Resident Haters
Meet Hate On Me’s most regular haters.
The Elahater
Founder, Co-Moderator, Writer
The Elahater is the founder of Hate On Me. She created the site after noticing a severe lack of comedic writing that tackled oppression, hate and ignorant bullshit in ways that didn’t perpetuate stereotypes. Thus, she launched Hate On Me in April 2008 as a way to air her grievances on non-Festivus days.
The Elahater is just your average first-generation Middle Eastern-American, pseudo-stand up comedian, pseudo-hip hop head. She’s lived abroad, she’s lived on Native American reservations, and she’s lived smack-dab in the middle of rural white America. She also guest blogs on entertainment-related nonsense at Bark+Bite.
Despite her visceral criticisms on Hate On Me, she strives to be a loving person who recognizes the need to work on her patience (as evidenced by her severe lack of it on this Web site). The Elahater really doesn’t hate rich, white men— come on, her best friend is a rich white man. And if you met her, you’d probably pinch her cheeks and ask her to watch your children. Who knows? You probably already have.
E-mail The Elahater
Kenny Darter
Co-Moderator, Contributer
You know the self-deprecating white guy in your office who’s always cracking on Whitey but never justifies black jokes with the “But I have several black friends” excuse? Well, that’s Kenny Darter.
Darter comes from the whitest of backgrounds. He played high school golf, he attended private schools where the only black students were sports recruits and he was only allowed to listen to Oldies – the Beatles, Jefferson Airplane, The Doors – until he was 15. He also thoroughly enjoys plain food. Mustard is considered exotic in his family. And Darter has ordered burritos that his parents have inspected like a rare dish from the depths of the Amazon.
So yeah, he’s amazingly white. Gleaming white, some would say.
Darter has been bringing his white bread-ness to Hate On Me since January 2009. He’s frustrated/saddened/infuriated most with sexism and racism in mainstream media. You expect it from the fringe outlets – Fox News, etc. – but CNN and NBC should try not to sound like his racist grandparents.
Until college, Darter took the “love it or leave it” approach to America. Someone would tell him how Europe had better healthcare, and he would suggest they catch the next plane to Munich.
After a couple years of sociology courses at a research university that will remain unnamed, Darter was so horrified by what he was learning – patriarchy and the systematic dominance of white culture – that he had to occasionally view it through a humorous lens. That buffered the shame and self hate. Darter was also listening to a lot of Rage Against the Machine and reading stuff that would have been toasted in his high school’s Wednesday Night Book Bonfires.
So Darter credits higher education for peeling open his lily white eyelids. Sociology of Gender made him hate himself even more. It was like in The Matrix, when Morpheus tells Neo that he’s been trapped in a computer simulation and that the real world was decimated by war hundreds of years earlier. Neo freaked, and rejected the notion. Darter did too, at first.
But Darter took the blue pill, and his rabbit hole has rattled his point of view in unimaginable ways.
Always feel free to call Darter out – he’s taken a lot from the comments on his first few “hates.” He thanks The Elahater for letting him share with you in this arena for criticizing the ignorance that slaps us all in the face every once in a while.
E-mail Kenny Darter
Little Nightowl in the Big City
Contributor
Little Nightowl in the Big City joined Hate On Me in January 2009 as a guest contributor. She joined because owls like to hoot and holler and hate starts with an “H,” too. Plus we all have a mental image of what an owl looks like–we think it’s safe to say practically everything pisses them off.
Issues that really get her blood going? Stereotyping. The Little Nightowl doesn’t want to hear any more about how black people have horrible credit and that white people can’t dance. This is a daily struggle for her since she feels compelled to laugh every time she sees a white person dance the “Cupid Shuffle” and her car is older than the original cast of “In Living Color.”
When asked about her background, Little Nightowl in the Big City asks us to picture a big bowl of Lucky Charms filled with marshmallows from all the colors of the rainbow. Can you picture it now? You can? Good.
Now take all the marshmallows out.
All you have are a couple of brown pieces in a sea of white. Welcome to her childhood.
