WARNING: This column contains obscenities.

People hate me.

Not many, at least in relation to the 7 billion-plus humans on the planet, or my 330-some million fellow Americans, or the quarter-million daily users of X, the most hate-filled of our social-media platforms. The vast majority of humans, those remote from my life and those I encounter online and “IRL”—in real life—don’t hate me, don’t know me, don’t care about me and such madness one way or another. Most people, as I often say, are still normal. That fact remains the hope of the country, and maybe the world.

And yet, I have more than my share of haters.

"Retard." "Faggot." "Fuckwit." "Shithead." "Cunt." "Dumbass." And, of course, "libtard." Those are only some of the obscenities and vulgarities—from the past few days. The rage and spite and hatefulness and violent language roll in like weather systems against many of my posts, and they are telling.

None of it bothers me any more. I’ve heard it all, and over the years I’ve developed a thick hide and an understanding that a significant portion of this unpleasantness is the product of choices made by the Lords of the Algorithms of Social Media—especially Elon Musk, who feeds rage and hate into every corner of his platform. People get addicted to it. Also, a good amount of the worst of Twitter/X and other sites comes from bots run by our enemies around the world. Our adversaries know that it weakens us as a people.

Still, it is a telling phenomenon in an America that feels as if it is coming apart.

I've been asking myself those questions for years.

Now, I’m not a saint online, or anywhere else. Like so many of us, I’ve had my moments, my slips, my sips from the cup of hate on social media. I’m ashamed of them. I was raised to think that kind of anger and language are shameful, especially in public. Most of us, I think, were raised that way.

America used to be a country that prized decency, in every class and across every difference. People who hurled obscenities and racist slurs at others in public were considered low-lifes, beneath contempt. Now they’re everywhere, online and IRL. They revel and take joy in their liberating self-degradation. They feel like they are running the country now, and the rest of us just have to take it, and they may be right.

So I ask: What are these citizens? I've come to believe the answer matters—not for my sake, but for our country’s. Because what gets tossed into my mentions and yours is not some fringe aberration. It is a symptom of something systemic, something that has infected the whole body politic. If we want to cure ourselves of it, we need to name it with precision. We need a diagnosis.

A few years ago, the research organization More in Common—founded after the murder of British MP Jo Cox by a right-wing extremist in 2016, and dedicated to understanding and bridging social division—conducted a revealing survey of Americans. They asked Republicans to describe the views of Democrats, and Democrats to describe the views of Republicans.

The results were striking, and not in the way you might expect. What the survey found was not that Americans are hopelessly polarized, that our fellow citizens on the other side are actually the monsters we imagine them to be. Quite the contrary. What it found was that we are wrong about each other. Systematically, persistently, dramatically wrong.

Republicans dramatically overestimate how many Democrats are atheists or LGBT. Democrats dramatically overestimate how many Republicans are wealthy or hold extreme views. We are not so much divided from one another as we are disconnected.

We are strangers to each other.

We no longer know each other. And into that ignorance, fear and contempt rush in to fill the void.

It happens when we give ourselves permission to become the worst version of ourselves whenever we think of The Other, or encounter Them.

We don’t see people any more. We see types, threats, targets. Phantoms, not humans. And then we type "retard" and hit send, because we are not, at that moment, communicating with a human being. We are discharging hatred into an abstraction.

It’s hard to get your head around this phenomenon, in part because it exists in its purest form in the sorcery of the social-media algorithms, and it feels alien to American life as we knew it for so long.

But for Black Americans, these experiences are nothing knew. Black Americans have always known this mechanism from the inside, centuries before the algorithms. They have lived within it, written about it, survived it, and borne witness to it with a precision and a moral authority that the rest of us can only try to learn from.

And no one in that tradition has mapped the inner geography of dehumanization more exactly, more devastatingly, than Claudia Rankine.

Citizen: An American Lyric is Rankine's 2014 masterwork—one of the great works of American literature—a book-length poem, or perhaps a lyric essay, or more accurately a work that breaks the boundaries of both categories to achieve something new and astonishing in American letters. It is a book about what it means to move through American life in a Black body, in a culture that has never fully decided whether to see you. Or not.

Race is different. It is always different in our country—older, deeper, more violent, more consequential than any other form of American disconnection. I do not want to blur that distinction or dilute the specificity of what Claudia Rankine is describing. She is writing about something that has a particular history, a particular weight, a particular toll.

We can learn from her genius.

This passage from Citizen is set on a train. A woman takes an empty seat. She is Black. The man beside her is white. They ride for a few minutes.

And in these lines, Claudia Rankine renders the inner experience of the mechanism of dehumanization with her characteristic clinical precision.

She also offers us a gift in her last line, its double meaning, its love.

—Terry

by Claudia Rankine

On the train the woman standing makes you understand there are no seats available. And, in fact, there is one. Is the woman getting off at the next stop? No, she would rather stand all the way to Union Station.

The space next to the man is the pause in a conversation you are suddenly rushing to fill. You step quickly over the woman’s fear, a fear she shares. You let her have it.

The man doesn’t acknowledge you as you sit down because the man knows more about the unoccupied seat than you do. For him, you imagine, it is more like breath than wonder; he has had to think about it so much you wouldn’t call it thought.

When another passenger leaves his seat and the standing woman sits, you glance over at the man. He is gazing out the window into what looks like darkness.

You sit next to the man on the train, bus, in the plane, waiting room, anywhere he could be forsaken. You put your body there in proximity to, adjacent to, alongside, within.

You don’t speak unless you are spoken to and your body speaks to the space you fill and you keep trying to fill it except the space belongs to the body of the man next to you, not to you.

Where he goes the space follows him. If the man left his seat before Union Station you would simply be a person in a seat on the train. You would cease to struggle against the unoccupied seat when where why the space won’t lose its meaning.

You imagine if the man spoke to you he would say, it’s okay, I’m okay, you don’t need to sit here. You don’t need to sit and you sit and look past him into the darkness the train is moving through. A tunnel.

All the while the darkness allows you to look at him. Does he feel you looking at him? You suspect so. What does suspicion mean? What does suspicion do?

The soft gray-green of your cotton coat touches the sleeve of him. You are shoulder to shoulder though standing you could feel shadowed. You sit to repair whom who? You erase that thought. And it might be too late for that.

It might forever be too late or too early. The train moves too fast for your eyes to adjust to anything beyond the man, the window, the tiled tunnel, its slick darkness. Occasionally, a white light flickers by like a displaced sound.

From across the aisle tracks room harbor world a woman asks a man in the rows ahead if he would mind switching seats. She wishes to sit with her daughter or son. You hear but you don’t hear. You can’t see.

It’s then the man next to you turns to you. And as if from inside your own head you agree that if anyone asks you to move, you’ll tell them we are traveling as a family.