COLUMN: Hate begins at the breakfast table
Last week, students, faculty and friends gathered at Rutgers University to hold a candlelight vigil for Tyler Clementi, a first-year student who took his own life Sept. 22 after a video was released online showing Clementi making out with another man. Clementi, an aspiring violinist, had been on campus less than a month when his roommate, Dharun Ravi, allegedly planted a webcam in their dorm room to record Clementi’s actions. The day after the video went public, Clementi jumped from the George Washington Bridge into the Hudson River. His body wasn’t found for days.
Clementi’s death has rekindled the national conversation around cyber bullying. Apparently this was the second time Ravi had secretly videotaped Clementi. Clementi had already gone to university officials and complained. Nothing had been done. His death has also reignited the controversy over hate crime legislation. Both Ravi and his childhood friend, Molly Wei, another freshman and Ravi’s alleged accomplice, have been charged with invasion of privacy. Many feel they should be charged with something more akin to manslaughter.
At the end of the day, though, Clementi’s death doesn’t simply reveal the possible abuses of technology; nor does it merely demonstrate the limitations of the legal system when it comes to crimes waged against vulnerable populations. Instead, Clementi’s suicide offers a mirror in which we can see the ways we are all, every single one of us, complicit in his death.
Because you don’t just wake up one day and decide to stream video of your roommate making out with another man. You don’t discover at the age of 18 that you should fear what you don’t understand. Hate begins much earlier. It is learned from your father who tells gay jokes at the dinner table. It is learned from your teacher who permits students to call each other “fag” or say “that’s so gay.” It is learned from the media where gay men and women are stereotyped and degraded. It is learned on Sundays when church leaders urge their followers to deny civil rights to same-sex couples. It is learned in everyday interactions where heterosexuality is the assumption and gay role models are absent. That Ravi thought he could tape Clementi with another man and then air it publicly without consequence only speaks to how we as a society have learned to accommodate our homophobia, live with it, like a limp or a dripping faucet.
We do not, though, have the option of ignoring the problem. In the weeks before Clementi killed himself, Seth Walsh and Asher Brown both took their lives, one by hanging and the other by gunshot. Both were 13 years old and from different parts of the country. Both were teased at school for their perceived sexuality. In that same time period, Bill Lucas killed himself, as did 19-year-old Raymond Chase. All gay teens. All dead. All in September.
Nationwide, gay teens represent 30 percent of all teen suicides, while closer to home, 40 percent of the teen homeless in Salt Lake City are gay. One out of six gay teens has been beaten badly enough to require medical attention. At what point should we act? Should we wait and see what happens in October? November?
I became a teacher because I believe that through the classroom the world can become a more socially just place, more like the world I want my sons to inherit, a world in which no one is scared to walk the streets at night or leave their house or make out in their dorm room. And I’ve seen change happen. Not because of anything I did, but because of a book we read, or an essay a student wrote, or a discussion we had in class that day, a day where none of us could leave the classroom as exactly the same person we were when we entered. We had been changed. A slight shift, a small movement. But changed nonetheless.
Words are powerful things. Revolutionary, even. And when we gather around a book or a piece of writing, when we discuss real issues, make ourselves vulnerable, we can’t help but be changed. That is the power and promise of education. And that’s why we here at this university need to be the ones to understand what caused Tyler Clementi’s death, what pushed him off the bridge.
The kitchen table, the living room couch, the sagging porch on the front of the house. These are spaces of change as well, not unlike the classroom. The next time we hear someone tell a gay joke, suggest someone is immoral for being who they are, call an individual a fag, we can take the first step in changing the statistics, in keeping those around us safe. Because we can say that’s not okay.
Tyler Clementi is dead. He will never be in this world again, never hug his parents, never open another book, never see a night when the Milky Way arcs across the sky like a river of stars. And that is not – and can never be – okay.
Jennifer Sinor is an associate professor in the English department.