If you've made it this far in this article, I'm glad. It means that I'm either pissing you off beyond belief, you are interested in what I have to say, or absolutely NOTHING is on Netflix worth watching today. In any case, please read on. Race is one of the most pressing issues in this nation today and is a bellwether to a much larger movement that is dominating our culture now and has been for more than 50 years.
In the previous two pieces of this article, I've striven to paint a picture that defines and delineates between 3 concepts that are used interchangeably in modern culture even though they are totally different in their meaning and impact. Those 3 words are PREJUDICE, RACISM, and BIGOTRY. We've talked about the first two, so let's go down the path of trying to understand BIGOTRY.
BIGOTRY is hate. I'm gonna say that again. BIGOTRY is hate! True bigotry in action is to ultimately despise another person simply because they are a member of another group, whether that group is based on race, religion, ethnicity, national origin, or any number of other factors. BIGOTRY is not based on sensible thought, observation, logic, reason, experience, or any other tangible cognition. It's a rudimentary disgust based on nothing more than "us versus them".
In the first piece, I described PREJUDICE as something one acquires by one's own experience or exposure to the experience of another as it was imparted to you. It's normal, natural human behavior and in and of itself, is not overtly negative. In describing RACISM, I attempted to describe the elevation of negativity involved in automatically assigning a lesser status to another group, making them less than you, based solely on their being of another race. BIGOTRY, dear readers, is on a completely different level. PREJUDICE is acting on previously acquired information and is subject to change based on newer information over time. RACISM is a belief system that is seldom subject to change based on new information, but doesn't connote HATE. RACISM, more than anything else, requires INDIFFERENCE. You simply don't care about the other individual. They are no more important to you than the fly you swat or the dog you leash. RACISM is just a matter-of-fact thought it's purveyors possess that they usually cannot explain and never justify. If PREJUDICE is a 1 on the Richter scale, RACISM is a 5. It's a firmly held belief, but it wouldn't compel someone to do harm or violence to another.
BIGOTRY, on the other hand, is hate. It's visceral. You don't simply see someone as different than you, or less than you. BIGOTRY requires you to see someone as a threat to you and, thus, requires you to take any negative action available to harm that person. It's cataclysmic 9.5 on the Richter scale that affects all in it's wake. It causes people who are infected by it to do evil, despicable things to others with no more thought than you would give to a mosquito. In the previous piece, I referred to the unspeakable things that were foisted on Blacks in this country in it's infancy. Those, readers of this tome, were acts of BIGOTRY, not RACISM. RACISM allows you to adopt a mindset to mistreat people or to feel superior to them. BIGOTRY gives you license to abuse, assault, rape, and even kill them because the hatred you have for them is such that you believe they deserve it.
I don't blame you if, having read this so far, you are thinking I'm being circuitous. Some times, these 3 things have so much crossover that it may be hard to distinguish where PREJUDICE ends and RACISM begins, or when RACISM metastasizes into BIGOTRY. The borders of the 3 do, indeed, get fuzzy. But if you first understand that they are three DISTINCTLY different things, it can make it easier to discuss them and, eventually diminish them. As human beings, we are innately flawed, but we are also capable of exponential growth as a species. As Americans, we have set out a pathway to do so at a breakneck pace that few areas of the world would deem possible.
We are a new nation in comparison to our home lands. There are areas of the world where ill feelings go back THOUSANDS of years. Cultural and religious traditions continue and will continue to cloud peoples' judgement for more generations than anyone can even fathom. In America, we started out as a region replete with that foulness, but as a new nation, we embarked on a new pathway. If you haven't read the founding documents of the country you were born into, do yourself and your progeny the service of doing so now. You will see that flawed men, having been steeped in the traditions and fallacies of their ancestors came here, recognized the future could not be painted with the past, and laid out a framework where we could eradicate these evils. The recipe for it is baked in the very DNA of America.
Slavery was brought here, not invented here. Anti-Semitism was brought here, not begun here. Sexism did not see it's start in America, it was shipped into our country with the folks who arrived here at Ellis Island and other ports of call. As much as the political Left has tried to pull the wool over your eyes and make you believe that the United States is an evil nation, the truth, staring you right in the face, dictates otherwise.
As I said previously, the original Americans brought the idea that one person could own another with them. But some of those same people, some being slave owners themselves, drafted a founding document that labelled that as wrong-headed and charted a path for it's abolition. Did that abolition happen in their lifetime? No, but it did happen. Why? Because, as a nation, we simply couldn't reconcile the difference between our current situation and our established goals. Why then, can it not be the same with RACISM and BIGOTRY? Viewing women as second class citizens was brought here from the homelands of our ancestors. American didn't invent it. The same thing happened with that that happened with slavery. We simply couldn't justify it's continuance in light of our stated goals of equality. Thus, we embarked on a path toward it's elimination from our culture.
With every passing day, we have done the grunt work necessary toward what the founders called a "more perfect union". We've stumbled. We've back pedaled. But we have consistently moved forward. That is, until recently. There is a major push by a minority (but powerful) faction of people to get the masses to believe that we are, as a nation, evil. Steeped in a history of evil and hurling toward an evil end. Poppycock! Balderdash! In a word, BULLSHIT! We are anything but.
We are a good people, of good conscience who want nothing more than to fulfill the destiny mapped out by our forebears. We see hate as evil and want it to be cleansed from our lives in all aspects. It is this desire, my friends, that makes us so vulnerable to the manipulations of the true evil amongst us. This evil pits each of us, purposefully, against each other. In the next installment of this article, I will attempt to illustrate to you a picture that will tie all of these concepts together and, if I'm successful, will allow at least the readers of this tome to reach beyond current circumstance and find a future we all seek, are willing to work for, and are entitled to.
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