To know where hate comes from, I have no choice but to take an atavistic journey—to my own roots in working-class Yonkers. I know it is normal for me to hate someone who does me wrong. Hating someone just because of the color of her skin, her country of origin, or her religion is a form of hatred that is alien to me, but not to some of the people who I grew up with. It was through Donna Donato that I first learned about hate, the kind of hate teenage girls have for one another for no other reason other than the enjoyment derived from being mean.
In the tenth grade Donna Donato and I were Best Friends Forever. BFF. We dropped mescaline and barricaded ourselves in her bedroom, listening to music. She was the first to buy the Allman Brothers’ Eat a Peach album. Donna’s first best friend, Tina Tucci,* always lurked in the background. Tina left our Catholic school to go to trade school for secretarial training. Out of sight, out of mind, Donna dumped Tina and made me her new BFF, sort of like being a made man in the Mafia. Tina always came back to reclaim her former status of BFF, wooing Donna with concert tickets, better drugs, and trips to the Jersey shore.
Then they ganged up on me. Saying nasty things about me behind my back, or to my face, zoning in on precisely what made me different from them—You’re too white to be an Italian girl. They especially hated the way I thought deeply about life. “You think too much,” they told me. They spread rumors about my honor and my virginity and worked in tandem like an assault unit, getting other kids to hate me. Back and forth, I was tossed between them like the third wheel on an old Schwinn.
Getting bullied by Donna and Tina is a far cry from the politics based on hatred in Nazi Germany under Hitler or most recently, in Rwanda under Gregoire Kayibanda. No genocide was going on in Yonkers, just the witless torture of a teenage girl. No matter how you look at it, though, hatred is hatred, especially when hatred emanates just because someone is different. Color. Religion. Ethnicity. Education. Any difference can spark a fire. Whether it’s Donna Donato pummeling me or Hitler exterminating Jews, hatred is the most effective way to build a coalition to grab power.
Hitler achieved power with the help of the Sturmabteilung, Storm Troopers, known as the Brown Shirts. Hitler founded this violent paramilitary group in 1921 to guard Nazi Party meetings. Often functioning as a security force at Nazi rallies, the Brown Shirts took an allegiance to Hitler and served him by committing violence to secure votes and beat Hitler’s enemies. The Brown Shirts lent muscle to the Nazi Party the same way Mussolini’s Black Shirts functioned as a paramilitary security force in Fascist Italy.