On bigotry.

Recently there have been a number of polls, articles, news stories about the rise of Islamophobia in the country.

A couple weeks back Howard Dean defended the the American people and the opponents of Park 51, from the accusations of intolerance and bigotry:

I think some of my own folks on my end of the spectrum of the party are demonizing some fairly decent people who are opposed to this. And, again, in no way am I defending, you know, the right wing of the Republican Party. But there are 65 percent of the people in this country are not right-wing bigots. Some of them really have deep emotional feelings about this.

To me this is a hollow sounding rationale. Simply because a majority supports something does not imbue it with virtue.

Why is that?

Well Jim Crow laws were widely accepted through much of the country not long ago. Women were disenfranchised until the turn of the last century, and that was popularly held belief. When surveyed, American troops supported segregation pre-WWII. Bigotry can be just as popular in this country as baseball and apple pie. If history has taught
us nothing else, it has taught us that; and there was nothing virtuous about any of the above . It is and was that the time, just simple bigotry.

Ta-Nehisi Coates does an admirable job of talking eloquently about this. Simply because a lot of people believe a thing it still can be prejudiced or biased or even racist.

The notion that that there are no actual bigots in America is hinted at in Dean's last sentence, that opposition to Park51 comes from "deep emotional feelings," as opposed to a presumably thin and shallow bigotry. In fact, bigotry is often quite substantive and emanates from "deep emotional feelings." The planter in the antebellum South who refused to emancipate his slaves was not committing evil simply because it felt good. He was, in the main, doing it to protect the interest and welfare of his children. In other words, he had "deep emotional feelings" about the fate of his progeny and the nature of their inheritance.

That about sums it up, for me.


-Cheers