A Threshold Crossed

Hate Touches Us All

hree attackers passionately stomp upon on a man's head. One of the aggressors seizes a chair and resolves to deliver additional blows. Surely this is just another distasteful scene from a violent blockbuster movie? No, this act unfolded upon the plain stage of an American street with real human actors-and that is why it is so ghastly.

Just days before the well-known homicide of the college student in Wyoming, Matthew Shepard, another man in Buffalo was beaten so inhumanly that almost every internal organ was damaged. The assailants captured $200, an expensive watch, and a breath of life. Some officials wondered if the event was hate-related because the man was killed outside of a gay bar.

At some level, we are all social scientists. We observe action of the type that saturates our nightly local news. If we are touched enough, we try to interpret and understand it. All too often, however, we remain baffled. This is to be expected, for who among us can adequately comprehend the perplexing motives behind evil? Even the cleverest of social scientists have difficulty dissecting the psychological and sociological conditions that foster hateful conduct.

For that matter, countless scholars have attempted to delve into the psyche of one of the foremost architects of evil-Adolph Hitler. All accounts reach one basic conclusion: Evil is enigmatic.

Hatred is a sentiment that shapes relationships between individuals and groups. Fueled by stereotypes, prejudice evolves as unfavorable attitudes are directed at particular groups. Intensity determines the boundaries of prejudice. For example, hostile attitudes toward someone perceived as a particular social category (i.e., disabled, Jewish, gay) may never reach the level of raging hatred. Beware, however, of the intensifying mechanisms. A lever is jerked and a threshold is crossed that yields the transformation of inimical sentiment into dreadful social gesture. The hate crime is born.

In his Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle asserted that anger, as a natural reaction to offense, is useful and virtuous. As activists mobilized a push for hate crime legislation, collective anger reflected a moral force. Impediments remain, however. Sometimes the traces of the invidious ideas of hateful actors are in eerie-if slight-harmony with leaders of the state.

Earlier last year, when Senate leader Trent Lott compared gays to kleptomaniacs, the image came to mind of a classic Nazi propaganda film that equated Jews with rodents. We need not wonder what they had in mind. It surely was not new forms of legal protection.

Expressed ideas of the hateful sort have symbolic meaning. At a minimum, such misrepresentations trivialize the lives of hard-working men and women who contribute to the productivity and progress of America (and happen to self-identify as gay). Moreover, that kind of nasty rhetoric belittles all of the family members working to understand the identity of a loved one. At their worst, Lott's pronouncements cultivate a climate in which individuals who pull the levers-as they did in Buffalo and Wyoming-might misconstrue their action as somehow legitimate.

As family and friends of the Shepards mourned, protesters were up in arms about one component of Matthew's identity-he was gay. So, they marched outside the funeral attempting to murder his memory. The protesters, as Aristotle might have predicted, failed. He professed that only fools don't get angry when the situation requires it. Indeed, for many of us the anguish on the faces of Matthew's parents was situation enough. At least for the moment, the fools were outnumbered.

­Scott Schieman

Miami magazine Home | Miami magazine Archive | Alumni Home | UM Home