Being Bigoted toward Bigots is Still Bigotry

Someone on Facebook posted a racist joke that I found offensive.

Reading the comments, I saw the guy got lambasted. People threatening to unfriend him, all that. The guy kept playing it off like, “Come on guys, it’s just a joke.”

Thought about giving the dude a piece of my mind.

But as I read through the comments some more, I saw he already had enough pieces of peoples’ minds.

More than that, I felt drawn towards introspection more than towards the need to be right at another’s expense.

There was a comment on there, about how “liberals” are hypocrites about tolerance.

I don’t identify with being liberal or conservative, as I think either path leads to the polarizing bullshit that currently divides the world into categorical delusions, but I do agree that there is much hypocrisy associated with many who proclaim the virtue of tolerance.

Noticed this especially, during some of the Westboro debacles, where we had people loudly declaring disdain and damnation for homosexuals.

The backlash against Westboro was often just as primitive and disgusting to me as the initial offense.

I remember obscene slander directed towards Westboro, even death threats. I never find outwardly-expressed hatred towards others beautiful or justified. I recall saying something on Facebook during those times, to the effect of: To be tolerant is to be tolerant of the intolerant.

Not exactly words that always fall smoothly on the ears of people blinded by hate.

To be tolerant of Westboro, just as to be tolerant of the person who posted the racist joke, is not to support their perspectives. My own perspective is not aligned with theirs. Quite far away on the spectrum, actually.

Here’s the thing. I used the word spectrum. A spectrum exists when it comes to matters of perspective. We move along on it through our lives, and future generations pick up where we left off. Maybe they’ll invent new spectrums we can’t imagine. Let me illustrate how I’ve moved along on the spectrum in my own life, using my shifts in perspectives on homosexuality:

1981: born
 1990: based on what I’d been taught, believed homosexuality to be evil
 1995: after a transgendered person visited my church, I found myself dramatically more disgusted by the church’s reaction than to the person him/herself.
 2000: Ideologically accepting of homosexuality, but uncomfortable with the idea of being “hit on by a guy” or seeing guys kiss
 2009: Started a close friendship with a guy who I later realized was gay. Through the course of communication in our friendship, I realized how pointless and misguided it was for me to feel uncomfortable around homosexual people
 2014: Surrounded by gay people. I love them all. I am not sure anymore, if being gay or straight is a thing. People are people. People are dynamic, not natural fits for little boxes.

That’s thirty-three years of being programmed, blown apart, and reprogrammed.

If thirty-three year old me were to sit down with nine year old me and say, “Homosexuality is not evil,” the little me would feel blood rise to his face. Cheeks heating up. Defense mode activated. I would have looked at thirty-three year old me as a threat to my beliefs. I would have given him a piece of my mind.

That’s the same person, some years apart, that cannot agree with himself.

The world is full of people at different places in the spectrum.

And once people shift to a new understanding, often times they are all judgmental of people who remain close to their old understanding. I see it happen all the time. And I’ve been there myself, quite a bit.

But I’m tired of it.

Hating hatred is as life-draining as hating anything else.

Not everyone will shift to where I’m at on the spectrum.

And that’s okay, too. The spectrum is not vertical. There is no superiority. There is only what works. Hating someone who doesn’t agree with me, doesn’t work for me.

And let’s not forget that where we land on the spectrum is a product of the times as much as anything else.

How many people born today would be as “pro-equality” as they are now if they’d been born in the early 1900s? Some would. Most wouldn’t.

We love to tout our individualism, but we owe a lot of who we are to the world we’re born into.

Ironically enough, this is true even when the world we’re born into causes so much dissonance in us.

In many ways, that dissonance is probably what drives us to change and grow, to find new, optimal configurations of being.

We’re products of our times, and of our cultures.

If I’d been born into a culture where it is considered moral to hate others, then hating others would feel like the right thing to do.

Now, consider that many people in this world are born into that culture.

They just don’t ask themselves the kinds of questions that move them beyond that place on the spectrum.

It doesn’t make them evil. It just means they aren’t very inquisitive.

At this point, I must acknowledge that my weaving in and out between race and sexuality in this post wasn’t altogether intentional.

Just the way my mind put it all together as I was writing.

The two do have a central factor or two in common, though, in that people in the minority have often endured intense social stigma and have had to go out of their way to win a sense of equality in many parts of the world.

Many of these are people who have dealt with intense shame, based on nothing more than characteristics inherent to their very biological existence.

That’s why I am offended by a “harmless” racist joke…

…that I would have laughed at when I was a teenager.

I don’t hate the person who made the joke, nor do I hate who I was as a teenager.

But I am not down with being that person anymore.