Sally Kohn: What we can do about the culture of hate
Sally Kohn searches for common ground among political foes by focusing on the compassion and humanity in everyone. Full bio
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of my personal and professional identity
and able to get along with anyone,
it's what I'm known for.
about it much myself.
is also one of my things.
get along with conservatives,
about being nice
creeping up inside me.
at school named Vicky.
and give herself bloody noses
from hardships in her life ...
is standing in the empty hallway
to come out of the bathroom,
and a survey I've made up,
for science class or something.
what shampoo she uses.
of any of the books I read that year,
anything from fifth grade,
she used White Rain shampoo.
at all the other kids,
for a long time.
and eventually social media,
to try to find Vicky.
what happened to Vicky.
what happened to me.
like some worthless other ...
having these mean impulses,
were about conservatives.
about mushy, centrist liberals
in these moments of hypocrisy,
or they were getting worse,
seemed to be getting more hateful, too.
undercurrent of hate
was not just my problem,
selfish plus side ever --
and cruelty to try to figure out,
I wanted to unravel
people do when they have a problem
you might be thinking to yourself,
the study of hate in the early 1900s,
a "scale of prejudice."
and other bias-motivated violence.
that your in-group
with those others.
picking on a poor kid,
would eventually end up being gay.
are more likely to be bullied,
in my little 10-year-old mind.
reason I picked on Vicky
hateful or anything,
in our public policies and in our culture
most likely to be bullied in school.
not just the most extremes.
that marching down the street,
rights from some group of people
or their gender,
that group of people is inferior,
that group of people is inferior
that you believe it --
the same roots, don't they?
of racism and sexism
and still infect our society today.
is as bad as being a Nazi,
is the same thing as punching a Nazi ...
who isn't as enlightened as you?
who didn't vote like me
deserve to call themselves Americans,
in some abstract, generic sense.
on which we all place ourselves,
of the essential root of hate:
and they are not,
and every research study I could find,
to some former Nazis
figure out how to escape hate,
of the former terrorist I spent time with
military convoy with a grenade.
to seven years in prison.
they showed a film about the Holocaust.
was mostly a myth.
seeing Jews get killed.
he broke down crying.
a master's degree in Holocaust studies
where former Palestinian combatants
Bassam used to hate Israelis,
and learning their stories
doesn't hate Israelis,
daughter, Abir,
who killed his daughter.
of the same hateful system as he was.
when their child is killed,
like Bassam's all over the world,
nor destined as human beings to hate,
by the world around us.
hating black people or Republicans.
that makes us hate Muslims or Mexicans.
of the culture around us.
who shape that culture,
the hate inside ourselves.
in all their forms
our ideas and assumptions.
but it's one we all need to take.
the hate in our societies,
and institutions and practices
neighborhoods and schools.
to support integration.
it's the right thing to do,
systematically combats hate.
that teenagers who participate
and activities reduce their racial bias.
integrated kindergartens
and in so many places around our world,
don't have any non-white friends.
those proactive solutions,
is upend the hate in our institutions
and difference
and sexual assault in the workplace,
criminal "justice" system.
we talk to each other
and open-mindedness
towards certain groups of people
or what they believe
and in our society
who became a peace activist.
to apologize to her victim.
around the Middle East and Rwanda
of people in communities
of hate behind,
a private investigator
that the person I'm calling Vicky
to hide her identity.
I began my journey,
conditional forgiveness.
cannot absolve you of your past actions.
is to improve the world,
from behaving in similar ways
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Sally Kohn - Political punditSally Kohn searches for common ground among political foes by focusing on the compassion and humanity in everyone.
Why you should listen
Sally Kohn has a powerful vision for a more united United States. She's a columnist and a political commentator for CNN, and she is working on a book about hate that will be published in the spring of 2018. As a former contributor to Fox News, this progressive lesbian sparred with some of the most conservative minds on television and has sifted through hundreds of letters of hate mail a day. But she deeply believes in finding our common humanity, political differences aside. Before we can achieve political correctness, we must first establish emotional correctness — and this will ignite conversations that lead to real change.
Kohn has appeared on Fox, MSNBC and CNN and has written for The Daily Beast, Salon, The Atlantic and TIME Magazine.
Sally Kohn | Speaker | TED.com