HATE

By: Fred Smith

Why the hell do white folks hate Black folks? That question echoes across our history, and the answer always leads back to the lies they built to protect their power. From the beginning, slavery needed a justification. They told the world we were less than human, that our bodies were property, that our free- dom was a threat. That hate wasn’t born from us—it was created and passed down to preserve white supremacy.

When slavery ended, hate didn’t die. It put on new uniforms: Jim Crow laws, lynching mobs, and police badges. It blocked our children from schools, denied us loans, and jailed us for existing in the wrong place at the wrong time. Hate became a tradition, a system, and a strategy. And generation after generation, white America found new ways to recycle the same fe