How to Unlearn Hate

On this episode of The Open Mind, we welcome activist Sally Kohn, author of “The Opposite of Hate: A Field Guide to Repairing our Humanity.” One of the last surviving deep political thinking talking heads, if we can be brutally honest, and the host of the podcast State of Resistance, Kohn has penned an illuminating account of our nation"s crisis of hatred, which appears more and more to be an epidemic, infecting our politics, our psyches, and our very American creed.  Kohn says, “the opposite of hate isn"t love, it"s connection.” She writes, “You don"t have to love people to not hate them. You have to see that you have something at your core: a fundamental humanity. A fundamental goodness.” She adds, “We have to do something about the way in which our lives and our communities are segregated, increasingly ideological, also racial; economic. It"s a very interesting thing about the gay thing. You can have these stealth gay people. I was one of them, where I was dormant in my family the whole time. Then suddenly surprise: I"m gay and they already liked me, so it worked out well, and that"s why we had such quick progress on gay rights as a country. That doesn"t usually happen, say with black people or Muslims. Your cousin doesn"t just suddenly one day come out to be Mexican.”