 |
Los Angeles Times Valley Edition | Glendale News-Press | 2005 August 13
Judging bigotry at all levels
BY PATRICK AZADIAN
Have you ever ran into someone who admits to being a bigot?
I haven't.
We don't come across people wearing T-shirts claiming "Bigoted and Proud!" or bumper stickers that boast, "My child is a bigot-in-training at Diversity School." We can only get "Save Bigotry" pins if we special order them. Even then, there is a real possibility the good people at Midwest Manufacturing will refuse the order.
We simply don't see people bragging about being bigots.
So, does absence of admission, mean bigoted attitudes have been eradicated from our psyche?
If bigotry can be defined as "intolerance toward people who hold different views, especially on matters of politics, religion, or ethnicity" and if I can trust my ears, then the answer is no.
In the last few months, I have been exposed to various forms of bigoted expressions from ordinary people. Although all the attitudes shared an obvious common thread, they differed from one another in form and content.
I have made an attempt to place them into three subcategories, and have kept the actors anonymous.
The first category, and the most puzzling of all, is what I'd like to call "self-loathing bigotry." It happens among individuals of the same ethnicity.
An Armenian man who has been in America for a couple of decades, chides his newcomer neighbors because their son let off a firecracker a few days after the Fourth of July.
Many of us may consider this criticism reasonable behavior by the self-proclaimed native.
Yet, what follows is beyond the bounds of civility. The "native" takes the opportunity to make the "foreigner" know exactly how he feels: "Why don't you all go back where you came from? It's people like you who give us a bad name!"
The individual who made the rash comments has the ability to empathize with the newcomer, and can be a catalyst for acculturation, but chooses a less productive route. In the process of demeaning his neighbors, he is defining himself as a person of higher social standing and an individual who has more of a right to be here.
Then there are "cross-ethnic bigotry;" it occurs among different groups of ethnic minorities.
A minority patron decides to boycott all Korean owned mom-and-pop stores because the old lady at the cash register does not make eye contact with him, does not deliver an airline-stewardess-type fake smile, and does not say 'thank you' out loud. He tells his friends: "'Those people' are all rude and they all hate us. Don't shop there."
As in the previous case, the individual has the capacity to understand behavioral nuances are not necessarily equivalent to racism, but chooses to act unaware. In his mind, he defines his own ethnic group as "less foreign" and higher in status. In addition, by labeling a whole ethnic group as bigots, he justifies making a bigoted statement against them.
No talk on bigotry would be complete without a note on "vintage bigotry." It has its roots in the mistrust of people who look and act different than the majority. It also reflects all the familiar human fears of the unknown and unfamiliar.
A resident (whose ancestors have settled in this country for generations) is rightfully annoyed by his neighbors who often have loud gatherings. The neighbors are newcomers and belong to an ethnic minority.
She tells her friends: "We are going to buy all the houses on this block, so that none of 'them' can move in."
All bigoted attitudes have their base in anecdotal evidence. Anecdotal evidence is unreliable evidence based on personal experience that has not been empirically tested, and which is often used in an argument as if it had been scientifically or statistically proven. The person using anecdotal evidence may or may not be aware of the fact that, by doing so, they are generalizing.
For example, a politician might publicly demand better teacher training facilities just because his own son happens to have a spectacularly incompetent teacher.
Moreover, we already know that the belief that people of different races or ethnicities may have different qualities and abilities, and that some races are inherently superior or inferior has been a defunct theory for over a half a century.
So what does it take to be a bigot?
A willingness and a desire to attribute one or more negative experiences about a group to all the members of that group. On the other hand, any positives that come from that specific group must get attributed to the individual and not the whole group.
It's easy, really.
What's probably a little bit more challenging, however, is to go against our instincts and prejudices, to realize that different is not necessarily bad, and to give every individual the chance to win our trust and friendship.
Being aware of her own inner prejudices, Turanga Leela, the one-eyed woman from the animated TV show "Futurama," once said: "We cannot make progress as a society if we cannot pretend to like each other." I am with Leela on this one.
Copyright 2005 Glendale News Press
|
