Sympathy for the Bigot

In literature, one of the foremost characteristics of reading about a tragedy or tragic character is responding to the author’s ability to make us sympathize with the character. If the author lays out a sort of history of the character’s life for us, detailing the influences on her or him and the character’s adoption of those influences, we come to a point where we recognize the larger forces at work and the individual’s inability to critically examine those influences when at a young age, depending on the circumstances of the individual in question. Some things we learn because they are handed down to us; we receive them passively and they become assumptions on which we ground the rest of the ideas we will have in the future.

Let us imagine real life people as characters in a novel or a drama. Let us imagine our lives as novels and dramas, each with their respective multifaceted and complex stories. I would like to imagine my uncle as a character in his own novel. He is one of the most racist humans I know, who said once, “Gypsies are made for one job – to entertain white people,” and sexist too. He wouldn’t let his daughter wear short skirts or shorts until she got engaged. Then it was expected that her fiance would have the say. My hairdresser, when learning of an eleven-year-old raped by her fifty-year-old teacher, remarked, “These young girls are going crazy these days. They are asking for it.” One of my friend’s grandmothers believes that a darker a person’s skin is, the darker their soul is. Someone else I know believes that if a white person has a child with a black person, the child will be cursed by God. These are but examples of ludicrous thoughts that hover over people’s brains on race and sex, let alone class, age, sexual orientation etc. Let these statements speak for themselves.

The above people, it appears, classify all as examples of bigots, regardless of their gender or experiences. The bigot, as is no news, in a very simplistic model, deems a completely worthy human only the white heterosexual male. (We are describing a very general sort of bigot; many bigots who are not white heterosexual or male may sympathize with their situation but hold different kinds of bigoted thoughts, thus the possibilities of being bigoted in different ways are limitless, but for the purposes of this certain location of the article we will retain this definition because, while debatable, the white heterosexual male bigot is thought to be the most unforgivable and dangerous because he holds the most institutional power.)  Everyone else is a second-class citizen. Most often, the bigot thinks that it is God-given that others are subordinate: that is the way the world was meant to be. There are plenty of cases where the bigot might say differently yet still espouse bigoted ideas, but this is where the nuance kicks in. He looks at everyone as already having equal opportunities. For example, the reason why there are not that many blacks or women in government, he says, is because blacks and women are simply not that talented biologically as white men. He does not acknowledge, or is rather ignorant of, the social dynamics at work which give preference to white males. For him, the cause of supremacy is natural, not arbitrarily social.

My immediate feeling towards people like my uncle who use the argument that supremacy is natural is one of disgust. It is in my nature to hate them instantly. How can I not when they clearly express bigoted worldviews? How can they not see that a person is a person is regardless of skin color or gender, for example? How don’t they realize that our differences in experience is colored by the power dynamics of society at large? Why shouldn’t we be not only equal in rights but aspire to strip away microaggressions totally? How the hell are these facts not obvious?!

It is one thing to look at people in the media who are saying different variants of bigoted things and it is another to know people like them personally. Having a personal relationship, albeit a family one where it is almost impossible to antagonize or confront a certain member openly (I come from a culture where it is unthinkable to disrespect family members. Rarely would you hear, “I hate my mother,” or “I hate [a person in my family],” among children, as, in my experience living in both cultures, is more common among American children. The reasons for this I don’t know.), the only other possibility seems to shut up and secretly let the mind burst in flames. Such is the most common reaction where cultural, social, and financial forces weigh heavily on the enlightened person who is dependent in some way or another on the bigot. What’s harder about a personal relationship where one is a bigot and the other is relatively enlightened, is that sometimes there is a characteristic about the bigot that is likeable that binds the two people together in the cases where there is no dependency. Do we just stop being friends with the bigot in that case? 

Now I have expressed some very bigoted worldviews myself, and probably still do, in the form of microaggressions rather than blatantly. The thing about bigotry is that bigotry is a characteristic, not a person. It is dangerous to label people as bigot and non-bigot, because that means defining people in terms of binaries, which is the very thing that the feminist movement tries to strive against. We fall into the error of running into our own trap, it seems, if we peruse about this course and look at matters in a black and white manner. I am mentioning this because before I learned about feminism and trans rights and microaggressions, I used to have some very bigoted beliefs myself. I had a friend once who was considerably more enlightened than I was, and she abandoned me as a friend because, I believe. I said once, “We should include trans models in our magazine because they are in,” to which she replied sarcastically, “Yeah, because they are in.” I didn’t recognize at the time that trans models should be included because they should be represented as anyone else, and not because it is trendy. However, I didn’t know this at the time, and I was hurt. 

Now, who cares if my bigot brain was hurt right? The fact is that is I was hurt much more by the sarcasm than I was by the fact that my idea was wrong. I didn’t realize why regarding it as a trend is a problem, and that was the perfect opportunity for me to learn. I could have asked, “Why?” after all or taken the pains to learn the reason why my remark was bigoted myself in my spare time. There are proponents of the argument that it is not my (then) friend’s job to enlighten me. As Audre Lorde mentions in The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House, “Women of today are still being called upon to stretch across the gap of male ignorance and to educated men as to our existence and our needs. This is an old and primary tool of all oppressors to keep the oppressed occupied with the master’s concerns.” However I would argue that it is not only the concern of the oppressor to be educated on the struggle of the oppressed, but it is in the interest of the oppressed that the master be educated as well. Thus, it is in the interest of all of us to eliminate whatever bigoted ideas exist, as ideas, for the good of all of us rather than morph a bigot into a non-bigot. It is a philosophical concern, where bigotry and non-bigotry don’t come in the form of actual human beings but in the form of characteristics and abstract traits, because a person has qualities; they are not a quality. When we stop being friends with someone because they say something bigoted, or when we secretly hate our uncle, we must understand it’s the bigotry we hate, not the person.

Hatred towards people who express bigoted ideas does not only serve to push away the person expressing bigoted behavior, but it also does little to enlighten them, thus it does little in getting more people on the boat for feminism’s causes. While the anger that stems from people having bigoted ideas is justified, we should do more to be as inclusive as possible to people in the movement. It is the movement that we should strive to fight for, rather than let the fact that we espouse enlightened ideologies feed into our sense of pride and create a clique out of it, throwing shade at whoever does not agree with us. 

After all, if we look at life as a novel, we should recognize that people who express bigoted ideas are complex characters. They have passively adopted certain behaviors given to them rather than sought out bigotry. (Well, most of them.) A lot of it has to do with how we are educated, what sort of environment we are brought up in, and it takes a great deal of courage and self-reflection in order to unlearn things, which is not so easy to do. 

I’m not saying that we should feel more sympathy for the bigot than we should feel for the oppressed, but at least possessing some understanding has its humane advantages as it does its utilitarian ones. It only furthers the cause of the oppressed if we do feel sympathy for the bigot, because that means we can change his or her ways which means the “bigots” are able to sympathize for the oppressed and perhaps convince others to do something about it as well. They may not create organizations or protest on the streets, but they most likely will have some sort of influence on their immediate surroundings, even if it is just by talking to others. And when we do possess some understanding for them, we are less inclined to spend tremendous amount of energy by indulging on a strong feeling such as hate and can instead focus rationally on how to solve the problem.

It is the hate towards bigots that I wish were eradicated, rather than the righteous anger that results from bigotry, even though both force us to be active in other ways that can make a difference through means other than persuading individual by individual on why their bigoted worldviews are wrong. Yet, it is a psychological given that “the bigots” will respond more to the hate than force themselves to think about their ways, no matter how one fights for feminism’s causes. The criticism ought to be constructive. 

Through the means of constructive criticism is how we ought to fight bigotry. We pose rigorous, organic questions, adopting the Socratic method. We unearth the sources of their bigotry, all the while retaining a calm and unpatronizing demeanor. We educate ourselves as much as possible, so that, even though we are not perfect representatives of our cause, we can at least aspire to strip down patriarchal attitudes and convey that spirit in our efforts.

I run into the trap of expressing very naive thoughts. There is the argument that the only way that we can achieve change is through making reforms in our judicial systems so that eventually bigotry will at least have to be tamed if not eradicated, or more importantly so, by deconstructing the current system. However it is better to be optimistic about how human nature functions than pessimistic about it, because we are more likely to incite change and focus our energies on convincing others rather than alienating them, so we can attract more people to the cause where the chances of deconstructing the system become higher with each human that becomes part of it. Only by recognizing the complexity of all humans can we seek a happy ending to our drama.