The Believer : prejudice against one's own ethnicity

what do you call experiencing / feeling intolerance & prejudice against one's own people / culture / ethnicity?? i've been reasearching for a while to no avail

Self hatred?

Homophobia. (not really an ethnicity but similar concept)

That assumes that all homophobes are closet homosexuals themselves. That's the stereotype, and it's definitely true in some cases (e.g. the rentboy incident), but whether it's a universal explanation for hatred of gays is debatable at best.

not that much,,here we have something else,,you see not all homophobs are gays ,only in some rare cases,,but here we have something more complexed !!!

Check out self-hating Jews / jewish self-hatred in Wikipedia. There is a related sociolological term as well.

More often than not, "self hating Jew" is a derogatory term that Jews themselves love to throw around as a way to discredit any Jewish person who openly speaks against one aspect of Jewish ideology/culture/history or another. How many times have people like Chomsky or Finkelstein been called self-hating Jews for not accepting to bow down to Israel's policies or argument in a way that displeased a certain intelligentsia?

It think it's less a real phenomenon than a subtle institutional response, an attempt at dismissing arguments and views that hit too close to home. At any rate, I've never heard of a black/Asian/latino/Muslim man hating his origins so much that he started to target his own. So why would a Jew? Outside of fringe exceptional cases, such as depicted in this movie, it doesn't make much sense, so i contend that the use of the term is mainly a stratagem to silence some unnerving voices expressing bothersome opinions.

I mean, reducing a guy like Chomsky to a so-called self-hating Jew is just ridiculous. He speaks the truth and sometimes that's all that is needed to be labeled as such.


People who don't like their beliefs being laughed at shouldn't have such funny beliefs

I call it crap. The movie was interesting but I can think of no real examples of this. Yes, there are certain people that are self-loathing, but to take it to the level of practicing and preaching violence against your own people while secretly observing your faith is just asinine. The character in this film never really makes a compelling case (or reason) for his state of mind.

Well you had to go back to 1504 to find an example. Even still he was only preaching against his own people, not beating or killing them. The character in this story was preaching against his people or beating them one day, and secretly observing his faith the next. A fairly ridiculous concept that has no basis in any real life situation.

Bobby Fischer was a Jewish antisemite and a rather virulent one. Then there was David Cole in recent times who is probably the world's most successful Holocaust Denier (if being a Holocaust Denier makes you an antisemite).

A milder version would be Norman Finkelstein, although I don't believe he's an antisemite, but many Jews do.

Jews who criticise Israeli policy are frequently derided as "self-haters".


It's not "sci-fi", it's SF!

Oh and you missed the fact it's based on a real person and events?

There was also one of the leaders of the Arian Brotherhood who was half jewish, he had a star of david on one arm and a swastica on the other.

If you examine your own sociocultural background, and find it to be flawed, isn't it sensible to reject it?

This quote is relevant: "I'm the only one who does believe. I see him for the power-drunk madman he is. And we're supposed to worship such a deity? I say never. " Isn't that why the movie is called "The Believer"? The protagonist truly believes that the jewish god exists; but he is also a dystheist, he sees that such a god must be evil. By extension, its religion is also evil.

I think it's not so much about intolerance or prejudice for ones community or ones own people, it got more to with knowing the propaganda machine in your community. Hatred and love and are very personal emotions and one does have both for their community as one tends to interact with their community more. Hence knows about the bigotry, double standard that exists in there own community or society for that matter. Being critical about one's community is for some reason a no-no, in fact people should be critical about their own culture, beliefs, society etc rather looking for faults in alien cultures.

The film is a jewish propaganda. NO more, no less.

Instead of attacking skin-heads and nazis directly, which might polarize the film, and maybe increase jew-hating from those groups or anyone sympathizing with those groups. But rather the movie use a clever hook, that the enemy is actually a confused jew, who repents at the end(because he was wrong!)

Having him repeat the "known" anti-jewish rhetoric in a repulsive way that you'd hate him and what he represents, and actually feel his demise at the end to be a just conclusion. Cleverly, abstaining from discussing "real" issues.

I suppose revenge is part of human nature, and the victim of past aggression will never be satisfied till he's avenged. But if you're going to take that route in life you shouldn't be surprised that "others" are doing the same thing.

Thank God a lot of us aren't vengeful. We forgive and forget.

Why would they be called self hating Jews? If a Christian were to leave Christianity and convert to Atheism and hate on Christianity then they wouldn't be called a self hating Christian they'd just be called an Atheist who hates Christianity. Why isn't it any different for Jews when Judaism is just a religion? It doesn't make sense to me!

Because being Jewish is more than a religion. Israel doesn't require you to be a practicing member of any form of Judaism, and for the most part the only Jews who wholly conflate Jewishness with Judaism are the ultra-orthodox.

Many believe that the individuals who are being mistreated will only feel anger against their oppressors. However, there are a startling number of individuals who, from the oppression and mistreatment of other groups, develop an unbridled hatred and shame of their own race or ethnicity. These individuals respond to the prejudicial behavior of others by internalizing the thoughts and actions of the oppressive group. Essentially, they blame themselves and their own race/ethnicity for the mistreatment that they endure. They become embarrassed of their own culture and feel as if they are superior to those of their own ethnicity, causing them to distance themselves from their own culture.

Examples of this occur in the children of parents who have emigrated from another country to the United States. In many ways, these children become Americanized and lose pride and respect for their ethnicity group. For example, they may use racial slurs against those of their own ethnicity because they feel they are superior to their own race. This is not at all uncommon, though it is extremely heartbreaking to witness.

Overall, the term self hatred would be an adequate description on this phenomenon. To my knowledge, there is no specific term that has been applied to this, yet self hated is commonly associated with it.

"Self-hatred" or "self-loathing" is the usual term. Perhaps something like "autophobia" - if you want a fancier term.

It happens all the time.

One of the most common examples you see about the place, are various rich/middle class/suburban youngster either in socialist/anarchist groups, or turning vegetarian/environmentalist.


It's not "sci-fi", it's SF!

The way I see it, a person can be proud of their heritage but be prejudice against some of their own people because of being a negative stereotype or making the main person and other decent people of the same ethnicity look bad. But as far as someone actually being prejudice against their own ethnicity, now that's going to the extreme.

Prejudice: Means to Pre-judge something.

So, being proud of your ethnicity is prejudice because you pre-judge it in total as being good.

There is no such thing as the supernatural, being a jew is based on that, so the whole thing is a bunch of lies. There's many smart jewish people, and they know it's lies, yet use them to their advantage and continue teaching children these lies, which is like child abuse. Meanwhile, when you read the Torah and Talmud, they're filled with hate speech against "infidels" etc which do not exist because god does not exist. These people also promote male genital mutilation because their fake god demands it.

Now, if you look at all of that, and are instantly proud of being a "jew" then you are a crazy prejudice person. However, you can be proud of certain "jews" for transcending being a jew.

For instance, my hero is the psychologist Alfred Adler who was born jewish, but then became an atheist humanist who believed everyone equal. He tried to encourage people to work together instead of belonging to hate groups like judaism.