A Bit about Bigotry and Why None of It Makes Any Sense

by Chris McGinty of AccordingToWhim.com

I more or less try to avoid getting into discussions on Twitter about topics that people are known for getting into heated and irrational arguments over. I’ve found that too many of them stray from the main topic and become unproductive. I have occasionally, when I feel like I can make a point in a neutral tone, chimed in and put a thought into the mix.

Recently, I saw a post that said something to the effect that white guys don’t like the term “white guys” being a pejorative because they’ve never had their identities used as pejoratives like everyone else. I get where she was coming from, but as I thought about it a little more, I think I know a better way she could have put it. But we’ll get to that in a few paragraphs.

My response was simple, and as neutral as I could make it:  “I’ll say this, and if you’re open to the dialogue then great. I’ve been alive 46 years, and ‘white’ and ‘male’ as pejoratives are not new. I spent my youth calmly explaining to bigots why bigotry doesn’t make sense. Racial, gender, political, etc. I’m still doing it now.”

There’s a lot to unpack here that Twitter brevity doesn’t do a good job of. First, note that I said that I’ve been alive 46 years. I’m 37 years old according to a nice newspaper article, so I just wanted to be clear about that. But I’ve been alive 46 years.

Second, I realize that it’s possible, though unlikely, that I’m the one and only white male who has had my race and gender used pejoratively throughout my life. If that’s the case then she’s right and I’m wrong.

Third, I included political because when they finally kill all the white men throughout the world, it’s going to be funny how people will just find something else to malign people about. It’s just too bad I won’t be here to say, “I told you so.” But I see it now where we’ve made rules about not talking bad about certain groups of people that some people are clinging to the groups they can still badmouth. This is why terms like “liberal” and “conservative” are used as slurs by opponents. No one is upset about that form of bigotry, but the dividing lines of political beliefs have ended friendships. It’s toxic, but it’s not frowned upon.

I said I would talk about what her post might have read, because if it had said this I think I would have agreed that she’s completely right:

“White guys are just upset because up until about five years ago it wasn’t seemingly universally agreed that racism against whites isn’t racism and sexism against men isn’t sexism.”

Slurs and pejoratives against white males is nothing new. The acceptance that they’re not really slurs and pejoratives, because white men are the majority is new.

Let me tell you a story about how my mom explained interracial marriage to me in 1981 when it wasn’t widely accepted. Some kids in the neighbourhood told me that there was a black man who was married to a white woman a couple of streets over. At that time it was less common than it even is now, so it seemed like an anomaly to me. I told my mom about it, and she said, “They must love each other very much to have gotten married.” It made sense to me. It normalized the entire concept in my head.

My parents never made a big deal about me having a black friend or a Hispanic friend. They had a foster kid who was Native American for over a year, who was treated like my older brother. Unfortunately, he ran away too many times and was taken back by the state. I was about as non-racist as I could be, and then I became aware as the years went on that there were people who literally hated me because I was white. No other reason. It was very weird to me, because I actually liked some of these people and wanted to be their friends.

Then we moved into a “black neighbourhood.” There was no actual problem, but some people seemed worried about it. My mom became friends with a black couple that lived in the building behind us. They were very nice people, and my brother and their son got together often to play. I had older friends I was hanging out with, but every so often I would hang with them. It was fun.

I want to say they were grandbabies, or nieces, but one day when we were over at their place someone brought by their twin daughters to visit. They were black, which at the time is somewhat obvious given they were family, and they were just at the age that they were starting to smile. I got to hold them for a little while and they smiled at me the whole time. I had an odd thought at that moment, which is that these girls might one day be racist. I doubted it given the family they were part of, but they might be. They weren’t born that way. It would probably be years before they were exposed to overt racism. It would happen, of course, and they’d be just as surprised by it as I was.

And this brings me to my true point about that post. I was trying to remain somewhat neutral, because sometimes you run into problems with people who don’t know you if you’re too agressive with your point of view. Here’s what bothers me though about this idea that it’s ok to be racist and/or sexist towards white men predicated solely on the fact that they’re the majority and it’s probable that they’ve historically had it easier than most.

There will be a white male kid somewhere in the world sometime soon who will get onto Twitter for the first time at age 8, or 9 and read a statement about how white men are basically the devil. He will be like, “What? Why would people say that?” Deep down he’ll be thinking, “I’m not the devil, but I’m going to grow into a white man one of these days, which means that there’s going to be this subsection of people who hate me for no real reason.” This kid didn’t create the patriarchy. This kid didn’t start slavery. This kid was just born a certain race and a certain gender in the wrong country.

The idea that we might be moving into a generation of our society who will be willing to persecute people based on this idea of payback is honestly ludicrous. It’s ludicrous because it’s never worked before. It’s ludicrous because most people are progressive enough with their beliefs that they want to see an end to racism and sexism. It’s ludicrous because renaming a problem doesn’t mean you’ve solved it. If we start calling hunger “nutritionally challenged,” it doesn’t mean that people aren’t going hungry. We could say that we solved hunger if we all agree that people going hungry isn’t called hunger. There are still nutritionally challenged people though. What are we going to do about them?

I’m opposed to bigotry. All forms. I firmly believe that all people should be judged by their character, integrity, and to some extent their actions. Not who they were born to. Not where they were born. Not what someone who shared one or more physical traits with them may or may not have done sometime in the past, present, or future. Not by the extremists in a given belief system that they share. People should be judged on their own mertis.

You can change the definition of racism if you want. You can change the definition of sexism if you want. You can even define hate speech any way you want. You can win all your social media arguments by referring to these definitions. There will still people being hated because of the colour of their skin and the shape of their genitalia. What are we going to do about them?

Chris McGinty is a blogger who thinks that anyone born in the US, or most other advanced countries, needs to realize that we have it really good compared to much of the rest of the world, and certainly better than past generations.