The Price of Hate

It was a white woman from rural Arkansas who said it... plain and unfiltered. She wasn’t quoting a headline or speculating on hearsay. She lived it. She heard it. She knew it. She spoke about her neighbors, her family, her town (about rural Arkansas and rural Mississippi) and how so many were raised on a steady diet of ignorance, fear, and whispered lies passed down like gospel. Raised to hate what they didn’t understand. Conditioned to believe their worth was measured by their distance from Black folks, not by the content of their own character or the truth of their condition. So when an African American man had the audacity to run for governor, they didn’t just vote against him... they vilified him. Not because of policy. Not because of principle. But because that’s what they were taught to do.

You heard what that woman said... what they called the Black man who dared run for governor. Don’t talk to me about outreach. Don’t talk to me about Democrats not trying. Time and again, hands were extended, policies proposed, futures imagined... and time and again, they spat in the face of progress. They turned their backs not just on candidates, but on decency, on reason, on their own survival.

And now the chickens have come home, not to roost, but to remind. Because make no mistake: what they are suffering now.. the joblessness, the hospitals closing, the schools crumbling, the future shrinking... is the bitter harvest of hate. They chose spite over substance. They chose whiteness over well-being. They voted not for a better life, but for a worse one.. so long as it meant Black folks had less.

So no, I offer no sympathy. I offer no soft words for hardened hearts. What they are losing now is what little they had... not because no one tried to save them, but because they could not bear the thought of being saved by someone they were taught to hate.

As Dr. King once warned, “We must learn to live together as brothers or perish together as fools.”

The tragedy is that some would rather see the whole house burn down than share the warmth of its fire.

And in the haunting words of James Baldwin: “If they take you in the morning, they will be coming for us that night.”

Their silence, their hatred, their vote... it wasn’t just self-destruction. It was complicity in a system built to crush us all.