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Assignment #13

Sara Ahmed discusses emotion and its significance to human connection in her article, “Affective Economics”. When analyzing the concept of hate and love, Ahmed shows how much of the tension and political uproar we see in America today against migrants, is not necessarily due to hatred. She says how hatred is never the core emotion, but that it is concocted thru feelings of endangerment for the things we love. When it comes to migrants, white nationalists don’t hate them for who they are, but hate how the things they love (their idea of a perfect nation, jobs, and society) feel threatened. It almost seems that hatred is a key effect of fear of change. Ahmed discusses how this is a significant problem among many white people and their collective passionate hate against threats to nationalistic ideas. Many share a strong love for their society, nation, and shared whiteness, and any intimidations to such cause combined chaos amongst them. Ahmed also notes how many people don’t have significant rights against accusations associated with this hatred. For example, many can be accused of terrorism and detained even if their connection to terrorist groups are very weak (like similarity in names, race or residences) with no real rights to fight against such detainment without prominent cause. I think Ahmed is trying to note how these false accusations and detainments are in a large way the effects of irrational hatred. She also explains how people concoct impressions of entire racial groups, for example middle eastern people are painted as terrorists; and how this can cause unnecessary fear on all sides of the equation. When discussing “grounds” Ahmed notes how unsupported racist evidence such as a person being middle eastern with a similar name to a terrorist could very well be the grounds for detainment today and how this is unacceptable.