Why Do White People Hate Black People So Much?
‘White People Have a Very, Very Serious Problem’
It’s not the Negro problem; it’s the white problem. I’m only black because you think that you are white.
— James Baldwin, during a Q & A session following a speech at Harvard.
Not long before her death, in an appearance on the now-defunct PBS “Charlie Rose” gabfest, the late, brilliant author, Pulitzer Prize winner, Nobel Prize Laureate and social critic, Toni Morrison, answered my above question this way: “White people have a very, very serious problem.”
She put the matter in psychological and moral terms: White folks’ hatred of black people is really a manifestation of their own self-hatred, she argued; their outward animus against not just black people, but all and anyone who does not “look like” them was more of a projection than anything else — a refusal to recognize, indeed a denial, of their own inner moral weakness. Rose asked Sistah Morrison if she meant, then, that black people were “morally superior to white people?”
“Yes!!”, she answered. Unlike white racists, she does not need “race,” she continued, to feel whole, to be human. Her moral superiority, taught to her by her father, serves her well as a defense mechanism, for white supremacy and white racism, could not exist…
