12 Years a Slave and the Pyramid of Hate

There’s a scene in the movie “12 Years a Slave” where Solomon Northrup – a real man who was taken from his home in New York and enslaved on a Louisiana plantation – has an argument with his racist overseer, John Tibeats.

Tibeats comes over to inspect the house he’s building. “I thought I told you to commence puttin’ on the clapboards,” the overseer says angrily.

“That’s what I’m about,” says Northrup, motioning to the clapboards.

“Well, didn’t I tell you to get a keg of nails?”

Northrup points at the keg of nails standing beside him. “Well, so I did.”

Viciously, Tibeat kicks in the clapboards. “God damn it,” he yells, “I thought you knowed somethin’!”

“I did as instructed,” says Northrup. “If there’s something wrong, it’s wrong with the instructions!”

But Tibeat refuses to listen. He orders the once-free man to strip his clothes and attempts to beat him with a whip before hanging him by his neck.

This moment so powerfully demonstrates the dangers of being in a place where a hateful and irrational person is given authority over you. Northrup is right, but it doesn’t matter. The overseer doesn’t care whether he’s right or wrong; he hates him simply for disagreeing.

The scary thing is, his hatred is SO strong that literally nothing the slave says will ever be able to change it.

And if we look again at the Pyramid of Hatred, we begin to see the truly disturbing thing about mindsets and theologies that consider it “good” and “Christian” to hate another human being. Because the very first level of hatred is insulting and slandering others. And already on this first level we’re having to defend our integrity as people against those who will NOT listen to us.

“You’re an uppity woman / fag / pervert / Muslim,” they tell us.

We say, “That isn’t TRUE. It’s wrong of you to say that.”

They say, “I’m just speaking the truth. It’s in the Bible.”

But if, like the overseer who beat Northrup, they’re ALREADY not listening on the first level, if the Scriptures already have no authority over them (even though they pretend that they do), how can we ever get them to listen when hatred becomes systemic and reaches the highest levels – vandalism, murder, and genocide?

If they won’t listen when we’re begging them to just *accept us as humans*, will they ever listen when we’re begging them not to kill us?

We have to face the horrifying reality that the most devastating and dehumanizing acts of violence are made possible when we refuse to engage our enemies as people and treat them with the level of respect and care they deserve. They’re people. They matter. If we say we don’t see it, it’s because we choose not to.

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AIDS, Authoritarians, & the Demon-Possessed Man, Part 3: When You Become the Monster

After I left the group I began studying the mechanisms of scapegoating.

 French sociologist Rene Girard said that all human conflicts are built around something called “mimetic desire.” Here’s how it works. Suppose two brothers are happily playing in their front yard. The older one grabs a toy soldier from their pile of toys and begins playing with it. The younger one immediately wants it—not because of its inherent worth, but simply because his brother has it. This makes the older brother want it even more, and before very long the two are engaged in a huge fist fight.

 Luckily, though, the neighborhood whipping boy, Jerry, happens to walk by at that moment. Jerry wears glasses and is chubby. The two boys forget all about their argument and run off together to torment Jerry.

We Have to Stop Telling Others That They Don’t Matter

I have a friend who recently came out as bisexual. According to her, there’s nothing particularly unusual or sensuous about it: she just feels safe and warm in the presence of other women.

But when I shared her story with an acquaintance, he dismissed it out of hand. “I see no evidence of genuine love here,” he said. “Just selfishness and lust.”

 It really *hurt* me that he could say such things about another person. To him it didn’t matter what she had gone through. Her story, her experience was irrelevant. He had never felt those emotions, but they were obviously wrong. He didn’t have to listen. He just knew.

A few days later I read the story of a young Jewish woman who converted to Christianity. She’s been routinely dismissed by other Christians because she’s “not like them.” She doesn’t lift her hands when she prays, she doesn’t pray out loud, so she must not be a *real* Christian. It doesn’t matter that these American cultural expressions are alien to her Jewish heritage. Why does she even need a Jewish heritage now that she’s following Christ?

“Everything I learned as a Jew,” she says: “keep prayer to yourself, don’t evangelize because it’s disrespectful, all humans are basically ‘good at heart’ like Anne Frank said in her diary—was not only irrelevant, but *wrong*.”

 I see this happening over and over, and it breaks my heart. Over the weekend when several women were murdered by a deranged man in retaliation for refusing his sexual advances, women on Twitter shared their stories of being harassed, threatened, raped, and then told it was all their fault. The outpouring of grief and anger at a system in which half the population is not safe was, for many, cathartic and healing.

 Yet one very popular blogger dismissed the outcry as a bunch of “liberal feminists” exploiting a tragedy to further their own agenda. The agenda of not wanting to be murdered.

 We have to quit doing this. In a lot of places it seems the only people who matter are white, male Evangelicals. If you’re a woman, gay, Jew, Catholic, artist, writer, Democrat, if you deviate from the “norm” in any way, it’s a safe bet that someone has used the Bible to tell you that you shouldn’t exist, that you’re going to hell. And then when you insist that this is who you are, that you’re a child of God, you’re ignored as though you’d never spoken.

Dismissiveness is dangerous. If we’re able to ignore people when they’re crying out for us to recognize them as people, we would ignore them in situations where their lives are genuinely threatened. We have to start seeing them, caring about them, understanding their stories and being broken over their heartaches. They’re people. They matter. Sometimes the best thing you can do for another person is just to listen and treat them with seriousness and respect.