There’s a photograph that keeps reappearing, grainy and timeless, like a ghost that refuses to be forgotten. Two figures stand together, their bodies pressed in quiet solidarity, holding a placard that feels less like a protest sign and more like scripture. The words are simple, almost brutal in their directness: DON’T HATE WHAT YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND.
Half a century later, the phrase feels less like a call from the past and more like a warning about the present. We live in an age where misunderstanding isn’t just common—it’s weaponised. In the perpetual scroll of online outrage, difference gets flattened into threat. What isn’t instantly legible is mocked. What resists translation is demonised. The algorithm doesn’t reward curiosity; it rewards speed, takes, certainty. The unknown becomes the enemy.
But this isn’t new. Pop culture has always been a battlefield where the misunderstood become targets. Punk was dismissed as noise until it rewired the aesthetic DNA of fashion and music forever. Hip-hop was branded criminal before it became the global pulse of culture. Queer nightlife was once seen as a dangerous underground—today it informs everything from mainstream pop visuals to streetwear silhouettes. Each of these movements was hated, not because they were inherently destructive, but because they weren’t immediately understood by those clinging to the safety of sameness.
The cycle continues. We see it in the way young Black artists innovate online only to have their dances, styles, and slang appropriated, stripped of context, and resold. We see it in the trans community, who face relentless demonisation while simultaneously shaping the future of language, art, and fashion. We see it in climate activists, ridiculed as alarmists even as the planet burns in real time. Hatred becomes the reflex where empathy should be.
To resist that reflex—to refuse hate—is a radical act. It requires patience, listening, and vulnerability. It demands we step outside of ourselves, abandon certainty, and admit: “I don’t know this. I don’t understand it. But maybe I could.” That is not weakness; it’s strength. It’s the first step to transformation.
Pop culture is, at its best, a machine of understanding. It takes the fringe and brings it to the centre, not to sterilise it, but to let it speak in its own language. It reminds us that everything we now take for granted—our music, our fashion, our slang—was once something strange, foreign, misunderstood. The very things we love today are often the things someone, somewhere, once hated for being different.
The placard’s message isn’t just about tolerance. It’s about evolution. It’s about refusing to let ignorance calcify into violence. It’s about protecting the fragile, beautiful moment when something new is born into the culture, before it is destroyed by those too afraid to understand it.
Don’t hate what you don’t understand. Learn from it. Sit with it. Let it unsettle you. That’s how culture moves forward. That’s how we move forward.
