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Robert Walczak Assignment 13

Sara Ahmed starts off with a passage from an Aryan web site that talks about how the emotions people feel for seeing something they don’t like isn’t hate but really love. She goes into more detail in her article “Affective Economies” about how her take on emotion and how it differs from other’s view on the subject. She goes against the notion that emotions are a private matter and that it just moves from one person to another. She goes into how emotions from my understanding are connected between the individual and the collective and this connection is important to understanding people’s views. She takes that Aryan example of how they picture the white person’s job, security, wealth, and purity and everything they love is being threatened by others. The love the Aryans have for their nation stems from their rewriting of history saying that the whites had built the land they love instead of the migrants and slave and call themselves the victim. Their telling of the story puts them as victims with their rights under danger and their nation being threatened. The hate they see the other as helps being the white subjects and the nation closer to each other. That is how emotions affect how people react and form a collective, common fear, hate, and love bring these people together. Another example of how emotions shared between people can affect the world around those people would be the 9/11 attacks. The terrorists shared the love of their religion and beliefs and used those beliefs to justify their actions. Their actions also led to the emotions Americans felt after the attacks, fear of more attacks, and hatred of the attackers and the want for vengeance. This was only spurred on by media which highlighted Americans fears. All of this now led to more groups fueled by different emotions in wake of the attacks and the following war.