Taught to Hate

You've got to be taught
To hate and fear,
You've got to be taught
From year to year,
It's got to be drummed
In your dear little ear
You've got to be carefully taught.

— Lt. Joseph Cable, "You've Got to be Carefully Taught", South Pacific

In this trope, Alice's prejudice towards Bob isn't something she came up with on her own. It was taught to her—maybe by her parents or guardians, maybe by society writ large—and she just accepted it as "the way things are" and never thought to question it.

Note that the technical definition of "prejudice" refers to "pre-judging" people, so this trope doesn't necessarily refer to beliefs that would traditionally be considered bigoted: Alice's dislike of Bob may be based on him holding a political or personal belief, rightly or wrongly, or they could be in a Feuding Families situation handed down from their ancestors long after the inciting dispute became moot. She may even consider him a Category Traitor if they have other traits in common but not this.

This can be used as a Prejudice Aesop along the lines of Rousseau Was Right: to wit, most people are not naturally inclined to hate each other but rather are encouraged to by others, who often have cynical motives for doing so. It's also a good way to portray the hater as more sympathetic than they might otherwise be, and can be an opportunity for Character Development if their beliefs are challenged to the point of forcing them to question what they were taught.

This is a Sister Trope to the Innocent Bigot, who gives offense out of pure cluelessness. Compare Troubled Sympathetic Bigot, who is bigoted but neither lionized nor condemned, and Conditioned to Accept Horror. Pulling Your Child Away may be involved in causing this trope. A character who learns that their prejudice was taught to them, and then decides to overcome it, may become a Former Bigot.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Martian Successor Nadesico: Discussed when Megumi leaves the ship and returns to her acting career. She points out, rather disgustedly, that the villains of the current show she's working on now have a villain called the "Jovan" and it's obvious that they're meant to be a stand-in for the "Jovians", and laments that they're teaching kids to hate the Jovians on sight.
• One Piece: Unlike most fishmen that crusade against humanity (of which there are several, due to racism and oppression of fishmen by humans), Hody Jones was never actually harmed by humans. He was raised in Fishman District, a run-down and isolated place where sentiments against humanity ran so intensely that Hody was radicalized into someone who would exterminate all humans. Prince Fukaboshi demands to know what humanity did to Hody, asking "What in the world did humans do to you?!" when confronted with Hody face-to-face. Hody's response is "Nothing", which stuns the prince. Prince Fukaboshi ends up Disappointed by the Motive once he finds this out, as he calls Hody's grudge "one without substance".

Comic Books

• American Born Chinese: When Jin moves to America and is introduced to his new American classmates, a white boy named Timmy says, "My momma says Chinese people eat dogs." Years later, when they are attending the same high school, he makes sure to loudly say anti-Asian slurs in the presence of Jin, Wei-Chen, and Suzy, all of whom are Asian.
• Rom vs. Transformers: Shining Armor: Stardrive is a Cybertronian raised from "infancy" by the Knights of the Solstar Order, who are convinced Cybertronians writ large are Always Chaotic Evil war machines and so believe they have an Orc Raised by Elves on their hands. The resulting Fantastic Racism, whether malicious or patronizing, has led to her internalizing both the same attitudes and a lot of self-loathing. A chance confrontation with other Transformers and discovering that they can be as compassionate or as ruthless as any other person is ultimately a contributing factor to her desertion from the Space Knights.
• Superman Smashes the Klan: Chuck Riggs hurls racist slurs against Tommy and Roberta. But it's shown that he was taught to be bigoted by his mother and uncle, the latter of whom is a member of the Klan. When said uncle tries to get Chuck to light the Lees' house on fire, Chuck purposefully misses. Chuck later apologizes for his remarks toward the Lees and they become friends at the end of the book.

Fan Works

• Bait and Switch (STO): A considerable amount of ink is spilled in Rachel Connor's Story Arc on Earth-humans' dislike of genetic augments since the Eugenics Wars, to the point of teaching a severely slanted version of the Wars' history in schools. Rachel Connor was involuntarily turned into a genetic augment as an adult and struggles a lot with Internalized Categorism over it, which she's gradually coaxed out of. In "Flesh And Blood STO", Kanril Eleya compares this to how she was taught in Bajoran temple school that "all Cardassians serve the Pah-Wraiths and all humans are cowards", which ended up putting her off of organized religion for most of a decade after she learned a more nuanced version of history from The Alternet.
• The Boys: Real Justice: The Justice League (many members of whom are very protective of children) realize that Homelander and Stormfront are attempting this trope with Homelander's son Ryan (trying to make him believe the same things they do). Eventually, Robin and Superboy break Ryan out of Vought Tower and bring him to the Watch Tower, where he's reunited with his mother. The Justice League help them set up a new home where Homelander will never find them.
• With Pearl and Ruby Glowing: Teddy picked up racist and misogynistic views from his father, which led him to bully Sweetheart's friends and eventually assault Melody.

Film — Animated

• Education for Death: This Disney short has one of the more horrific examples of the trope, as it details the life of a young German boy named Hans under the Nazi regime. He's raised on fairy tales that depict Adolf Hitler as the dashing Knight in Shining Armor who saves Princess Germany from the Wicked Witch named Democracy. And when he goes to school, he's humiliated by his teacher for showing sympathy to the poor rabbit who got eaten by a fox, which causes Hans to repent and declare his hatred towards the rabbit and all things weak. This small lesson becomes the foundation for Hans' higher education, where he participates with his class in book burning and ransacking a church. The end of the short features Hans all grown-up as a ruthless, hateful, blindly obedient Nazi soldier marching into war and eventually... to his death.
• How to Train Your Dragon (2010): All Vikings of Berk are taught to slay every dragon on spot, as they view them as dangerous beasts that raid out of sadism, and they even train children to fight them, until the best of the recruit is chosen for a initiation rite that consists in killing a dragon in front of the entire village. Even Hiccup used to hate them, until one day, after sparing a Night Fury (Toothless) from his trap out compassion, he decided to study him in a peaceful approach and trained him. And after finding out the real reason behind the raids (it turned out that those dragons were forced to steal Berk's supplies by the Red Death, under the threat of eating them) and dealt with it, people are starting to train them as well, developing a symbiotic relationship in the process.
• The Land Before Time: Cera was taught from a young age by her father that threehorns (triceratopses) don't hang with any other dinosaur, and that to survive, they have to go their own way and only fend for themselves. Cera takes this to heart and takes an extremely long time to open up to Littlefoot and his friends, seeing herself as better than them and implicitly leaving them to die multiple times. The third movie explains that Cera's father learned his behavior from his father, with the implication that it goes back much farther.
• The Lion King II: Simba's Pride: The Outsiders, led by Zira, are a group of lions exiled by Simba for being loyal to the deceased Scar. Zira's children — Kovu, Nuka, and Vitani — are raised by Zira to hate Simba and the Pridelanders for killing Scar and banishing them into the Outlands. Kovu in particular is groomed to be Scar's successor and Simba's usurper. However, upon meeting and falling in love with Kiara, Simba's daughter, Kovu is able to shake off the hateful teachings of his mother and manages to convince the Outsiders (sans Zira and Nuka) to drop their feud with the Pridelanders and unite as one pride.
• NIMONA (2023): The legend of Gloreth claims that she was a valiant knight who defeated an evil monster. In actuality, the monster was Nimona, who became friends with Gloreth while the young human was a child. Gloreth initially had no fear of her friend's magical shapeshifting, but when her village found out they stoked fear of Nimona and burned down their own homes in an attempt to attack her, while Gloreth sided with them and turned on her former friend.
• The Sneetches and Other Stories: In the cartoon version, a mother Sneetch teaches her son Ronald to dislike and ignore the Sneetches without stars on their bellies.

Film — Live-Action

• 42: Illustrated by a scene with a young boy attending a game with his father; when Jackie Robinson takes the field, the father begins shouting slurs. The boy seems taken aback at first but, upon observing his father and the rest of the crowd shouting racial abuse, soon joins in.
• Jojo Rabbit: The title character is a young German boy who is being indoctrinated into Nazi ideology by the Hitler Youth organization. Jojo's anti-semitic views are challenged after he discovers that his mother is hiding a Jewish girl named Elsa in their home and gradually develops a friendship with her.
• Ruby Bridges: Ruby is chosen to be the first black student to desegregate an all-white school in New Orleans, but the school initially fights it by reassigning all the other students to other classrooms. They're eventually made to mix the classes, but a white boy skips over her while playing duck-duck-go because he was told by his parents he wasn't allowed to play with her.

Literature

• Alexis Carew: During the bidding on land parcels for the settlement of Dalthus IV, Dunholm Carew happened to outbid Rashaed Coalson on several properties. Rashaed got it into his head that Dunholm was intentionally targeting him, causing a Feuding Families situation when Rashaed taught this version to his sons and grandsons: his heir Daviel turns out to have murdered Alexis's parents because of it. The Cycle of Revenge is broken by Rashaed's grandson Edmon, who is initially antagonistic (trying and failing to get her into an Arranged Marriage so he can inherit the Carews' estate), but is impressed when Alexis returns home a war hero years later. He unexpectedly takes the Carews' side in amending the colony's inheritance laws so that she can inherit the family estate.
• The Dick Francis novels Break In and Bolt deal with two racing families, the Fieldings and the Allardecks, who have hated each other for centuries.
• In the Harry Potter series, characters raised in elitist "pure-blood" families are generally taught to hate "mudbloods" and "blood traitors." The most prominent example is Draco Malfoy, who very much embraces his parents' hateful values, at least for most of the series. Some good characters, namely Sirius Black and Andromeda Tonks, have backstories in which they were raised with this sort of indoctrination but rejected it.
• It: Henry Bowers bullies Mike Hanlon because he was taught to hate black people by his father.
• Kris Longknife: The feud between the Longknife and Peterwald dynasties, which led to a string of sometimes-successful Assassination Attempts against the Longknifes by the Peterwalds, all goes back to when a Longknife relieved a Peterwald of duty in wartime. The Peterwald took that personally and taught his family to hate the Longknifes. Kris Longknife and Vicky Peterwald finally end the Cycle of Revenge when Kris manages to persuade Vicky that she wasn't responsible for the death of Vicky's brother Hank^note Hank died in a battle where Kris was the opposing commander, but 1) he started it and 2) he would have survived if a third party hadn't sabotaged his Escape Pod. and then saves her father's life from an attempted Colony Drop.
• Nineteen Eighty-Four: From a very young age, Oceania's children are taught by the Party to hate all enemies of Big Brother with a fanatic zeal. They are given war-themed toys like model helicopters and submachine guns, and youth organizations like the Spies (of which the minimum age to join is seven) teach them to report their own parents to the Thought Police for signs of disloyalty to the Party and assault random people in public for doing anything that could be perceived as an insult to Big Brother, such as setting a woman's skirt on fire for wrapping sausages in a poster with Big Brother's face on it.
• Penny From Heaven: Penny and Veronica used to be friends until Penny's uncle, Ralphie, rented a building he owned to someone else instead of Veronica's father, who got angry and called him bad names for being Italian. Ever since then, Veronica has been mean to Penny and even made anti-Italian remarks to her face.
  Veronica: My father says we should have dropped the bomb on Italy. He says it would've gotten rid of all you traitors.
• Reign of the Seven Spellblades: At the Kimberly Magic Academy entrance ceremony, Annie Mackley overhears Katie Aalto complaining about mages treating demihumans and magifauna as natural resources, and covertly casts a spell on her to make her run towards the parade of magical creatures they're all watching. She does this for no other reason than because her parents taught her "that pro-civil rights people and demihuman lovers are a blight on the magical community." That said, she didn't mean for Katie to nearly get trampled by a troll: she just wanted to embarrass her but the troll happened to lose it for unrelated reasons at that exact moment.
• Stories From Shakespeare: The introduction to this anthology's novelization of Romeo and Juliet states that the Feuding Families situation of the play began when "one man wronged another", and the two then taught their grudge to their respective clans. The original play doesn't clearly address how the feud started.
• In The Way of Kings (2021), Kachula, like all lions, is taught from birth to hate hyenas, with the differences between the species being emphasised. Once he actually gets to know a hyena for himself, he realises they aren't actually so different after all.
• Wings of Fire: Winter and Snowfall have both been raised to despise NightWings, a prejudice that has been held among IceWings for the past two thousand years. However, they both manage to grow beyond this. Winter's hatred in particular stemmed from the fact that his brother had been murdered by a NightWing ( or at least, that's what he thought happened). This idea is actually a core part of the series- that bigotry and xenophobia is learned, and that one should never make assumptions about groups they don't know, and that learning about other cultures might reveal that they're not so different after all- and that your own group or ideology has flaws you might not have considered before.

Live-Action TV

• All in the Family: An interesting case occurs with Archie Bunker, the Politically Incorrect Hero at the center of the show. Norman Lear intended Archie to be actively malicious in his prejudiced views, which he espoused about anyone who wasn't a white Anglo-Saxon man like himself; Black people, women, gay people, Catholics, "commies," and Jewish people (among others) were all targets for Archie's maligned ideas, and Lear wanted him to be a Strawman Political who was made to be laughed at. But Carroll O'Connor, who actually played Archie, instead insisted on portraying him as a misguided but genuinely good man who'd been taught prejudice and hatred by his upbringing and was capable of overcoming it, which he frequently showed through his sincere friendships with people like Lionel and Louise Jefferson (a Black family), Beverly LaSalle (a cross-dressing gay man), and Stretch Cunningham (a Jewish man). Lear and O'Connor were thus frequently at odds over the scripts, with O'Connor demanding rewrites or simply improvising new material if he disagreed with what Lear had made.
• Ghosts (US): Inverted. Thorfin hates Danes, and is deeply disappointed to find out his son (who was a baby when Thorfin died) married a Dane and had three children with her. At first Thorfin wants to disown his son, but eventually gets over it.
  Thorfin: I was not there for Bjorn when he was a child. Children are not born with hatred in their hearts. They must be taught hatred!
• Kamen Rider Zero-One: The Ark was originally a networking satellite meant to guide Humagears into Japan's workplace using Daybreak Town's populace as a control group. Gai Amatsu deliberately fed the A.I. examples of human atrocities and tragedies so that it would decide Humans Are the Real Monsters and stage an uprising; causing the Daybreak Town Accident. The four Humagears it chose as its heralds would continue to plague humanity to the modern day as Metsubojinrai Dot Net.
• Key & Peele: In "White Zombies", the Zombie Apocalypse takes a turn with most of the zombies, being mutated white people, still carrying their former selves' prejudices and thus avoiding black people rather than eating them. One child zombie tries to bite Key and Peele, but its parents hurriedly pull it away.
• Law & Order: Special Victims Unit
  • "Hate" has a murderer attack Middle-Eastern and Muslim people because he believes they're all terrorists. We later learn that part of the reason he hates them is because his father fell in love with an Arab woman and remarried, with the murderer's mother feeding into his islamophobia.
  • "Raw" leads the investigation to a local gun store that’s also the headquarters of a Neo-Nazi group, since it's connected to a local shooting and death of an African-American child. The owner’s son, Kyle, has been homeschooled his whole life by his father to hate all minority groups. Kyle had such a strong hatred towards non-whites and unwavering and devoted loyalty to his father’s beliefs that Fin (who is black) felt sorry for him, despite Kyle’s offensive remarks towards him. Fin also believed due to his father’s teachings, Kyle never had a chance to think for himself.
• Ohsama Sentai Kingohger: Exploited. Humanity and the Boggnarok warred against one another 2,000 years ago, which morphed into enmity due to Jeramie's legends portraying the Bognaarok as the villains, in turn teaching the Bognaarok to embrace their dark reputation and Become The Mask, setting up a generational Cycle of Revenge. It's eventually revealed that the Galactinsects deliberately set the races against one another from the start as part of their planetary extermination campaign, strong-arming both sides into war to determine which species got to survive; Shugoddam's kings being directly blackmailed by Dugded into hostility to ensure their peoples' survival. Gira breaking this cycle and prostrating to Dethnaarok to unify the races sets the Galactinsects' sights on Earth, who end up flabbergasted by Gira's refusal to play ball; the first monarch to actively defy them.
• Shining Time Station: Discussed in "Schemer's Special Club". Schemer tries to join the Nickelaire club, hosted by Hobart Hume III, who is both sexist and racist. Mr. Hume insults Billy's Native American image by calling him an Indian and refuses to let Stacy join the Nickelaire club because she's a girl. In "The Reason You Suck" Speech that Stacy gives to Mr. Hume, she tells him that he does not have to be sexist or racist because nobody is born prejudiced; it's something they learn from someone else. In his case, she concludes that he learned his prejudices from his grandfather, Hobart Hume I, the founder of the Nickelaire club. Sadly, Mr. Hume has no intention of changing his ways.
• Star Trek: Enterprise: One episode concerns Dr. Phlox treating a patient who's bigoted against Denobulans. Phlox reveals that he used to be bigoted against that guy's species too, but only because his grandma told nightmare-inducing stories about them, and he eventually learned better as he grew older.
• Watchmen (2019): Alluded to in "It's Summer and We're Running Out of Ice". After Angela gives a presentation to her adoptive son Topher's class about her bakery, one of them asks if she bought the place with her "Redfordations" — a derogatory nickname for "reparations" to American blacks for pogroms by white supremacists, combining the word with the surname of President Robert Redford who passed them into law — prompting Topher to tackle the other kid out of his chair. On the drive home, Topher calls the other kid a racist, and Angela replies, "He's not a racist. He's well on his way, though."

Music

• The message of "Who Taught You How To Hate" by Disturbed is that people are not naturally hateful. They have hatred taught to them by others. And by living this way, they essentially lose everyone around them.
• Though it's not the main message of the song, Shawn Mullins' "Shimmer" references this in the context of its larger exploration of the concept of human nature and trying to live a better life by reaching back to those positive elements. As part of this, Mullins paints a picture of a newborn baby, remarking on how a child is innocent and knows only love, but the world will "teach him how to hate".
• The song "Don't Drag Me Down" by Social Distortion is about the history of racism in the United States and how it persists into the modern day. It opens with a straightforward explanation for why the problem has persisted so long: "Children are taught to hate."

Tabletop Games

• In the old Battletechnology magazine supporting BattleTech, one of the issues had a writeup of the DragonSlayers mercenary company, a company that had a titanic hatred for the Draconis Combine, to the point of refusing to hire former DCMS personnel. Hatred going in for the Combine was not required of new hires, as the DragonSlayers proudly boasted they would teach new members to abjectly hate House Kurita.

Theatre

• Rodgers and Hammerstein's South Pacific, specifically the song "You've Got to be Carefully Taught", is the Trope Namer. Lieutenant Cable, a white American man in an interracial relationship with Tonkinese Liat, becomes angry at his own internalized racial hangups about the romance, as well as the impact that those same biases are having on his friend Emile (whose fiancee called off their engagement after learning that Emile's late first wife was Tonkinese and consequently his children are mixed-race), and breaks out into a song to the effect that bigotry isn't something humans are born with, it's something they learn and, by implication, they should damn well un-learn it. The playwrights were requested to cut the song for being too Anvilicious and retorted that its Prejudice Aesop was the point of the whole musical.

Video Games

• Blue Archive: Almost a century before the events of Volume 3, the Arius Autonomous District were once against the formation of the Trinity School alliance and were purged for it, plunging the district into a spiral of poverty and infighting. Since Beatrice's takeover, she has used that vendetta as a form of indoctrination on the students to transform them to her obedient attack dogs and unleashes the likes of Arius Squad to disrupt the Eden Treaty.
• Final Fantasy XIV
  • The prejudices of Ishgardian society are perpetuated by the nation's dogmatic adherence to 1,000 years of faith and tradition:
    • The rift between noble and commonfolk is enshrined in the Halonic faith, which dictates that the nobility descend from the members of the Knights Twelve who survived their battle with Nidhogg. Count Charlemend de Durendaire, the head of the highest of the Four High Houses of Ishgard, specifically teaches his nephew Ronantain to be an Upper-Class Twit who abuses the privileges of his birth. Following revelations about the truth behind Ishgard's founding, Charlemend is ashamed of his former conduct and has Ronantain volunteer with him at a newly opened hospital in the Firmament to slowly undo the prejudices they were taught.
    • Similarly, the Halonic faith encourages Ishgard's 1,000-year-long Forever War against the dragons of Dravania. Children are taught that honor and glory can only be found in service to the Holy See, with the highest accolades going to those who can kill the most dragons. Thus, Ishgardian society is focused on committing genocide against their sworn enemies. Following the end of the Dragonsong War, Ishgard's vendetta against the dragons slowly subsides, with some dragons even visiting the city in the spirit of new friendship and understanding.
  • The Garlean people are taught by their government to hate all other races as "savages" for pushing them out of their ancestral homeland in modern-day Corvos and for not being as technologically advanced as them. Overcoming this prejudice is a major challenge in Endwalker when the Ilsabardian Contingent brings humanitarian aid to the ruined Garlemald. Thankfully, not all Garleans buy into this bigotry, with some children like Volusus not showing any signs of it.
• Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance: Being an open Fantastic Racist when she joins, Jill could easily be mistaken for a Token Evil Teammate. If she's still alive by Chapter 17, she gets a base conversation where she reveals that's simply what's taught where she comes from, and travelling with and meeting more Laguz proved this entire prejudiced worldview was a lie.
  Jill: Do you know the first thing we're taught in Daein schools? Sub-humans are evil. Sub-humans are the enemy. Sub-humans must be eradicated. [...] At first, I thought I could protect my old life, that I could prove the sub-humans were monsters. But I was wrong. And now things are different. The sub-hu— I'm sorry, the laguz... I want to know the truth about them, and I need to base that on what I see, not what I am told by others.
• Fire Emblem Engage: It turns out that Sombron's Hates Everyone Equally mentality stems what he was taught by the Emblem of Foundations. Apparently, they despised having bonds with others and firmly believed that strength can only come from casting everyone aside. Sombron admired The Emblem's strength, and wanted to follow their example in order to get as much power as he possibly could. That is why, in the present day, he treats every important figure in his life like insignificant bugs, as he only sees them to further his own strength.
• Kingdom Hearts: Birth by Sleep: Exploited. Master Eraqus is a hardliner against Darkness in all forms, which results in an uncompromising Black-and-White Morality-filtered view of the world. This ends up getting passed onto his students, namely Terra and Aqua. Aqua is a no-nonsense individual who's been taught that Darkness in all forms is bad and that dedication is the greatest virtue, making it all too easy for her to mistrust Terra when Xehanort rigs the duo's Mastery Exam and scapegoats Terra into thinking he's got Darkness in his heart; planting seeds of doubt in everyone and generally making the boy seem more rebellious than he actually is. Terra meanwhile is inherently insecure and despite his cautious attitude, ends up manipulated countless times, which only serves to reinforce Aqua's mindset when she stumbles onto the aftermath of Terra's visits through the worlds. Aqua is condescending towards Terra and Ventus due to this inherited belief of moral superiority, which serves as one of the catalysts that fractures the trio's friendship and makes them even easier for Xehanort to manipulate. Early in the game, the Fairy Godmother tries to warn Aqua of the dangers of such a mindset when the warrior nearly invades Tremaine's house to combat her Darkness, but the lesson doesn't truly sink in and mishaps later in the game render it moot.
  The Fairy Godmother: (Stopping Aqua from outright invading Lady Tremaine's house) It is dangerous to fight the Darkness with Light, my dear!
  Aqua: ...Why would advise me not to fight Darkness with Light?
  The Fairy Godmother: Strong rays of sun create dark shadows....Light and Dark go hand-in-hand.
  Aqua: (Near game's end): What is Darkness, if not hate and rage?
• Mass Effect: Several examples.
  • Kaidan can become speciesist against aliens under the influence of his Commander, Shepard the Player Character, if certain choices are made in the Dialogue Tree with him. This is completely ignored in the next two games.
  • Tali's hatred of the geth comes from...well, her whole culture really, but most especially from her father, who has been doing secret experiments on the geth and is having her send him geth pieces so he has materials. Under the influence of Shepherd and the geth construct Legion, Tali learns to let go of her hate, and by the time of the Rannoch war in 3, she's trying as best as she can to minimize casualties on both sides.
  • Grunt has a hatred of the Turians literally implanted in his head by his maker, Warlord Okeer. Subverted later on though, as Grunt relays that although he feels the hatred, it doesn't mean anything to him, and he's actually bothered by the fact that it isn't actually his.

Webcomics

• In El Goonish Shive, Dwight the griffin explains that the distrust "the other side of this universe" has towards uryoums is entirely rational: truth magic doesn't work on them, and they tried to take over the world ... with technology. Liam the griffin then explains that the "take over the world thing" was thousands of years ago, if it even happened, and the prejudice against them is mostly for the usual reasons people are prejudiced against those who are different. He's just explaining this to the "our side of the universe" humans, and is surprised when Dwight, admittedly somewhat confusedly, starts taking this on board as well, with the suggestion that no-one had ever raised the possibility that "uryoums are liars and shouldn't be allowed technology" was a prejudice in front of him before.
• The Order of the Stick: The short story "How the Paladin Got His Scar" has O-Chul capture a pair of hobgoblin scouts called Pangtok and Tingtox during a series of border skirmishes. When O-Chul asks them why they hate humans anyway, they tell him they just bear a lazy kind of sort of general enmity as a cultural default which has been imposed on them by their leaders. Neither of them really have any passion in them for hatred.
  O-Chul: So you're saying you have nothing against humans?
  Tingtox: No, no. We totally hate you.
  Pangtok: Sooooo much.
  Tingtox: But it's more of a vague, lazy hate.
  Pangtok: We wouldn't normally do anything about it, except maybe nod when our leaders blame all our domestic problems on you.
  Tingtox: I did point disapprovingly at an effigy once.
  Pangtok: Oh, I can never go to those. I feel too bad for the cute little strawman.

Western Animation

• American Dad!: Francine Smith is left-handed and hates left-handed people and forces herself to use her right hand instead. This is because she grew up in a Catholic orphanage till the age of 7 where her left hand was beaten with a side of beef (or a fish on Fridays) if she used it whilst the nuns who taught her would scream about left-handedness being the sign of the devil.
• Avatar: The Last Airbender: After nearly a hundred years of invading other nations, the Fire Nation's education system is turned into an elitist, imperialist indoctrination for many innocent children, all being raised to become loyal soldiers for Fire Lord Ozai. According to Fire Nation propaganda, the Fire Nation is a great nation spreading prosperity and wealth to its "inferior" neighbors, and thus they are totally justified in waging a war of genocide when said-nations resist their efforts. It even goes as far as creating complete fiction to better portray the Fire Nation as the victim, namely claiming that Fire Lord Sozin honorably fought and defeated the Air Nation Army rather than initiating a surprise and horrific invasion against a peaceful people. Luckily, Aang manages to deprogram one class of Fire Nation children by introducing them to dancing while Prince Zuko, heir to the throne, gets a good taste of reality outside the Fire Nation and then calls out his father for continuing the lies the Fire Nation have been raised on.
• Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts: Dr. Emilia was raised in a burrow full of scientists who were dedicated to isolating the mutagen that caused animals to become Mutes, and cure it (making the surface safe for humans again). She and her brother Liam were pressured by their father to dedicate their lives to finding the cure, outright saying that all of their accomplishments were worthless unless they met that goal. Emilia took this to heart which led to her seeing Mutes as nothing but an obstacle for humans to overcome (not caring that many Mutes were sapient beings who, if befriended, could be allies instead of threats). She's so hard-set in her beliefs that, when Liam suggested that they try to live in peace with Mutes rather than cure them, she killed him in cold blood and blamed the Mutes for his murder.
• The Owl House: Emperor Belos grew up in the 17th century, a time when witches were believed to be real, and were in needing of execution. He was also raised by his older brother, Caleb, who was an esteemed witch hunter, which is part of what influenced Philip (Belos' birth name) to hate witches as much as he does. When the two of them ended up in the Boiling Isles, a place where witches actually exist, Caleb learned to outgrow his past ways of thinking and came to accept that the witches of this world aren't all bad. Philip, on the other hand, never learned to outgrow his past ways of thinking, which sent him into a downward spiral that only got worse as the years went by.
• Tom and Jerry: There are numerous cartoons where Tom tries to teach a younger cat to hate and attack mice, often to his frustration when he finds them getting along immediately after the lesson. There are also various shorts where Spike the bulldog instructs his son on the fine art of cat-hating and chasing. This being a classic cartoon where Cats Are Mean is in full effect, Tom's behavior is cast as appropriately villainous, but Spike's is depicted as tender father/son bonding.

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