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Tolerance, Bigotry, and Tolerating Bigotry

I’m something of a Luddite, and so my involvement in online social networking has been slow, cautious, and, to be frank, often misguided—hence that Friendster account I only recently abandoned. Due to this, I’m chronically out of whatever loops are currently going, though I’ve been getting a bit better at following what’s been going on inside the greater genre community. With that in mind, if any of what I’m saying seems clumsy or slightly off-base please feel free to set me straight, and of course the topic at hand isn’t one that only relates to the genre community so feel free to link to any relevant articles or posts if they seem topical. What I’m slowing shambling toward is a question that’s been on my mind more and more of later, which amounts to how much benefit of the doubt we are willing to give those who express bigoted sentiments before we decide that discussion and education is fruitless and writing them off is the only sensible decision to maintain one's own peace of mind.

I’m probably the worst candidate for gently educating bigots, as I tend to lose my temper when confronted with the smug, patronizing attitude that so often characterizes these debates—desiring equal rights for all human beings is such a simple premise that when confronted with people who think otherwise I sometimes lose my shit. This is a weakness of mine, and one that I’m constantly trying to work on—this Ill Doctrine’s clip is a good place to start, if you’re anything like me. It’s nothing new, either— I got into a lot of fights (read: I got beat up a lot and only occasionally landed a punch) in grade school after my all-white classmates found out I had a black friend who lived in the nearby city, and rather than renouncing this heinous relationship I stuck up for the absent object of their hostility. Rural Pennsylvania, man—they may have never seen a person of color other than on TV, but that didn’t stop them from hating out of general principle.

I’m not bringing this up to boast about what an awesome white liberal I am, battling the hordes of ignorance with only two bloody knuckles and a fourth-grader’s sense of justice—I’m bringing it up because I think that was about as good a person as I’ve ever been, and after we moved down south that fearless championing of human rights fell into something more cautious and careful. As I grew older I would still engage people in debate, but there comes a time when you have to stop punching people who disagree with you.

Flash forward to the day when I’m an adult with online friends I’ve never met in real life and we get to a unique problem—it’s much easier, for me, at least, to get a feel for someone when they’re standing in front of me than it is to figure it all out based only on black-and-white text on a computer monitor. In the absence of hard evidence to the contrary, I would give people the benefit of the doubt, since I tend to be given to the blatherz myself and wouldn’t want someone to assume the worst about me based on some ill-considered sentence structure, but the longer I was online and the more angry, bigoted posts I would see the less willing to give people the benefit of the doubt I became, and, unfortunately, the more I began to question the effectiveness in mature discourse as a way of educating bigots. This led to a prickly impasse—how much should we tolerate bigotry in the hopes of changing minds through reasonable debate when said bigotry shows little sign of relenting even in the face of facts and figures and many a testimonial?

It’s obviously different for everyone, and perhaps more difficult if the bigotry is coming from family rather than friends, but still—there comes a time when we have to acknowledge that we are incapable of altering the ingrained hatred, and by “respectfully disagreeing” we are simply giving the bigot in question license to spout their screeds—everyone likes an audience, and with the bigots I’ve met they seem to take a perverse delight out of lecturing to an audience who vehemently disagrees with them. Now, I’m certainly not advocating that we stick our heads in the sand, nor do I think debate should be silenced—but I’ve come to the conclusion that at a certain point a firm refutation of their claims followed by a kiss-off is far more healthy for me, emotionally, and no less effective than polite disagreement at evoking a reaction and maybe, just maybe, a self-examination (there I go giving people the benefit of the doubt again…).

I’ve recently lost people I counted as friends due to this, and I’m only sorry I didn’t drop them sooner. One guy kept posting about how white privilege didn’t exist and the concept was racist against white people and how gay people were annoying and how illegal immigrants were comparable to rapists and then deleting his posts whenever people called him on it. I sent him a note explaining that his furious rants were off-putting and that I wasn’t willing to give him the benefit of the doubt that he wasn’t a bigot—he responded with a typically self-righteous 20 paragraph email railing against the evils of Mexicans and liberals and stupid white college girls who never lived in the real world and implying that I was threatening his career. The email at least confirmed he was a conscious bigot rather than an oblivious one, and a kook to boot, which in turn confirmed I’d done the right thing in dropping him like a bad habit—he never had any intention of listening to opposing viewpoints, he simply wanted an audience for his paranoid racist, sexist, and homophobic rants.

Another guy responded to a rhetorical question I posed about why society hadn’t progressed more in terms of gay rights by saying something like “probably because gay people are so annoying.” We got into it, and when I demanded clarification he blathered about gay people having caved in to right wing family values and he liked them when they were freaks and he thought emo kids probably had it worse than gays now and a bunch of other stuff that was neither relevant nor apologetic for his initial bullshit but was increasingly offensive to my oh so delicate bleeding heart sensibilities, and so there went a several year relationship with someone I had previously found little fault with. Should I have done more, done better, to educate him? Maybe, but I just couldn’t handle it anymore, not with gay kids committing suicide at record rates due to bullying from straight kids who find them “annoying.”

And it goes on—another white male writer I had an online disagreement with maintains that there’s a difference between black people and n_____s, which are presumably a subset of the African-American populace, but I’m not engaging with that fucking asshole again, because time and again it’s been proven that some bigots simply want to make you mad and have no interest in actually discussing the issues. Jut look at the Elizabeth Moon thing, or any number of other examples of bigots wanting to be heard but refusing to listen. There’s obviously the problem of letting vocal hatred go unchallenged, something I am never in favor of, but I’ve found at least for me it’s important to acknowledge that some people simply will not listen, and it’s not the fault of the challenger if the challenged puts on blinders and earplugs.

A couple of days ago, for example, an article by Gustavo Bondoni ran at Apex called “Plucking the PC Parrots of the Genre World.” With that title you can, I’m sure, infer that it was in no way inflammatory or dismissive toward people who disagree with the author. The gist of the article was a rehash of the all-male table of contents for the Mind-Blowing SF anthology from a ways back, with the point being that quotas, that bugbear of hardworking white dudes everywhere, are pointless and unfair because “most modern people are color blind and gender-blind.” When I pointed out that most people probably weren’t ether of those things, especially since in the article itself Bondoni groups authors based on their genders (Men do better SF, women do better Victorian Lit, in his humble opinion), but of course he alleges that his creation of this binary is completely different and in no way disproves his claim of genderblindness. Furthermore, my bringing it up is a sure sign that he and I will have to “agree to disagree,” which is undoubtedly true—he steadfastly maintains there is no racism or sexism in the genre world, nor really, it would seem, in the US, and when one starts from such an extremely myopic and dangerous position then true debate is impossible.

Now, I’m not necessarily accusing him of anything beyond writing a sloppy article that relies on an unsubstantiated and frankly ignorant premise and then refusing to engage in real debate, but it is interesting that the author does adopt many of the hallmarks of the bigot to make his case: he offers unsolicited assurances that he is not in fact a bigot, he denies a problem exists, he denies the methods that have historically been effective in redressing the problem of being valid in any circumstance, he insists that the methods of redressing social injustice are even less "fair" than the original problem, he substitutes his personal experiences and preferences for reality, he accuses those who disagree with him of being zombies/parrots/hysterical/etc., he attempts to derail any real opposition, he attributes his unwillingness to engage as resulting from the challenger’s tone, he claims he is colorblind and genderblind, he claims such a blind scenario is both desirable and feasible on a global scale, and finally, when confronted with an example of an apparent hypocrisy and fallacy in his argument, he decides it’s time to “agree to disagree” rather than continuing the debate. So yeah, I’m not saying he’s a bigot, but if it walks like a parrot and it squawks like a parrot…

So what does one do? Even though I don’t think I’m always the most effective, cool-headed person to engage people with debate I’ll damn sure keep trying, because the only thing that pisses me off more than bigots posting their screeds is when well-intentioned people simply shake their heads and say “well, that’s your opinion, and I respect it even if I don’t agree with” rather than confronting hatred and bigotry. The bottom line is that these opinions are not respectable or defensible on any level, and when you pretend that they are you give the bigot the validation he or she so desperately craves. If you think you can do more good by maintaining a friendship with a bigot and gently trying to change his or her mind over an extended period of time more power to you, but in my experience all that does is encourage and embolden them. Freedom of speech is a beautiful thing, but sometimes the consequences of that is you lose friends—but so far I’ve found that you always make better ones in the result. As a general principle, I think tolerance for difference viewpoints and experiences is incredibly important, crucial, even, but when one refuses to extend the same courtesy to others then they are no longer deserving of an audience—let them bellow into the darkness, and be done with them.

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