The Dynamics of Minority Hatred
Steig, Arthur
Each of the many minority hatreds which exist in our world (antiSemitism, antiNegroism, for example) appears to have an individual existence and unique character. But, while each indeed has a...
...It is the purpose of this paper to demonstrate that all minority hatreds, despite gross or subtle differences in their folklore and modes of expression, are created and kept in motion by one central neurotic dynamic...
...Goering, in private conversation, referred to the Jews as "black ravens"—and, in the matter of confiscating their belongings, said "they stole them anyhow...
...In fighting for freedom, it encounters the same forces that thwarted it to begin with—the forces of the culture-authority, now firmly established in the psyche...
...THE BELIEF that freedom from antiSemitism (for example) is a product of humane intelligence is true only loosely and at second hand: It is true only insofar as intelligence tends to produce genuine social dissent...
...POLITICAL ANTISEMITISM (as in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union) is sometimes believed to be propaganda contrived for special ends...
...The only active measure that can be taken against this social disease is to repress its overt expressions through force of law...
...My analysis, I believe, provides a spine for the bones they have unearthed...
...GIVEN A REPRESSIVE culture, and a minority group large enough to be significant, minority hatred will necessarily develop...
...ALL HATREDS of minorities are produced by the same psychological dynamic...
...Men and women carry beneath the burden of their impotence a spark of life, however buried, that flares at the sight of the Stranger...
...The Negro does not reciprocate this unwarranted compliment to the white gentile because he submits to their culture-authority: The Whites, as Whites, cannot therefore constitute a minority for him in the sense that the gentile does for the Jew...
...IN THE UNIVERSAL, swampy Unconscious the minority group always stand for those who f - - - better than I do...
...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...
...All minority hatred then is, in Freudian terms, Id transformed into an ally of the Superego...
...The second phase is a brilliant neurotic maneuver: At one stroke the energy of rebellion is transformed into an energy of self-repression: By attacking the most available symbol of nonconformism—the minority group —one reaffirms one's submission to the culture-authority...
...And in this blind light they see his strangeness as the mark of a terrifying freedom...
...Minority hatreds are woven in a complex way into complex social fabrics...
...If Freud's theory that sexual repression is the basis of culture were correct (a theory contradicted by many anthropological findings—Malinowski's for example—and questioned by one's innate sense of decency), then minority hatred would exist until we had a civilization so repressive that minorities were obliterated...
...Why do minority hatreds proliferate their rich folklore...
...Because minority hatred is rooted in social submission, social authority (as ethos and as punitive force) is the only means for holding it in rein...
...The degree of an individual's antisemitism is in direct proportion to the degree of his attachment to repressive authority: A Jew imprisoned at Buchenwald ( a camp that held many "Red" political prisoners, and criminals, as well as Jews) reported that "The least antiSemitic element among the prisoners seemed to be the common criminals...
...In the meantime, only remedies can be sought...
...It is the irrepressible energy that beats against the wall of our Judaeo-Christian antisexual ethos...
...The politicos are, rather, the antiSemitic archetypes of an antiSemitic people...
...The hope that education will wash away minority hatred is even more Utopian than the idea that we can achieve a good world through universal psychotherapy...
...All psychoanalysts find that their white Christian patients feel that Negro and Jew enjoy special sexual license—and that Jews (for whom, after all, the gentiles constitute a "minority" group) feel that the goy is a sexual libertine...
...A study, for example, of the economic competition between Southern Negroes and lumpen Whites cannot obscure the fact that the poor White's hatred of the Negro and the bourgeois White's hatred of the Negro have the same root...
...Soviet Russia is taking small steps in the same direction—falteringly, impeded by the Marxgeist...
...This solution to the problem was almost arrived at by the Catholic Inquisition and, more recently, by Hitler...
...THE ACADEMIC Marxist will find it difficult to accept a theory of minority hatred that is not based on production relations...
...It is not flowing freely in its natural channel, but it is moving in its natural direction, and it is fighting for its freedom...
...This latter part of the neurotic dynamic is the only part that enters the conscious mind...
...But, while each indeed has a distinct social history and wears its own peculiar face, they all derive their energy from the same source...
...In this phase the energy is still a healthy energy...
...It is the same task...
...Negro hatred of Whites, in general, has a rational basis—just as does that part of the Jew's antigentilism which stems from memory of long persecution...
...All those who have overmended Freud are asked to remember the sexual anguish, of, at least, their teen-age years...
...Achieving the end of minority hatred and minority persecution is no less difficult than achieving a new society...
...Many useful investigations have been made of these complexities...
...Minority hatred, in helping the common man submit to a state of quasi-castration, also makes him a more reliable citizen economically and politically...
...Whatever guilt-feelings appear simply instigate (defensively) more vicious irrationalities...
...To sum up: Minority hatred engages and dissipates the energies of rebellion in a complex and corrupt act of submission...
...Is it, of course, because who he f---'s better than I do is he who f---'s dirtier...
...In the meantime we can hope that the very gradual (though, historically speaking, rapid) growth of sexual freedom will decrease the energies available to minority hatred...
...PSYCHOLOGISTS who delight in interpreting political radicalism as sexual sublimation are guilty of a gross irrationality: All sound philosophies of dissent have at least an intuitive awareness of the connection between social repression and sexual repression...
...When social dissent fails to see this connection, it is invariably sublimation, and, like Nazism, wholly corrupt...
...But the image of a group of Machiavellian politicos "putting over" antiSemitism on a naive people is totally inaccurate...
...It is only one of many dunghills onto which man's everfiowing creative energies are deposited by the neuroses which a repressive society creates—and from which the society derives its continuity...
...In the first phase, the primary energy is blocked and largely transformed into an energy of rebellion...
...The conclusion naturally follows that he is therefore generally no-good (indolent or over-ambitious, brutish or overintelligent, a usurer or Communist...
...In all cases the energy involved is, to begin with, a healthy energy...
...Here it is elaborated into the endless rationalizations and justifications that the hater has at his lips...
...Combating the verbalized rationalizations of minority hatred (the top of the iceberg) is virtually useless...
...The contempt of a minority group for itself—the ultimate in social conformism—is a bizarre example of the many ways in which minority hatred corrupts its victims as well as its practitioners...
...The conflict produces intense anxiety...
...But the Negro can, and does, participate—as a gentile—in antiSemitism...
...And it is safe to assume that Stalin in his antiSemitic persecutions satisfied himself even more than political expediency...
...The captains and carriers of repression, whether they be Calvinists or Communists, have an unfailing fear and hatred of the peaceful promethean forces of clean (animal) sexuality...
...The genuineness of dissent cannot be measured by degrees of overt "leftness...
...Minority hatred is produced by a corruption of primary, creative, biological energy...
...Each of the many minority hatreds which exist in our world (antiSemitism, antiNegroism, for example) appears to have an individual existence and unique character...
...He will have to satisfy his compulsion to understand everything in economic terms by reading or writing treatises that ravel and unravel the fringes of the problem...
...The only Negro in real danger of being lynched is one who gives circumstantial support to this anxiety...
...The criminal, having established in practice his freedom from the state-authority, has little use for the psychological dynamic of antiSemitism—less use, it would appear, than the "revolutionary...
Vol. 6 • July 1959 • No. 3
