By all means, work on the individuals in your life, but we won’t always have the luxury to treat them as therapy cases. When nazis start marching, there’s no pause button where you can stop time and deradicalize those people before they hurt innocents.
Bigotry is also hard to cure. It self-reinforces. It diminishes empathy and creates negative confirmation biases, which then makes it hard to see past stereotypes. This is even more intense for well-off white people, because then classism and class narcissism play into it too.
Most of the time you’re not going to talk someone out of their bigotry. The only real cure is exposure, taking time to get to know people from the group they hate, and even then bigots are liable to compartmentalize about how “they’re one of the good ones.”
We don’t always have time for that. Sometimes the only solutions are violence and intimidation.
my response to that edit:
By all means, work on the individuals in your life, but we won’t always have the luxury to treat them as therapy cases. When nazis start marching, there’s no pause button where you can stop time and deradicalize those people before they hurt innocents.
Bigotry is also hard to cure. It self-reinforces. It diminishes empathy and creates negative confirmation biases, which then makes it hard to see past stereotypes. This is even more intense for well-off white people, because then classism and class narcissism play into it too.
Most of the time you’re not going to talk someone out of their bigotry. The only real cure is exposure, taking time to get to know people from the group they hate, and even then bigots are liable to compartmentalize about how “they’re one of the good ones.”
We don’t always have time for that. Sometimes the only solutions are violence and intimidation.