essay 4

Prejudice and Goodness

Original Fragment:
I want to think and write about the complexities of dealing with people that are good but have parts of them that are ignorant if not abhorrent. Specifically in the context of southern white ideologically racist people that in practice look out for and care for all people, maybe not evenly but more evenly than their rhetoric would seem to suggest they would be. 

I know many people from many walks of life and I know for a fact that skin color, creed, gender, sexuality and background mean nothing compared to the content of a person’s character and their actions. I don’t consider myself any kind of enlightened but I do try to make a concerted effort to find and annihilate my own biases and prejudices. This effort of mine against some parts of myself has been long and arduous and through the process I have worked through some very deep seated ignorance and found out things about myself that I am not proud of. I know I have a long way to go but all I can do is try my best to do my best and always be better than I was. 

That being said, I have been wrestling with how to apply my thoughts and feelings on social politics and civil rights and equality to a world and people that are seemingly willfully ignorant. The actual experiences that drive me to think about these types of things in these terms is my constant brushing of shoulders with people I have to tolerate their prejudice, and in the pursuit of giving people a chance to change I take it upon myself to continue engagement in the hopes of helping destroy the hateful outcomes of their ignorance, or in some cases, stupidity. I struggle with where to draw the line as far as holding my ground morally and trying to hold back my beliefs in the pursuit of discussion and change. It feels impossible to change anything if we just stop talking to people we disagree with so I continue to interact with wildly ignorant or stupid people because I have a unique opportunity to do so.

Due to the fact that I look and seem like someone who would, to these people, naturally hold their belief structure, they take it upon themselves to make themselves nice and comfortable and they say and do things they would never do around people that don’t fit the bill. That means that I am allowed special access to parts of people that other groups and individuals would never get to. This is both a blessing and a curse, I have found. I have the ability to see behind this specific curtain and know that these people are both deeply prejudiced, racist, sexist, any other manner of bigotry, but also, good people. 

I know it sounds crazy and counter-intuitive, it still feels that way to me. I know these people hold beliefs that I find abhorrent, but even in spite of those things, they often act in opposition to their supposed worldview. For instance, I know a guy that says the hard r, frequently expresses opinions that are ignorant of social pretexts and socioeconomic precedents, and is just generally racist, not in an in your face kind of way, just in the off handed, edgy way that country built white boys can be. However, despite what you would think this conduct of his, in what he views as safe spaces, would point towards, he is the kindest and most caring person when it really comes down to it, regardless of any social, racial or any other factors. I have watched this man essentially give the shirt off his back to a black guy. He would have just as soon made a joke about him once in his white safe space, but he helped because he was in need and I don’t know how to palate it and exist with the painful dissonance.

At this point in my life I have no choice as to this presence, but even given the opportunity to distance myself from all prejudice, I wonder, to what effect? I feel I will never find someone free from what I aim to purge from myself but to what effect do I excommunicate myself from people I disagree with? Yes, it is fundamental to me to view people as equal, but by cutting myself off from the people that feel otherwise, I cut myself off from the ability to not only influence them, but challenge my own beliefs from unique perspectives. Obviously, there are people that are prejudiced and also just generally bad people, but the grey area I am wrestling with is the people that are in practice and in general life good people, but then express beliefs in “private” that seem diametrically opposed to their conduct.