There are various analyses of the roots of hate violence and racial and ethnic stereotyping, some pointing to head trauma, genetic factors, or brain biochemistry. But I’m putting forward the thesis that bigotry, especially in its organized manifestations, stems from an inability to compete in the market due to fear of exposure to new experience and failure resulting in economic deprivation and a need to compensate. One study indicates that members of a white supremacit organization known as the Aryan Nations are drawn overwhelmingly from the ranks of the deprived, powerless and downtrodden. The study found that 78% of members were manual laborers or unemployed. They despised and victimized blacks, Latinos, immigrants and especially Jews, and gained a fleeting sense of power or adequacy from acts of violence or rallying together and reinforcing commonly held hatreds.
For a bigot, steoreotyping serves to rationalize feelings of personal failing and fear. It offsets the dissonance born of the ostensible success of previously repressed minorities, whose rise in the demographic is otherwise uncomfortable to behold.
Hate violence is usually committed when the attacker is physically superoi or armed or has superior numbers, and serves the physic need for a fleeting sense of strenght of relief from a sense of weakness.