Exploring the emotion of hate through the Cronulla race riot that occurred on a Sydney beach in Australia in December 2005, this article’s principle concern is to interrogate the pleasure and the pain of hate, by asking what is happening to us when we hate? Analysing hate as an emotional response to and a soothing strategy for dealing with human alienation, it suggests that crucial to understanding hate is a grasp on the ontological entanglement of self, otherness and hate. Viewing hate through this lens it is possible to become attentive to the ways in which hate is mobilised by and for social institutions such as masculinity and nationalism and enacted as racial hate.