How Hate Learns Its Manners
On Reading Addison Flay’s Essay and the Language of Civilized Contempt
“The colonist fabricates and maintains the colonized subject for his own ease of mind.”
—Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks
Author’s Note
This essay is not a refutation of Addison Flay—it is an autopsy. He is not an aberration but a specimen, valuable precisely because his rhetoric is so fluent, so typical. To study him is to study the grammar itself.
Flay describes himself as a far-right white nationalist. His essay “Blacks Are a Huge Problem” is the subject of this autopsy. Every move he makes has been made before; every sentence he writes was taught to him by a centuries-old curriculum. I am using him as the lens not because he invented this language, but because he speaks it with such unmistakable clarity.
What disturbs me is not that a man could write such hatred, but that so many could read it and nod. The grammar of supremacy has always been seductive—its rhythm confident, its diction clean, its violence dressed in calm syntax.
Every empire has its lexicon. This one calls its panic “prudence.” Its prejudice “pattern.” Its segregation “safety.”
My aim is simple: to trace language back to its first wound—to show how even the most articulate hatred begins as self-preservation and ends as scripture.
