Hmm… so, Bigotry is bad, because it is derogatory to other people AND because it is false. And while calling someone else a Bigot , and treating them as such, even though it is true, is still being derogatory. If you can’t separate people who are misguided from people who are just bad people, then I am going to call your own moral code into question.
Yes yes, I’m intolerant of intolerance. How novel.
FWIW I don’t think you can talk a bigot out of anything. I think that is the sort of thing that can only be changed by experience and exposure.
Part of the problem is I can’t let it go unchallenged. If I am going to be friends with the person, I am going to be compelled to point out every single time when they say something that is prejudiced. And that is exhausting.
Well that is not so much my point as that I am pointing out there are degrees of bigotry and different factors that contribute to that. I’m sure there are many cases where you and I would agree, that we would both be, vehemently, intolerant of intolerance.
OK, but didn’t you say you had known them for a couple years and that they hadn’t said anything like this before?
Yes. Which was definitely a factor in my decision not to unfriend the person.
OK, next question, not meant to argue with you either… but why do you feel compelled to be, for a lack of a better word, the Morality Police? Look, I get it with the gross cases of Bigotry, Racism, etc… I also understand and agree that it gets overwhelming to witness and that it is a hard trait to change in other people…
Checks out. I’m a woman and I’m just lousy at gravity.
SpiceWeasel - putting women on pedestals is an exhaustively-discussed method of societal control. It allows the one doing the worshiping to define the acceptable ways in which the object can behave in order to retain her balance, while simultaneously defining a class of inferior objects who are considered lesser.
As for your questions - is it possible that one might be a good person but have a single belief that is so objectively vile as to color all your whole understanding of them? Well, sure. But you probably ought to at least chat with the guy first to see where he’s coming from. It might be he just made an ill-considered remark and is open to discussion. He might not have a really thought about it. Or it might be just the tip of the iceberg. Who knows.
That is a good question and I think the fact that I feel compelled to be, as you put it, the Morality Police, is a double-edged sword.
On the one hand, I have a background in social work and have studied social justice issues at length. I have worked almost exclusively in nonprofits and so in my social circle it is the default expectation that these issues will be vocally addressed and must be vocally addressed to put a stop to them. I have a difficult time recognizing degrees of bigotry because any kind of bigotry is in my mind automatically linked to systemic oppression. People make an offhanded remark about gays, for example, and all I can think about is this magnitude of suffering that has been imposed upon the LGBT community - about the friends I had who were thrown out of their homes as teenagers, about the trans people who are routinely murdered and forgotten. To me this person making this offhanded remark about gays is facilitating the culture that leads to grievous acts of hatred. I see them as complicit in these hateful acts (or perhaps more accurately, I see myself as complicit in those acts if I don’t speak up.) You can’t dismantle an oppressive system by ignoring it.
On the other hand, I worry a lot about my own morality, whether I am moral enough, whether I am correct, whether I am good. So I’m sure there is also a neurotic component to it as well, a feeling that if I don’t speak up this makes me a bad person.
Sure, there are degrees. But a blanket statement that one sex is superior to the other is not, for me, one of the minor degrees.
Women have the best vaginas.
hmmm… understood you very well here. I guess my only point here is you have Actions, Attitudes and then Opinions. I guess I am most concerned with the first two. For example, I HATE people who are Anti-Union, Anti-Food Stamps, Anti- to raising the minimum wage. I don’t just mean people who think food stamps are “maybe” excessive, I mean the people who mock people on food stamps, politicians that GLEEFULLY cut food stamps and after school programs, politicians that devote their whole career to busting up unions. I can not possibly tell you how much I hate people like that. I would never be friends with one and I doubt I could carry on a civil conversation with one. But… I can’t make myself miserable by dwelling on people like that. Instead, I try to shift my focus to other things, positive things that I can do.
But if I met someone who just had the opinion that food stamps were often excessive… I’d probably ask them, have you ever walked a mile to the grocery store? Have you ever, after leaving college, had to survive on ramen noodles and tuna fish and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches? I might ask them, what would need to change with our social programs to make you more agreeable to food stamps? I might suggest that if they volunteered at a food bank they would get to see some people who are (probably) on food stamps and see that they were real people who just had some bad luck… not evil con artists.
See, truly bigoted and hateful people I don’t have the stamina to deal with. Someone that has an opinion I disagree with I can deal with in a civil manner…
I certainly understand the point you’re making. I guess my response to that would be that I don’t think you can reason people out of bigotry the same way you might be able to reason someone out of a disdain for food stamps. I might be wrong putting them in different lights, but that would probably be my rationale for being friends with an anti-food stamp person but not with a homophobic person, for example. To me it’s possible to make reasonable arguments for a lot of different political positions… I don’t agree with fiscal conservatism but I can at least see the rationale. Whereas for bigotry it just looks like pure willful ignorance to me. Again, I dunno if that’s fair.
Well, can I tell you something? I was never a bigoted person, I was never a hateful person. But I had a lot of stereotypes and prejudices. A couple years ago when the white privilege topic was getting a lot of coverage I thought it was exaggerated and very skeptical. But, several black friends I was close with and I started to discuss the topic and I was shocked at their first hand account of all things they had to contend with. Several years before that when I first joined a boxing gym, I was mildly racist or at least very stereotypical. But after making friends with several black and Hispanic people at the gym, that changed. So exposure to other people and ideas helped me a lot.
My point being, two years ago or ten years ago I would of said things that sounded horrible. So maybe your friend is like that, just uneducated. Or maybe he is kind of a jerk. I guess you will have to wait and see.
PS- I sent you a PM on a separate topic
OK, well, I think we are partially in agreement and partially in disagreement. I think good people can have bad ideas, though, it may be rare. Maybe I’ll see you at another point in time on some other thread?
Thank you for sharing your experience. It’s never easy to admit when you’ve held prejudices. But I think we all do and the best we can do is be honest about them and try minimize their impact on our treatment of others. I certainly don’t claim to be blameless in that regard. One of the reasons I’m so convinced racism, sexism etc. are problems is because I’ve found elements of them in myself.
I actually did have a conservative friend who was skeptical of white privilege, we discussed it off and on for months and I didn’t think we were getting anywhere, and then out of the blue he told me he finally got it because of things I had said (and he promptly began trolling his conservative friends with it, which amused me.) I never expected he would change his mind so that was a pleasant surprise. But I never considered him a bigot. I just think a lot of people have a hard time wrapping their heads around the concept of privilege, particularly if they have had difficult life experiences.
Perhaps I should be bringing more nuance to this issue in my consideration of how to handle situations like this. I may have never had hate in my heart but for the prejudices I have managed to combat, I never would have gotten there unless someone had been patient enough with me to walk me through it.
Two really interesting questions. I think maybe they can be combined into a bigger one, which is: given that a particular person is bigoted, what else do we think we know about that person? which I think ultimately is the same as asking what’s so bad about being bigoted?
I run into a lot of prejudiced people in my line of work, and my uneasy theory is that we can’t conclude very much at all about a person based on finding out that the person has a particular prejudice.
If that’s true, then the source is super relevant, because what we don’t like about bigotry is that it’s sort of a short-hand for being a terrible person, right, like if you need to establish a dude as a villain, you can just make him a racist and you’re done. But if you already know that the person is a good person and makes an overall positive contribution to the world, then both the number one consequence of and the number one reason for the bigotry (he’s a Bigot, which is a kind of awful irredeemable person) are out the window. It’s not that you were wrong about the person before, it’s that you now have an additional piece of information that you weren’t expecting to coexist with the rest of the picture. But it totally does!
In my view, at least, it’s kind of a relief to start to see the world this way, because then conversations about whatever-ism become more like conversations about whether or not pizza is good for you and less like conversations with orcs about whether or not they should support Sauron. And that’s way better. For one thing, people generally know when you’re approaching them like they’re a force of evil and when you’re not, and it’s not really easy to change anybody’s mind about anything when in your own mind you’re convinced that it doesn’t actually matter why they think what they think. For another thing, it’s a healthier conversation for everyone involved, since it feels just as disgusting to think of another person as a villain as it does to be thought of as a villain. If nobody ever considers the source when they talk to a bigoted person, nobody anywhere ever will have a productive conversation about bigotry.
Unless bigots are just terrible people and terrible people are bigots, there must be some reason why people are bigots. In the past people were probably bigots because of ignorance, but that seems an unlikely explanation in this age of information overload and instantaneous communication.
Could it be that there are actually benefits to bigotry?