“You’ve got to be taught to hate and fear. You’ve got to be taught from year to year. It’s got to be drummed in your dear little ear. You’ve got to be carefully taught.”
Hating people who are different from ourselves isn’t something that is hard wired into our brains.
When Richard Rodgers wrote “You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught” for the musical “South Pacific,” the people who were hated and feared were Asians. Whether they were the Yellow Peril in the days of Hearst or the Nisei and Issei who were interned during the war, white Americans found it easy to be racist.
But it wasn’t babies or infants or toddlers doing the hating. Even in those days, when little kids were thrown together, race or ethnicity didn’t come into play. Nice kids gravitated together, and it wasn’t until they were taught not to get along with each other that they stopped getting along.
“You’ve got to be taught to be afraid of people whose eyes are oddly made and people whose skin is a diff’rent shade. You’ve got to be carefully taught.”
I wish I could say that it’s all about race and ethnicity, but there are both older and newer prejudices that come into play these days. Maybe the oldest of them all is anti-Semitism, which peaked during the Holocaust and never really went away.
Anti-Semitism seems to be the one prejudice that is shameful enough that many people don’t want to admit to it, but it’s certainly one of the factors with conservative Southern Christians. Many of them say they love Israel, but much of that is about End Times theology and not about tolerance.
Of course there’s a newer one, and it’s the one that seems to be causing the biggest fuss these days.
With a generation of people no longer hiding the fact that they’re not heterosexual or cisgendered and expecting to be treated as well as if they were, heads are exploding in states like Florida. With Gov. Ron DeSantis trying to out-Donald the former president with his “don’t say gay” legislation.
It’s difficult to reasonably believe that campaigning that far to the right and playing to voters’ prejudices will get anyone elected president, but DeSantis may be figuring the combination of hard-right voters, Trump supporters and voter suppression might just get it done.
So look for plenty of hate oozing out of Florida and pity the poor children who have to deal with it.
“You’ve got to be taught before it’s too late. Before you are six or seven or eight to hate all the people your relatives hate. You’ve got to be carefully taught.”