Excerpts from my book (in progress)
…
Freud had a term for this: He called it “the narcissism of small differences.” Basically he meant that a bully will pick on someone who differs from him in the most unimportant of ways, while pretending that it makes the hugest of differences.
... Do you remember that episode of the original Star Trek in which two aliens holocausted each other’s planets because one of them was black on the left side and the other was black on the right side?
Sometimes Freud was more a cynic than a scientist, but on this, he keeps turning out to be right. I just wonder who these bigots will pick on next — first it was African Americans, then it was gay people. I wonder who their next target will be. I wonder how they’ll reinterpret their religious books to identify their next holy scapegoat.
— J. E. Brown
Brain Food.
Ethnic jokes are good for the brain. They improve memory. Many people will react to an ethnic joke by saying, “I just remembered I have an appointment somewhere! Good-bye.” They may however forget your phone number.
— J. E. Brown
Born Again for the 21st Century.
The basis or foundation of bigotry is the belief that Other means Evil. In fact, ever since Freud, there has been a suspicion that “evil” means nothing but “other”: a belief that many people are actively looking for a target to pick on, and so, bigotry and judgmentalness are automatic whenever signs of otherness are seen.
My church had a curiously modern definition of what it means to be “born again”: You were born an animal, the church said; you were born with an instinct to dislike some people by reflex, and to gossip about them and to pick on them for fun and to bully them for laughs and to cheat them for your own benefit. Becoming “born again” means you learn to see and recognize these animal urges in yourself, and weed them out of your character, and become a good person. This applies to you whether you are a Christian, or a Jew, or a Muslim, or a Hindu, or an atheist. In other words, your character matters more than your cultural religious beliefs. People aren’t worth crap unless and until they’ve been born again. {Source: “Definition of Bigotry” by J. E. Brown.}
— J. E. Brown
A word about how bigots operate, how they get their way, how they use mind games to keep minorities down, and thus, how bigots fit like cogs into the machine:
See, betas occupy their current position in the pecking order because they have been groomed for oppression and exploitation. They have been trained to accept unequal treatment.
I have come to believe that educating the oppressors and abusers has no value. Wall Street, abusive bosses, molesters, abusive parents, abusive romantic partners, etc. will not police themselves; the only hope for ending their systems of subjugation lies in teaching their victims exactly what is going on and how the game operates, how the oppression begins and is maintained and how the victims are tricked into accepting it.
The uneducated are really easy to control with guilt, particularly if you can reach them at an early age through religious instruction. If you can tap into a child’s neurotic need to feel accepted and mainstream, you can get the uneducated to do pretty much whatever they’re told. If you can convince people “You’re not a full and equal citizen if you’re different from the mainstream in any way,” then it becomes really easy to divide the population into “guilt groups” which can be kept down because some invented version of God said they’re inferior (women, blacks, gays). Or because the State (i.e., the bigots who write the State’s laws) said so.
— J. E. Brown
The arrest and beating of Sandra Bland in Texas calls us to consider what happens when a police department is taking measures to pad its productivity numbers. … Crooked cops pick on a segment of the community which tends to be low-income and therefore powerless. It’s important to recognize this as just one side of a self-supporting system which appears carefully designed to exploit certain groups of people, even though it may arise and evolve organically: a system which targets a racial group for exploitation, harassing them with DWB arrests, harassing them because they are less wealthy and therefore safe targets, harassing them with economic sanctions (citations) which ensure that they stay poor. So the system is self-regenerating and self-perpetuating: it brings in a harvest, and it acts to guarantee that harvest. We’ve all heard the stories about crooked police departments using ticket quotas and even arrest quotas to bring in income and to make the public think more police should be hired. A system which comes to see people of color as habitual criminals, if only because people of color are habitually arrested to feed the system.
It’s time for lawmakers to recognize the problem and take steps to downsize their bloated police departments, which have grown beyond the legitimate needs of the community.
— J. E. Brown
Nonstandard Bigotries.
Over the years it’s been cool to ridicule all of these groups:
- people who are good at math
- people with car phones
- people with cell phones
- people who have a bottle of water with them at all times
… as if there were anything wrong or hurtful in those. It’s proof that some people are too judgmental for the rest of us to hang out with.
— J. E. Brown
Translations
| Statement
| Meaning
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| “I don’t see how persecuting those people makes me a bigot.”
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“I believe that my neurotic need to be liked by others is more important than their right to be treated as equals, possessing dignity and human rights, and if necessary, I will warp the definition of every word in the dictionary and the Constitution to see that they are treated as second-class citizens.”
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| “religious freedom”
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religious freedom to bully minorities
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— J. E. Brown
Comebacks
| If someone tells you:
| Your correct response is:
|
| “I won’t judge you for that.”
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“Too late, you just did.”
“Riiiiiiiight. And I won’t tell you what Dan Pearce says about that.”
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| “These activist judges need to stop overruling the will of the people.”
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“ ;^) It’s so cute when the bigot minority calls itself ‘the people’.”
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| “Those people are trying to move into our neighborhood and our school.”
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“You need to get over your belief that people only have rights IF YOU LIKE THEM.”
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| “Jesus hates people who ____.”
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“I call that ‘Religious Ventriloquism’. Cuz it sure is funny that whenever Jesus speaks, your lips move. … If you drink a glass of water, does Jesus hiccup? Or does it just turn into whine? ;^) ” {Source: “Definition of Bigotry” by J. E. Brown.}
“Poets and scientists tell us that there’s a strange place where people are different from us. The people in that place have customs that are different from yours and mine. That strange place is called Every Place on Earth. Stop whining and get used to it.”
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| “God will send you to Hell for being different from us / for what you’re doing.”
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“Psychologists have a word for what you just said: it’s called ‘projection’.”
“Isn’t it great that you have God making your death threats for you? Stay away from me and my family, or God will beat you up.”
|
— J. E. Brown
Random Thoughts.
Tolerance means allowing people their quirks, even when those quirks don’t match yours.
If concentration camps have to be built … next time, could we do it right, and put the bigots on the inside?
If you want to understand how bullying works, you need to look at the big version of it, as seen in the way religions subvert the machinery of government as a tool for carrying out their traditional vendettas and witch hunts against the usual victims: anyone who’s black, anyone who’s gay, anyone of a different religion. If you want to understand how government-assisted bullying works, look at how the oppressors claim “tradition” (namely, “the way we’ve always done things”) as an excuse for not examining the original reason for the oppression — as an excuse for not considering whether there is even a present-day reason or justification. “Once upon a time, we just suddenly one day decided to pick on these people, and that’s reason enough to do it forever” — apparently that’s enough justification.
Someday the law will find a way to crack down on these hate groups who use their book of fables as an excuse to spread slander against minority groups.
“Tradition” means “I let dead people do my thinking for me.”
People (and governments) will go out of their way to invent any chain of reasoning that ends with the words “therefore I can do what I want to people.”
Any defense of bigotry really means “But look how big my group is. Look how many of us share this bigoted belief. One thousand KKK members couldn’t be wrong.”
The best reason to unfriend bad people on Facebook: Your friend list is visible to others. People who see a bully or a bigot or a gossip on your friend list will assume you have no taste, no class, and poor judgment. They’ll wonder if *you* can be trusted.
A word about Denial: The bigot will say “I don’t consider myself a bigot/racist/sexist/etc.” The shoe fits but he won’t wear it. Bigots forget that these words have objective definitions, meaning they are measured by looking at visible facts. Bigots usually have a problem seeing visible facts. Bigots think the word “bigot” is an insult instead of what it is: an empirical statement of reality, an accurate description of their behavior. They think it’s a decoration or a defacement, not a description.
Racists always deny being racists. Bigots always deny being bigots. Bigotry is the hatred that dares not speak its own name. So always call a bigot a bigot. Being caught and identified and correctly labeled is what they fear most.
Some people, finding themselves in possession of an over-enlarged sense of disgust, believe themselves to be ethicists, when in fact they are busybodies.
Bigotry comes from this false logic: Everything that is evil is shocking; therefore, everything that is shocking (to you) must be evil.
— J. E. Brown
From the chapter on “How to Be Deplorable”:
Note: This is intended as humor. … Bigots will probably continue taking it as a rule book anyway (roll eyes) (sigh). Whatever.
Everything that disgusts you should be illegal. While it’s true that The Law was designed only to prevent damage to people’s property and freedom, you could always make a case that anything which disgusts you deprives you of your freedom to not know about it, and so ought to be outlawed. (For more tips on making your case, see also Exaggerate.)
The Law was intended to protect people’s rights; but you could always try to impress the court with new legal theories, such as the theory that you have a right to dictate your children’s ethical beliefs, and this right is somehow endangered by the mere fact that people outside your family live differently than you do.
Project your hatreds onto your religion — the way terrorists do. Whether you wear a pointy white hat or a suit of dynamite.... Whether you throw stones at police, or at schoolgirls.... Whether you wish to deny someone a job, or to deny them the rest of their life, … Whatever uncontainable animal craving you wish to give into, your religion has a Holy Scripture that (at least vaguely) allows and encourages you to do it.
The citizenship and character lessons you learned in kindergarten do still apply, but only in certain limited contexts. Remember that lesson you learned about respect (“A person’s a person, no matter how small”)? That only applies to the citizens of Whoville. That lesson you learned about tolerance? That applies, but only to red-nosed reindeer. The lesson you learned about exaggerators? That only applies to Chicken Little. The authors couldn’t have been talking about your behavior. {Source: “Definition of Bigotry” by J. E. Brown.}
— J. E. Brown
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Quotes
You can safely assume you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.
— Anne Lamott (possibly not original: see Wikiquote)
Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.
— Blaise Pascal
The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.
— George Orwell, 1984
(PS. Whether or not you believe the preceding statements, whether or not I believe them, whether or not George Orwell believed them, there are people who believe them and live by them, and it is necessary that you know that. — J. E. Brown)
Dogs bark at everyone they do not know.
— Heraclitus
Homophobia is like racism and anti-Semitism and other forms of bigotry in that it seeks to dehumanize a large group of people, to deny their humanity, their dignity and personhood. This sets the stage for further repression and violence that spread all too easily to victimize the next minority group.
— Coretta Scott King
Bigotry is probably the thing I detest most.
— J.K. Rowling
Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.
— Mark Twain, Innocents Abroad
Perhaps travel cannot prevent bigotry, but by demonstrating that all peoples cry, laugh, eat, worry, and die, it can introduce the idea that if we try and understand each other, we may even become friends.
— Maya Angelou
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2nd edition. 09 May 2018
1st edition 08 Nov 2016
Further Reading at Other Sites
Concepts:
definition of bigot, definition of bigotry, what does bigot mean, what does bigotry mean, define bigot, define bigotry, what is a bigot, what is bigotry, bigot is defined as, bigotry is defined as, examples of a bigot, examples of bigotry, why are people bigots. Misspellings: what is bigot mean
More at This Site
- Is there a booklet of manners in your house?
We offer this one:
How Rude! — a booklet about rude and abusive people, and how to recognize them
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