The Bigotry Epidemic

Mr Holdsworth deals with the problems of bigotry and hatred, accusations of which grow more numerous every day.

His introduction:

Words like bigotry and racism get used so often and so casually today that I think they’ve lost the quality of gravity they deserve. It’s like the boy who cried wolf. If you try to elevate the severity of a situation to emergency levels too often, people will start to disregard the time when there is an actual emergency. If you call everything bigotry then nothing becomes bigotry and real instances of that need our attention will fall under the radar and I think that’s starting to happen. I think a big part of the problem with this issue is that our definition of bigotry has broadened so dramatically that we’ve given people permission to make that accusation without justification.So I think we should take a look at our definition of bigotry and, frankly, throw it away and come up with something that is more acute. If we really want to address the problem of bigotry and reduce its impact on society, then I think we have to get to the root cause of it. Most people just want to deal with what they perceive as hatred or negative associations of others but that’s not the root of it, that’s just a symptom of it. I think a better definition of bigotry would be: treating an individual according to a category or generalization. So what that means is, whenever you ignore the individual and treat them according to some category you can group them in based on something like skin color, religion, gender, etc., then you are committing bigotry and I think this is the at the root of what gives people the excuse to let it escalate into hatred. It’s much easier to hate a categorical projection than it is a real person and when we think in those terms, the individual person gets lost thereby exaggerating the risk of injustice.