Author's Statement

The prompt asked for a description of the five stages of prejudice. I used my story to describe stage one. The protagonist of the story learns that the hate speech they encounter at school and have just brushed off for their entire life is how dictators and evil people are able to twist the majority into being alright with a genocide against a minority. That relates to the prompt because it ties in a modern event - hate speech against LGBQT+ people - with the Holocaust and the way Jewish people are spoken about and to in Germany right before the genocide to show that it's never just words - words can lead to awful things happening.