Parenting & Family Quote by Nadine Gordimer

Fear is often treated as a private feeling, something that happens inside the body. Gordimer refuses that comfort. In one clean sentence, she makes fear social, teachable, and contagious: a child "understands" it early, not as an abstract concept but as a force with consequences. The line’s power is its grim economy - fear arrives with a receipt, and the receipt is "hurt and hate."

Gordimer, writing out of apartheid South Africa, knew how efficiently a regime can educate children without ever opening a schoolbook. Fear is curriculum: pass laws, police raids, whispered warnings at home, the sudden silence when an adult enters the room. Kids learn which streets are unsafe, which words are dangerous, which bodies are protected, which are disposable. The subtext is that racism and political violence don’t only brutalize through direct harm; they reproduce themselves by training the next generation’s instincts. Fear hardens into reflex, then into ideology. Hurt isn’t just an outcome; it’s the primer that makes hate feel plausible.

The sentence also flips a sentimental trope on its head. We like to imagine childhood as innocence, a buffer against history. Gordimer insists history reaches children first, precisely because they’re defenseless and alert. "Understands" is key: not "fears", but comprehends, as if fear is a language adults force them to become fluent in. The intent isn’t to pity children; it’s to indict the world that teaches them fear so well, then acts surprised when they grow up speaking hate.