The 6 most important types of hate

Hate is a human emotion, although it is not considered healthy. Antipathy and aversion towards a person is not a good thing, nor is it an emotion that one wants to have, although it is natural to feel a little dislike towards someone who has done us an offense.

This word has acquired a new nuance in recent years, thanks to the awareness that there are many incidents motivated by hatred towards a certain group of people.

There are several types of hatred based on prejudices and false beliefs present in society, and then we are going to find out.

• Related article: "The 8 types of emotions (classification and description)"

The main types of hatred

According to the DRAE, the word "hatred" is the "antipathy and aversion towards something or towards someone whose evil is desired." We have all felt in at some point in our lives this emotion that, although clearly bad and negative, it is inevitable that we can feel it towards someone or something. It is not a healthy emotion, but everyone feels it and for that reason we should not think that we have a serious problem

. The important thing is to recognize that, sometimes, we can not like everyone.

However, in recent years this word has acquired a new nuance, a definition that refers to something very murky: hate the different. It is not that a new type of aversion has arisen in society, but that it was very present practically always, only this time it has been given a name, it has been detected. They are hatred towards minorities, towards people of another sexual orientation, race, ethnicity, gender or political ideology. A hatred based on prejudices and erroneous beliefs about what people who are part of a certain group are like.

It is this type of hate that we talk about when we read about "hate crimes" on social media. Any aggression, insult, harassment and murder that has as a background discrimination and prejudice towards a collective is considered a hate crime or, at the very least, an incident associated with hatred towards women. minorities. So, if someone has shown signs of harassing or attacking someone for having a disability, be of race distinct, of a particular religion, homosexual or transgender or any other protected category, is considered a hate crime.

These are the types of hate based on how hate crimes are defined.

1. Racism

Racism is hatred based on racial prejudice, that is, one or more irrational and harmful attitudes towards one or more races. This hatred has been one of the main ones in the greatest misfortunes of humanity in recent years, being among them the slave trade to the New World, racial segregation in the United States, and apartheid in South Africa.

The Holocaust is considered by many a display of racism, and they are right. But it is that not only in this more than abominable event in our history he was motivated by racism, but also by xenophobia and a marked religious intolerance. Jews were attacked for being of a different race (despite the vast majority being white), belonging to to a different culture (despite being mostly German) and believe in Judaism (many of them don't practitioners).

2. Xenophobia

Closely related to racism we have xenophobia, although they are not synonymous terms. Xenophobia is based on ethnic prejudice, that is, false beliefs about people with a nationality or who belong to a specific culture. It can be combined with religious hatred, linguistic discrimination and racism towards people of a certain ethnic group.

There are several recent events motivated by xenophobia, a hatred towards people who do not have to come from outside the country where they are but to be part of a different culture. An example of this we have in the wars in Yugoslavia, in which people who even did nothing shared the same nationality killed each other because they felt they were Croats, Slovenians, Serbs, Bosnians and other ethnicities.

2. Religious hatred

One of the main arguments used in wars throughout history has been religion. From time immemorial it has been justified to destroy an entire people by the simple fact of not believing in the same gods as those of the invading peoples. Within religious hatred we find aversion towards people who profess one or more religions.

One of the most classic and ironic examples of religious hatred was the wars between Catholics and Protestants, in which two creeds that claimed to defend peace and love in the world were embodied in bloody battles to show which of the two factions was right.

In the wars in Yugoslavia, religious hatred was also evident, especially towards the Muslim-majority Bosnians, seen as the main problem of the now-defunct country. The images of the destruction of the Old Bridge in Mostar (1993) are historical, considered this incident as the end of the peaceful coexistence of several religious communities in the Bosnian city.

Religious hatred has also been responsible for the majority of terrorist attacks in recent decades in Europe., motivated by Islamic fundamentalism. Included within religious hatred is the desire to completely end religion and implant a completely atheistic society, as would be the case of several communist regimes in times of Cold

3. Ideological intolerance

People are very diverse even living in the same country, sharing the same language and being of the same race, evidenced in the great diversity of political ideologies that we can see materialized in the form of all kinds of parties and associations.

Each political ideology has its pluses and minuses, but as long as it does not promote harm to others people or the denial of fundamental rights, each one can defend the idea that he considers most timely. Unfortunately, not everyone thinks this way, and there are people who defend attacking and hurting people who do not think the same as them. This is a show of hatred called ideological intolerance.

Anticommunism in the United States and Franco's Spain are an example of this. So is the political persecution of opposition leaders in Venezuela and the total eradication of any opinion critical of the leader Kim Jong-un in North Korea. Religious hatred, depending on how you look at it, can also be considered ideological intolerance since it is persecutes someone for his ideas, be it these policies or how nature and life are governed human.

3. LGTBI + phobia

LGTBI + phobia encompasses all hatred towards non-cisheterosexual people. Thus, within this type of hatred we find several modalities such as homophobia, biphobia, transphobia and any hatred directed at people who feel identified in the acronym LGTBI +.

Although this is rare in the most advanced and civilized countries, criminal offenses are still being committed. hatred motivated by aversion towards people with a non-normative sexual orientation or gender identity. An example of LGTBI + phobia, in this case homophobia, is beating a kid to death who is walking quietly down the street and yelling "Fagot!"

4. Linguistic discrimination

There is the kind of hatred associated with a language and its speakers. This is known as linguistic discrimination, based on the idea that there are better and worse languages and, also, in the myth that languages ​​are proper to certain places, despite the fact that the earth has no a specific language just as it does not have a race, a culture or a religion naturally associated with her.

An example of hatred for linguistic reasons would be the discrimination towards Catalan, Basque or the Galician in multiple periods of the history of Spain and also by certain political movements current. In most cases, it is the speakers of minority languages ​​who suffer this type of hatred, producing in turn, situations of linguistic minority, something common in countries such as Italy, France, Germany and the Kingdom United.

Ironically, linguistic discrimination does not have to be made towards minority languagesInstead, speakers of majority languages ​​and seen as “invasive” can be victims of this type of hatred. An example of this is the fact that posters in Spanish are crossed out in Catalonia or in French in Corsica, or that Spanish-speakers are attacked in the United Kingdom and the United States.

5. Ageism

The emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic has fueled many stigmas and preconceptions towards different age groups. At first, when it was still not believed that a health crisis like the one we are experiencing could be reached, there were not a few who saw the elderly as potential contagious sources from which to flee.

Over time this vision has changed. Now that the majority of the older population is vaccinated, it is the young who are considered as a potential focus of transmission, blaming them in multiple ways on the latest outbreaks that have occurred throughout the world.

Be that as it may, hatred towards people of a certain age group is ageism, and we do not only see it with the pandemic. The opinion that older people are worse behind the wheel and should not drive is a sign of this kind of hatred, just as it is also believe that all young people get drunk riding scandalous bottles in the squares or that youth today is very vague.

6. Misogyny

Misogyny is hatred towards women. While claiming that a society is completely misogynistic is an exaggeration, it is clear that violence against women, sexist murders, feel free to sexually abuse a woman walking down the street at night and other acts against women are fueled by visions misogynist.

There is also the fact that, structurally, we live in a fairly macho society and proof of this we have in the form of lower salaries for women in addition to the existence of the Ceiling of Crystal, that which prevents women from reaching the best as easily as men jobs.

What are the incidents associated with a hate crime?

When a person commits an aggression based on her hatred towards a protected group, a person with a different ideology than yours or simply because he is of the gender that he is, the behavior does not have to be manifested only in the form of physical aggression.

There are many incidents associated with a possible hate crime, incidents motivated by the prejudices of the person who carries them out towards the group to which the person attacked belongs. Among these behaviors we find:

• Verbal abuse: insulting, making offensive jokes and using pejorative names.
• Bullying
• Intimidation
• Physical attacks: kicking, punching, pushing, spitting
• Threats of violence
• Prank calls, abusive texts and threatening emails
• Cyber ​​bullying
• Circulating discriminatory literature and posters
• Damaging property of the attacked group, such as their home, pets, and vehicles
• Offensive graffiti
• Arson
• Throwing garbage at the house of the attacked group
• Malicious complaints about parking, smells and noise.

All these actions are incidents associated with a hate ideology, but not all of them are crimes. The consideration of crime will be based on whether these incidents clearly violate the laws of the country and will receive the name "hate" in case it is shown that there has been prejudicial motivation in its realization, such as racism, homophobia, transphobia or intolerance religious.