Considering Hate: Violence, Goodness, and Justice in American Culture and Politics

Hosts Celeste Carey and Cecil Prescod speak with Kay Whitlock, co-author with Michael Bronski, of Considering Hate: Violence, Goodness, and Justice in American Culture and Politics. Their book proposes a paradigm shift, moving us beyond simplistic notions of hate and love or good and evil. 

All too often Americans choose to believe that terrible cruelty is aberrant, caused primarily by “extremists” and misfits. The inevitable remedy of intensified government-based policing, increased surveillance, and harsher punishments has never worked and does not work now. Stand-your-ground laws; the US prison system; police harassment of people of color, women, and LGBT people; and the so-called war on terror demonstrate that the remedies themselves are forms of institutionalized violence.

Considering Hate challenges easy assumptions and failed solutions, arguing that “hate violence” reflects existing cultural norms. Drawing upon social science, philosophy, theology, film, and literature, the authors examine how hate and common, even ordinary, forms of individual and group violence are excused and normalized in popular culture and political discussion. This massive denial of brutal reality profoundly warps society’s ideas about goodness and justice.