More recently black thugs drove white and Asian merchants from their neighborhoods during riots in some cities. His view was that these were isolated aberrations not to be likened to the systematic horror Serbs and Muslims are visiting upon one another in the former Yugoslavia. I agreed on the point of magnitude, but stuck to my guns on the potential, particularly because there is an aggravating trend toward disparate cultures between races in America. The affluent and the intelligentsia float above most of this, as they always seem to do, but from the lower middle classes downward, ethnic relations in America are not hunky dory. The wrong kind of leader could exploit them.
Hate is an odd emotion.
It rots the mind. It is hard to describe what it does to people in its unfettered state. The first time I saw it was in Zimbabwe in 1980, where I was covering the aftermath of a seven-year civil war in which a white minority government had been defeated by guerrilla warriors from the black majority. It wasn't the animosity between whites and blacks that shocked me, although there was plenty of that. There were some retributive murders of isolated white farm families.