The Road To Hell Is Paved With Discrimination:  Where We Are on Allport’s Scale

Another Mexican has been discriminated against, marginalized and murdered. Luis Ramirez, a father of three (now orphaned) children, was murdered after a group of drunk white males accosted him for walking home with his fiancé’s pregnant, white sister.

She reported that the motley crew demanded to know why Ramirez was out so late and asked if the baby in her belly was another person they would have to pay for. Racial epithets followed. Ramirez returned to confront the group and was beaten and kicked in the head. Ramirez was left convulsing on the floor while the students retreated. One of them (according to retired police officer Eileen Burke) yelled, “You tell your effen Mexican friends to get out of Shenandoah or you’re going to be laying effen next to him.” Ramirez died two days later from the injuries to his brain.

The Shenandoah police who arrived on the scene said it was not a priority to go after the white students who murdered Ramirez. This despite being told what direction the assailants went and the eye witness identifications they received. Instead witnesses, including former police officer Burke, alleged the Shenandoah police officer who first arrived on scene told her to “shut up” when she asked him to get an ETA on the ambulance, searched the eye witnesses for weapons, and asked if the dying Ramirez was drunk.

Burke even stated that she stopped one of the officers from kicking Ramirez when he attempted to tell ambulance personnel that Ramirez was faking. An all-white jury acquitted the group of murderers and instead found them guilty of simple assault. A Department of Justice investigation is now under way. To sign a petition for justice for Ramirez, readers can go to: maldef.org/luis_ramirez_petition/

As stomach turning as these types of stories are, they are all too common. Federal crime statistics show a 40 percent increase in attacks on Hispanics from 2003 to 2007 while hate crime rates overall remained around the same. Experts estimate this statistic is very conservative given how underreported hate crimes are. A review of Allport’s scale (devised by psychologist Gordon Allport in 1954) indicates we’ve hit an all time low in America. Allport’s scale is a measure (on a scale of 1-5) of the manifestation of prejudice in society.

Step one on the scale is Antilocution (When majority group freely makes jokes, speaks in negative stereotypes, negative images, and hate speech about a minority group. Although this behavior is seen as harmless by the majority, it sets the stage for more severe outlets for prejudice). And all Glenn Beck’s, Lou Dobb’s, Rush Limbaugh’s, Bill O’Riley’s and Sean Hannity’s of the world seem to indicate there is no end in sight to the onslaught against Latino’s living in America.

Shock Jocks have carte blanche to use and propagate hate speech against Latinos every singe day. Is it any wonder that there are even video games such as “Border Patrol” where you can “kill” cartoon Mexicans as they attempt to cross the border? Even our president has recognized the phenomenon saying recently that “a certain segment has basically been feeding a kind of xenophobia. There’s a reason why hate crimes against Hispanic people doubled last year.” He said, “If you have people like Lou Dobbs and Rush Limbaugh ginning things up, it’s not surprising that would happen.”

The second tier on Allport’s scale is Avoidance (people in the majority avoid people in the minority). We have already seen efforts to enact anti-immigrant legislation in many states. At the same time, resistance to passing or enhancing hate crimes laws are blocked at every turn.

On tier three of Allport’s scale, discrimination against a minority group becomes prevalent in society. Discrimination against Latino’s is en vogue in the U.S. right now. There is an unending number of stories of open and overt discrimination of Latinos in their work places, in schools, in lending, by police, and in housing. Oh, you have to dig harder and deeper to find these stories because the negative media stories about Mexicans will distract you, but they are there.

People who watch Univision, or other Spanish news, hear these stories every day, but most unaffected Americans never hear about them. And for those who do live the effects of discrimination, they leave deep and sometimes life-long scars. A study by Mark Schuster of Harvard University indicates that “Hispanics reporting prejudice were more than three times as likely as other children to have symptoms of depression,” and that “participants experiencing prejudice also had higher rates of ADHD, oppositional defiant disorder and conduct disorder.”

Tier four of the scale is Physical Attack. This includes vandalism of property as well as violent attacks on individuals or groups of minorities. This brings us back to Luis Ramirez: the 25 year-old Mexican immigrant, who had been living among the citizens of Shenandoah for six years; who worked two jobs to try and give his children a better life and more opportunities than he had known. A young man in love and in a bi-racial relationship, who lost his life in a senseless act of brutality that was dismissed by town locals as nothing more than a drunken brawl gone awry. The senselessness and randomness of attacks against Hispanics is overwhelming and wide-spread across America with headlines like these:

Hispanic Man Assaulted In San Jose For Speaking Spanish
(story about a man assaulted by a stranger for speaking Spanish on his cell phone)
Beating and Assault of Hispanic Teen in Texas Displays Indicators of Hate Crime
(story about teen bleached, burned, beaten, kicked, and sodomized)
Pregnant Woman’s Rape Linked To Hispanic Assaults
(story about a woman raped by a group of thieves targeting Hispanics for home evasions)

Finally, the fifth tier is Extermination. Is an attempt to exterminate Latino’s far behind? Is it already underway? Extermination of Latinos seems almost inevitable given the dramatic rise of hate groups (Southern Poverty Law Center’s “Intelligence Report” 2009 found that hate groups operating in the U.S. have risen 54 percent since 2000), and the increase in membership to those groups is coupled with the anesthetization of senses by hate speech, shock jocks, and unscrupulous media.

The question is: Will we all stand idle as it happens? We seemed to have stopped listening, stopped noticing, and stopped caring about all the other steps on this road to hell. And all the good intentions in the world won’t do us any good unless we wake up now and rise to the challenge of exterminating racism and xenophobia in our society instead of burying our heads in the sand.