Thinking Outside of Hate

Victoria Allen
Class of 2016

During my most recent visit home to southern Kentucky, I was greeted with some disturbing news. A family who lived several streets from my mother and me had been victims of a hate crime. Previously, the mother, along with her three biracial children, had suffered from an electrical fire some days earlier that forced them to leave their home temporarily while it was being repaired. During the interim (while they were waiting to move back in), a couple of teenagers cornered her oldest child at school and told him that his mother was a "n*gger-loving whore" and that this time they would burn his house down for good. A few days later, they made good on their threat, and the family’s home was destroyed in a confirmed arson.

I share this story because very few other people will. It is being investigated as a hate crime, but unless someone steps forward to accept blame, very little will come of this. I have spent the last two years of my study focusing on the rural South: the people, the poverty, the politics. It is very comfortable to sit in my academic recliner and examine data of racially motivated crime, and the effects of white poverty on a theoretical community, but this is different. When my mom told me about what had happened in my sleepy hometown, it was like a punch in the gut. 

This event has forced me to address the emotional consequence of my area of study. It is not difficult to visualize the heat of a burning cross in Mississippi while reading a historical account of a Klan hurrah from thirty years ago, but it is much more nauseating to recognize it in a community that you call home, regardless of how welcoming it is to you. This event has forced me to recognize the three dimensional aspect of this field of study. Each side of the equation holds a set of victims, those that are being terrorized, and the ones inflicting the terror. 

It would be easy to hate these teenagers. They premeditated and carried out an arson based solely on the fact of race. We should hold them accountable, but we cannot make them monsters. They are victims of circumstance too. There is an embedded hopelessness in poor rural areas. The knowledge that you are a link in a chain of generational poverty is deafening. I am not excusing their behavior. Growing up in that environment, I am the first person to describe the boiling hate and shame I felt having the N word hurled at me when I went to the same high school that those teenagers attend now. And I feel those same emotions now when I think about what they did to a family with the same racial makeup as my own, mere streets from my home. But, letting myself be darkened by hate is not the answer. I have to think outside of that to search for solutions to stories like these that are far too common, because everyone is a victim in the narrative of poverty.               

Victoria Allen, of Auburn, Ky., is a junior McConnell Scholar at the University of Louisville. She studies history, political science, and women and gender studies.