Yes, It's Still Called Bigotry

If there’s anything that’s really traditional, even a part of many historically “traditional family values,” it’s prejudices and the accompanying bigotry. 

Of course, bigots are really, really offended when someone points out their bigotry. And their hope is that by showing how offended they are, liberal guilt and the accompanying navel-gazing will kick in and get the critic to feel bad so they don’t have to. They take that response as proof that they’re right.

People are told that it’s not nice to call someone names, and so we don’t, no matter how openly bigoted they are. And women in our culture have been taught that it’s more appropriate to be nice than honest anyway. 

The famous psychologist/minster/writer John Bradshaw spoke of the personally destructive forces of the “Price of Nice,” and Angelina Castagno collected together a group of scholars in an edited volume entitled The Price of Nice: How Good Intentions Maintain Educational Inequity to explain how being “nice” in school and university settings works to reinforce racialized, gendered, and (dis)ability-related inequities in education and society.

Then there’s well-known author M. Scott Peck, who sought to revise our thinking about “civility” in his book A World Waiting to Be Reborn: Civility Rediscovered. He began to arrive at a better definition of it, he wrote, when he discovered a profound quotation from America’s Oscar Wilde: Oliver Herford.

“A gentleman,” Herford wrote, “is one who never hurts anyone’s feelings unintentionally.”

“Civility,” Peck concluded, has “much more to do with conscious intention – awareness – than with not hurting feelings. In fact, on occasion, it might actually be civil to hurt someone’s feelings as long as you know what you’re doing.”

But bigotry is bigotry and it’s betrayed through actions, words, emotions, and the choices people make in their priorities and their politics. And in our culture today it has become more mainstream as directed against people of color, LGBTQ+ people, and women of all colors.

This presidential season has already provided more evidence of it while all the while those who display it deny it. And they will continue to play that being offended card in response.

Now, there are certainly all kinds of explanations for bigotry from people’s pasts, family upbringings, and emotional presents, but whether they’re used to make excuses for it now is a different question. And whether we allow those excuses to act as if it’s not bigotry will depend upon our own privilege, which depends upon whether it’s hurting us personally or just a matter for debate.

The word “homophobia” is one example. It has an appropriate use highlighting various fears. But it is not a substitute for the maltreatment, violence, and slurs against LGBTQ+ people. Those represent bigotry plain and simple. Whether they arise out of their fears is another question.

And these are conscious choices people make. Back in 1981 influential Republican campaign consultant Lee Atwater explained the “Southern Strategy” his Party was using to win the vote of racists without changing anything but not sounding racist themselves:

“You start out in 1954 by saying, “N****, n****, n****.” By 1968 you can’t say “n****” — that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now [in 1981], you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things, and a byproduct of them is blacks get hurt worse than whites.… ‘We want to cut this,’ is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “N****, n****.”

This “strategy” hasn’t ended – its blatant "dog whistles" have just changed. Think since, of the more recent use of other tropes such as Affirmative Action (when White women have been the greatest beneficiaries of it), CRT (when the acronym is used without them knowing what it is, where it’s actually taught, or even what the letters mean), DEI (when many couldn’t even tell you what the letters mean, much less why they’re against whatever it is in their minds).

Bigotry toward transgender people allowed those who play on bigotry for their gain decide that the gender diverse could be lightning rods to maintain rigid gender roles and gender definitions. Raising all sorts of fears, Republicans claimed they were protecting children from the undocumented threats posed by those who didn’t fit their ideas of culture. We could label it “transphobia” but what we’re seeing is conscious bigotry.

In order to continue this in a way that would not just sound like the old-fashioned bigotry behind it, leaders consciously and intentionally added still another strategy for promotion of discrimination – the appeals to “religious liberty” that still gave them the cover to remain bigots. With the promotion of “religious liberty” laws and conservative judicial decisions for “religious liberty,” they could appeal to the trope that it was religious people who were victims in all this, that it’s really their freedoms that are threatened - again in the hope of appealing to liberal guilt.

It's important to be clear about this so we are not the enablers who soothe the consciences of those who choose bigotry. If we refuse to be wise, we should be ready to take credit for keeping the bigotry going.

We can’t be afraid of calling it what it is. But we can still do it in compassionate ways. We don’t actually have to say “You are a bigot.”

First, then, don’t allow in your presence any of what you know are thoughtless words that promote bigotry – and certainly don’t use them. When people parrot mindless talking points such as CRT, DEI, Affirmative Action, religious liberty, if you want to engage them ask them to explain what they mean.

Make them say out loud that they are against the recognition of human diversity, or including everyone, or treating everyone equally with equally fair opportunities. Let them hear what they are saying and let all around hear it too.

Second, stop making excuses as if those promoting and colluding with bigotry are not capable human beings. Make sure they are accountable for their positions just as you need to be accountable for your own.

Third, act as if you really believe in your own principle. Moving toward their position as if bigotry has merits affirms their position. We can respect people without respecting every destructive viewpoint. Let them be clear as to what you value.

Fourth, repeat, repeat, and repeat your position again. But feel free to end the discussion without the sense you have to win an argument.

We are in a centuries-old fight – one that’s life or death for many – against old-fashioned bigotry in new, apparently more sophisticated, guises. And it’s our choice whether or not we make excuses for the bigotry that continues to harm, demean, and kill the people we love as it has down through history.