Are stigmas and and prejudices, inherently based on fear, ignorance and hatred?

[The Grand Nudger]

I have thought often of how prejudice, stigmas, and hatred work, and it seems to me that the people who feel hatred (the kkk, homophobes, etc) are often doing so out of a sense of fear, and are ignorant of the people they hate. In essence, they don't understand why they exist, so they hate them. I feel that with understanding eliminates this hatred, in whatever sense it may be. If someone raped your daughter, for example, if you figured out that that person has a specific part of their brain that lacks empathy, you may say that they were destined by nature to be a rapist and have more sympathy.

Kind of a leap from being unempathetic to being a rapist, don't you think?  I'm not sure how one consigns a person to the other?

Or, if it turned out that they were raped as a child, then it was nurture which made them a rapist.

Maybe it was the raping -they- did that made -them- a rapist?  Just tossing that out there......lol.  

Either way, even in the most extreme cases, it seems that an understanding, a cool calm and rational understanding free of emotional response, absolves hate. What is your opinion?  That is to say that hatred, prejudice, fear, are the categories of emotional responses. Whereas understanding does not involve this sort of thinking. Perhaps you could even liken it to the difference between the sober, rational, scientific mind, and the irrational, emotional, religious mind.

I'd say that in the absence of an emotional understanding it is pointless to claim -any- understanding of humanity.  There is no dichotomy between being rational and emotional, and if the subject is human behavior the one is positively meaningless without the other. Understanding often leads to hatred, prejudice and fear...it's not as though these emotions are categorically unjustifiable or irrational.