Jesus and the Disinherited

As in the chapter on deception, Thurman sets up his argument with a defense of hate as a reasonable and often respected emotion among the disinherited. He describes the ways in which racial hatred toward Asian Americans and other minorities became commonplace and even patriotic after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Hatred is often disguised behind other names or infused into more respectable frameworks. It is difficult to pin down and define, and it is surrounded by a “conspiracy of silence” (75). Thurman states that the Christian church has not adequately dealt with hatred and has only attempted to address it through “platitudinous judgements” (75).

Thurman presents an anatomy of hatred as a set of conditions and steps. First, “hatred often begins in a situation in which there is contact without fellowship” (75). This includes false fellowship, which to Thurman includes much of the interaction between Black and white Americans in the South. When there is contact without fellowship, it either leads to a lack of understanding or “a kind of understanding that is strikingly unsympathetic” (76). This understanding includes judgement and cold assessment. Powerful parties understand the weaknesses of the oppressed in order to exploit them. They also have an understanding of the oppressed as subjects defined by the boundaries they dictate. Unsympathetic understanding often leads to “the active functioning of ill will” (77). Thurman tells the story of a train ride he once took, wherein a racist white woman protested his presence on the train and tried to spread her prejudice to other passengers. Thurman completes his anatomy with the manifestation of hatred: “ill will, when dramatized in a man or woman, becomes hatred walking on the earth” (78).

Hatred is at the core of racism, but the weak also hate the strong. Hatred in the mind of the disinherited stems from bitterness and resentment. Thurman illustrates his point by describing a theoretical family in which one child is routinely ignored. The child begins to resent his family and is nourished and validated by his own hatred, in place of love. Thurman also presents Captain Ahab, the tyrannical captain in Moby Dick, as a symbol of bitter hatred and explains that this type of hatred is often also turned inward: “Because they are despised, they despise themselves” (81). Thurman presents the advantages of hatred among the disinherited. It can provide endurance and strength, and it can serve as a bulwark for self-worth: “When hatred serves as a dimension of self-realization, the illusion of righteousness is easy to create” (82). Actions taken against oppressors, regardless of their particulars, are all considered moral, given the enormity of previous injustice. Hatred allows all offensive action to fall under the maxim “eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth” (83). Again, Thurman explores the psychology of combatants during World War II and the suspension of conventional morality during wartime. Hatred allows for limitless justification.

As a disinherited Jew, Jesus understood this hatred, and still, “in the face of the obvious facts of his environment he counseled against hatred” (86). After defining the hatred’s functionality and attraction, he argues that “hatred destroys finally the core of the life of the hater” (86). Once ignited, the fire of hatred cannot be controlled, and it consumes everything it touches. Thurman relates a story about a white man teaching his children not to hate Black people and a story about a visit to the doctor to illustrate hatred’s ultimate lack of discrimination. Hatred itself is not aware of political situations or power imbalances, and so it tends to destroy everything, even if it began as a source of creative energy and resilience. Thurman concludes the chapter with an excerpt of his own poetry about Jesus’s rejection of hatred and affirmation of life.