Tell the bigots you have skin in the game
A few days before the 2016 election, I was at a party drinking whiskey by a bonfire and trying to keep the conversation from going where I knew it was heading anyway. White guys say some of the most horrible things among one another, especially middle-aged white guys and (if often seems) especially to me. I’m regularly surprised that this surprises people to hear.
I speak with a slight New Jersey accent, I have a white wife and four white children. I am overweight. I curse in normal conversation. These, as I’ve come to understand, are indicators that if you are a bigot I am on your team.
When the conversation inevitably turns to the blacks and the gays and the problems with Our Country I’ve learned to diffuse it. Often polite disagreement is enough, sometimes a joke at my own expense or launching unbidden into a tangential story does the trick. I always avoided confrontation, not because I was afraid of it, but because I felt it was pointless.
‘Bigots are stupid’
Facts are as useless as careful arguments when you’re talking to a bigot. No one who believes in racial or sexual inferiority just needs more information on the matter. Information isn’t what got them there. Moreover, as a member of their club (straight, middle-aged white guys) I can’t make them empathetic by talking about women and minorities positively.
I use “bigot” because it is a nastier word (I think) and because it gets more to the heart of the matter than does “racist,” which makes race rather than perspective the problem.
My fellow old white guy complained that the town wasn’t business-friendly because it wouldn’t let a strip club open near the college (so the girls could work their way through), that the black girls at the WalMart were a drain on society and that there were no good jobs.
There are no answers to these assertions. I asked him why he thought my children should strip their way through college and continued down the list telling him not that his views were wrong but that he was stupid or selfish for thinking them.
The “We Should Be Meaner to Racists” headline above caught my eye because it shares at least some of my perspective on the matter. What I discovered that evening is that even though I can’t make bigots enlightened I totally can invoke my white privilege to shut them up and maybe even make them afraid to speak.
Non-bigoted white guys know that the bigot always will test the waters before letting the real poison out. I decided that night that instead of taking that as a cue to redirect the conversation, in the future I would use it to shut the conversation down.
Making worse arguments for the better
This goes against much of what I believed before the bonfire. Because I spend too much time around people who, even when we disagree, are susceptible to argument and evidence, and, because I tend to be susceptible as well, I’ve got this notion that people should get a fair hearing and an honest reply. If you’re a white guy who has read this far you likely do too.
We are wrong.
I have women, and gay people and people of color in my life whom I love for whom it is something of a betrayal, I think, to give voice at all to bigots. In the attached story, Erika Heidewald talks about revoking social capital for racists, which is where I find myself now.
Bigots tend to think they’re in the majority. This gives them courage. If you’re a white guy, they cannot think worse of you than to assume you’re a misogynist, homophobic bigot. These aren’t abstract ideas they’re pondering aloud they are direct insults, and they should be addressed like the insults they are.
That’s our new responsibility as non-bigoted white guys. We have to start responding as if we’ve been insulted rather than merely having our opinions on race, sex and gender disagreed with.
Although it goes against pretty much everything I believe about rhetoric and conversation, it is time to start our responses to bigoted insights with, “What the fuck is the matter with you?” Because, really, the answer to that is the only fact that matters.