Thoughts on Self-hatred

I read “Bastard Out of Carolina” last year for English, and the theme of self-hatred burned throughout the book. Bone, the main character, passionately hates herself because her neighbors and schoolmates look down upon her and her “white trash” family. Bone fights her low self-esteem throughout the book, but the book ends with Bone capitulating to a lifetime without compassion, a subsistence of violence and hatred towards all, especially herself. In chapter 15, Wright discusses the disease of self-hatred in black men. Reading Wright’s thoughts, I remembered Bone and how her intense self-hatred stemmed from other’s hate. Wright writes, “Hated by whites and being an organic part of the culture that hated him, the black man grew in turn to hate in himself that which others hated in him. But pride would make him hide his self-hate, for he would not want whites to know that he was so thoroughly conquered by them that his total life was conditioned by their attitude; but in the act of hiding his self-hate, he could not help but hate those who evoked his self-hate in him (266).” Wright goes on to explain that a black man filled with these ideas would become “inefficient, less able to see and judge the objective world (266).” If white men were to observe a black man in this state of mind, they would think him unbalanced, and this one black man’s bizarre behavior would further lower the white men’s opinion of all black men. I thought it interesting how the thoughts of a poor white girl in a fictional story mirror the meditations done by a black man in his autobiography. Both recognize, and experience, that odium is a horribly vicious thing. It’s a cycle that refuses to stop for hatred is born from self-hatred, and self-hatred arises from hatred.