Dove (2008) | capn madd matt / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
Following the assassination of Charlie Kirk, New York Times columnist Ezra Klein rushed to praise the far-right activist for, he wrote, “practicing politics in exactly the right way.” Klein lauded the Turning Points USA founder’s approach to civil political debate on college campuses. The column brushed over the fact that Kirk had spent years promoting and fueling hatred against ethnic and religious minorities. Meanwhile, more than 600 Americans were fired, suspended, or investigated for posts deemed too critical of Kirk after his death. Washington Post columnist Karen Attiah lost her job after posting measured comments on social media about gun violence and racist double standards and citing an example of Kirk’s animus against Black women. The fallout from Kirk’s death made it all too clear who is granted the permission to hate, and whose hate is named as such.
Journalist and author Şeyda Kurt’s book Hate: The Uses of a Powerful Emotion (Verso, 2025), newly translated from German into English, addresses key asymmetries in the politics of hate today. As the title suggests, Kurt frames hate not as merely a private feeling but an emotion whose expression is conditioned by relations of power and domination.
Hate expressed across different structural positions is received entirely differently: pathologized in some, legitimized in others. Drawing on theorist Achille Mbembe’s account of the white colonial gaze—which casts the colonized as incapable of compassion or nuance, driven only by “rage, nervousness,” and “brute strength of the body”—and on Martinican psychiatrist Frantz Fanon’s experience of being perceived as a furious, threatening creature on the streets of France, Kurt shows how colonial discourse deemed the colonized as inherently hateful and incapable of reason, a characterization that licenses their subjugation. As Kurt puts it, “The right to exercise hate and its accompanying violence is … reserved for those whose violence has always been oppressive and destructive,” like colonizers, cops, and other beneficiaries of racialized and gendered hierarchies. What emerges from this picture is not a moral rejection of hate but a selective and political one.
Kurt identifies different “modes” of hate in the book, each describing a distinct mechanism by which hate is produced, suppressed, or redirected. One distinct mode is self-hate. Drawing on Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, Kurt describes how colonial domination produces forms of self-hate, in which the colonized internalizes the colonizer’s gaze and comes to view their own body as a site of inferiority and ugliness.
Kurt further illustrates this dynamic of self-hate within gendered oppression through the case of Aileen Wuornos, a queer woman who murdered six men she claimed had attacked or raped her. Broken down by sustained abuse, poverty, and exploitation, Wuornos represents those for whom hate is not a choice but a condition imposed by their circumstances. Wuornos pleaded for her own execution, stating that she had “hate crawling through [her] system.” For Kurt, Wuornos is the tragedy of self-hate at its extreme, for she internalized the world’s verdict that a hateful person has no right to live.
This self-hate is simultaneously reinforced by what Kurt calls the “prohibition of hate”—that those subjected to subjugation and oppression must constrain their hatred for the injustice they face, and instead signal acceptance of oppressive conditions. Kurst uses the example of the case of Rodney King: While he was beaten unconscious by four Los Angeles police officers in 1991, his attempts of self-defense were recast in court as signals of aggression and intent to attack. The police officers were acquitted, leading to furious riots. “The more Rodney King defended himself, the more indefensible he became,” writes Kurt. The racialized person who resists is recast as the aggressor, their self-defense serving as confirmation of their inherent violence.
Kurt directs her criticism to what she calls a “Peace, Love and Pancakes” society, the tendency of a liberal order where varying forms of hate and conflict are neutralized through a moral imperative to remain civil, agreeable and non-confrontational. At a time of rising authoritarianism, Kurt condemns this “formula for cosmetic peace” that prioritizes harmony over confrontation. Kurt points out that in Germany 2021, some 12 thousand deportations were carried out—an 11 percent increase from the previous year—while the police force was celebrated for being “more diverse than ever.” Here, political hate is not eliminated but rebranded as the state makes performative inclusions with one hand and mass expulsions with the other. Klein’s praise of Charlie Kirk as a proper practitioner of politics also exemplifies this logic. The pacification of society does not make political hate and oppression disappear.
“What does hate look like when we take control of it, unravel it and weave it anew?” Kurt asks. If hate is continuously displaced, suppressed, and regulated, how might one break this vicious cycle? For Kurt, the answer lies in a mode of hate as the “self-empowered response to oppression.” In this sense, hate becomes an organizing force for the oppressed, capable of drawing political lines and sustaining necessary political opposition. The recent wave of nation-wide anti-ICE protests offers an example. In the wake of intensified immigration crackdowns and recurring incidents of deadly state violence, slogans like “Fuck ICE” have emerged as expressions of collective hate and refusal. However, not all expressions of hate as self-empowered responses to oppression travel equally. When Northern Irish rap group Kneecap projected slogans of “Fuck Israel. Free Palestine” at Coachella 2025, their livestream was cut; when punk rap duo Bob Vylan led Glastonbury crowds in chants of “Death, death to the IDF”, their visas were revoked by the State Department, which declared that “foreigners who glorify violence and hatred are not welcome.” The Trump administration has even sought to deport students and scholars for expressing solidarity with Palestinian struggle and criticizing Israel.
In contrast, when celebrities from Bad Bunny to Billie Eilish voiced anti-ICE speech at the 2026 Grammys, few faced visa revocations, criminal investigations, or job losses.The slogan of “Fuck ICE” gets a hearing that other slogans don’t, partly because ICE serves as a clear symbol for the worst of the Trump administration’s excesses; a large enough constituency of liberal, middle-class opinion finds it a sufficiently safe target. “Self-empowered hate” is still subject to the same logic Kurt describes in other modes of hating—this, too, is reserved for and determined by those with a relative degree of power.
A crucial question remains: How does hate translate to concrete political action? Kurt names the “self-empowered hate” as potentially salutary, but doesn’t theorize the passage from prohibition to resistance: What conditions allow suppressed hate to become empowered refusal rather than collapsing back into self-hate? Her proposed answer is a society grounded in “radical tenderness,” pairing both hate and tenderness, destruction and construction. Hate serves as the force that negates and resists oppressive systems, while tenderness could bring people together and build new social relations without cruelty and domination.
Her most ideal model is Rojava, the Kurdish autonomous region in northern Syria, where women’s cochairmanship in every institution and democratic confederalism beyond ethnonationalist projects prove that cycles of hate can be broken and transformed into practices of liberation. Kurt herself planned to travel to Rojava to find more answers, only to watch on screen as Turkey again rained bombs over the region in 2024. “Suddenly, all my words sound empty and awkward. Trans-formative jus-tice: nothing but broken syllables, all wrong.”
Kurt’s vision of productive hate and tenderness remains largely vague and underdetermined, although poetically gestured toward. It is unclear how a politics grounded in feeling, even powerful feeling, can be transformed into enduring action and strategy. Still, in a moment when righteous hate of the oppressed is continuously silenced and institutional violence is normalized, Kurt’s insistence that hate can be legitimate, generative, and necessary is an argument worth having and pushing forward.
