class in the latter half of the twentieth century and led to the various white supremacy movements had its roots in a profound sense of injustice. Members of this group began to feel deceived and treated unfairly (a halfway house to paranoia, as will be discussed later). They felt they had been seduced by promises not kept. They had kept the faith, played by the rules, and still were denied the respect they felt they had earned. The injustice that the bourgeoisie as well as the working class felt may well have started in the 1960s with the revolt of their own children.

The revision of values that began in that decade was perceived by parents as an assault on their standards and way of life. In the short-lived antimaterialism of the student revolt of the 1960s and 1970s, the white middle-class parents joined with the working class in a sense of outrage and betrayal. The parents had purchased the material goods, which their children affected to reject, at extraordinary cost in sweat and labor. They had lived their lives doing unrewarding work, consoling themselves with the assumption that what they could purchase with the earnings from their labors was adequate reward for the sacrifice and drudgery they had endured.

Their children—by rejecting and thereby showing their contempt for split-level homes, two-week vacations, large American-made cars—were challenging the trade-off these parents had been forced to make. Spitting on the flag was not all that outraged these parents; spitting on the twenty-one-inch color television set, the wall-to-wall carpeting, the patio furniture, the microwave oven, and the Buick was worse. Finally, the image of the drop-out child and the druggie became the ultimate assault on the work ethic by which their parents lived—and sacrificed. The children were ridiculing a way of life for which their parents had paid dearly.

In addition, these parents identified the trappings of a middle-class lifestyle as the social sign of their upward progress from the Great Depression days of their childhood. While their children were choosing to go barefoot, they were recalling the times when, for them, going barefoot was not a choice but a necessity. It was a shameful stigma of social caste. For children to affect the dress of the working class—the overalls, the work shoes—was a bewildering rejection of the very status symbols for which the parents had traded much of their pleasure and time. They had sweated out their lives for these “things,” not just for their own sake, but for their children’s. In attacking these symbols of success, the student revolution had raised doubts about the irrevocable contract that the middle class had signed. It was too painful to acknowledge the possibility that they had opted for simply another mess of pottage.

The social revolution of the late 1960s and the 1970s, with its Nietzschean “reevaluation of values,” shook up the working class. To make matters worse, the Great Society, with its rising concern for the rights of minorities, led to welfare programs and affirmative action that seemed to preclude that class. Even worse, the sympathy that the liberal community expressed for the minorities seemed in contrast with the contempt it had for blue-collar tastes and values. White middle- and working-class people were feeling the same injustices that minority groups had been experiencing for years, stemming from the lesser share that they were expected to accept, although for different reasons. They had earned their proper share—not through the “dole” or special consideration, but through their labor and diligence—and now the value of that share was suspect. Somehow or other the promise had been broken. The just rewards for labor had not been meted out. The rules of the game had been changed.

This sense of injustice, of a tacit agreement revoked, continues to feed the mass resentment and