What has happened to our attitudes toward bigotry? I used to feel like I was a member of a vast alliance of people committed to fighting bigotry. We believed it was possible, and in optimistic moods perhaps even even inevitable, that bigotry would be overcome. In the last three or so years, though, I have felt this alliance evaporate. One by one, then en masse, people have succumbed to a belief that bigotry is innate and ineradicable, and that the belief that we shall overcome it is at best naive, but more likely covert or unconscious bigotry in action.

It seems that anyone who belongs to my category, whether we realize it or not, is bigoted, and is therefore not qualified to contribute to the discourse. To those on the right, my category is Liberal Elite. I have been accused of being prejudiced against the common folk, who by nature, are unavoidably xenophobic. As the majority they have democratic prerogative to preserve their majority. Who am I to say they do not have a right to determine their own cultural climate, by deciding (in racial terms!) who and who does not enter their country? When being attacked from the left I am a member of the Dominant Class — white, male, cis, heterosexual, bourgeois  — who cannot know what it is like to be otherwise, whose fundamental conceptions have been shaped from birth by the experiences of someone who enjoys privileged status. I should know that the best response to understanding my privilege is to “STFU” and allow those who haven’t had their turn to speak to do all the talking. If I want to say anything, it should be to shush others like myself, as determined by the categorizers who have determined what I am.

Both attitudes are dangerously illiberal.

Here is my stance on bigotry, which is a liberal stance, and which ought to be acceptable to any liberal on the left or the right.

—-

First, it does not matter who you are. Any person can be a bigot. Any theory that claims that only some categories of people can be bigoted is bigotry authorizing bigotry.

Bigotry is the human default. If you do not choose to overcome it, it is inevitable that you will be a bigot. And if you try to overcome it and do it wrong-headedly, you will a remain a bigot. No matter who you are, if you have not dug into your own soul and excavated significant amounts of prejudice, you can bet that prejudice is still down there — possibly holding up your elaborate conceits that you, because of who you are, are incapable of bigotry. What could prevent investigation more effectively than the belief that investigation, for you, is unnecessary?

Your theoretical justifications do not matter. What good is rejection of racial essentialism, if you immediately find sociological substitutes that hand you the same results? The one place where bigotry is unbigoted is where it finds its justification: a blessing from scripture, from history, from biology, from psychology, or from political or social science will do the trick equally well. One thing is needful: a prejudgment on who gets to do the judging.

The values you assign do not matter. In times when phobias are forbidden, bigotry shapeshifts into phelias. Categories are despised or adored, and individuals are despised or adored according to the category they exemplify.

If you deputize your gaze to assign political identity to another individual you are a bigot.

But who can blame a bigot? It is much easier to live in a world populated by examples of categories than by unique individuals. When you hand over the world to your own gaze, so much effort is saved, so much energy conserved, so much passionate intensity released, so much conviction mustered that the experience is intoxicating. Bigotry is easy. It feels good. It pumps faith, energy, clarity and conviction into your soul and your world. It especially tempts those with limited resources. Not only those with limited intellectual resources (the stupid), but also limited time resources (the busy), limited energy resources (the tired), limited financial resources (the poor) and most of all, limited social capital resources, (the disprivileged, the marginal!).

Understand, your own sexed gaze, your own racialized gaze, your own cultural gaze, your own orientational gaze, your own theoretical gaze — whether dominant or marginal, will tempt your bigotry. Resisting temptation demands effort, and effort demands resources. Perhaps the belief that this effort is a universal requirement is itself a kind of bigotry of those with the resources to resist bigotry. But does this make the bigotry of the vulnerable any less bigoted?

Understand, the sole advantage marginalization gives a person is more urgent curiosity into what goes on in the complacently aggressive minds of dominant others. If a marginal person forecloses these questions with facile answers, that person has forsaken the only privilege the marginal have: the privilege of sensing questions where others see only The Way Things Are. To believe disprivilege gives you or anyone some sort of epistemological privilege, some natural ability to spontaneously perceive the True Truth, is to succumb to the same ideological idiocy that drives those you judge so harshly.

Understand, bigots are bigots because bigotry has advantages, especially for those with limited resources. Truth consumes resources. It slows you down, tires you out, raises questions when answers are most craved, and complicates everything.

Anyone low on resources, short on conviction, harrassed by complication, overwhelmed by alienation, dogged by patience, and desperate for burst of intense moral passion, will be tempted by the abundant gifts of bigotry.

Don’t do it.

Don’t succumb to the bigotry of the privileged. That is the way of the illiberal right.

Don’t succumb to the bigotry of the disprivileged. That is the way of the illiberal left.

Commit to perpetual struggle against bigotry. Commit to living in the infinitely complex, conflict-ridden, questionable world of autonomous individuals.  That is the way of liberalism.