My great-grandmother was a wonderful woman. Her home was one of the warmest, most comforting places I have ever been, and many of my best memories as a child revolve around her kitchen.
My great-grandmother was also a bigot. As a child, she patiently explained to me that the Ku Klux Klan was a force for good (they built schools!). She thought that Brown v. Board of Education was one of the worst events in U.S. history, equaled only by the end of mandatory school prayer. In response to a horrific string of murders of black children in Atlanta, she commented that such a thing shouldn't happen "even to children like that."
My great-grandmother was a product of her time. The odds of a working-class Southern woman born over a century ago being anything other than a bigot were slim to none, but even now it feels kind of gross and traitorous for me to acknowledge her bigotry. She clearly met any reasonable standard for the word 'bigot', yet applying the word to her feels disgusting.
This brings me to Rod Dreher and the bitch-slap theory of politics.
Rod recently penned a column whose central thesis was "I dares you to call me and everybody else who opposes gay marriage a bigot!" This is a classic bitch-slap tactic. "Call me a bigot and you call all those nice old ladies who voted for Prop 8 bigots too!"
The bitch-slap tactic isn't so much an argument as a dare. As Josh Marshall eloquently explained, a political bitch-slap involves taunting an opponent in a way intended to highlight their lack of strength or courage. If the person whom you bitch-slap responds angrily, they look irrational or crazy. If they respond in a calm, measured way, they look and feel like wimps. It is a win-win for the person doing the bitch-slapping. It's also a cheap, nasty tactic that should be recognized as such.
Rod's argument is also, frankly, unfair to bigots. My great-grandmother didn't have much of a chance to be anything but a bigot. Her bigotry was an accident of history, and not in any real sense a choice. Frankly, I do not blame her for what she was. I blame the politicians and writers and preachers who actually had the chance to shape her environment and chose to do so in a way that inflamed bigotry. I don't know if those people were actually bigots. I do know that they deliberately spread the evil of bigotry, which to my mind is far more immoral.
12 Comments for “My Great-Grandmother and the Bitch-Slap Theory of Politics”
posted by TS on
Valiantly argued, Mr. Chase. But you are drawing the line between free will and determinism a bit too conveniently. Your dear old great granny’s “circumstances made her do it” while your political enemy “had a choice, and chose wrong.” You are trying to play defense attorney and prosecutor all in one breath.
I come down on the side of all determinism, myself. We are just playing out some cosmic drama for the amusement of cruel gods. Circumstances shaped your great grandmother and Rod Dreher into bigots. They shaped us into gays. Now we get to clash. Let’s face it, a play without conflict is boring (ever seen “The Tempest”? An all-powerful wizard versus some feeble, demented guy? Yaaawn).
posted by esurience on
TS, Mr. Chase gave the reason that his grandmother was a victim of circumstance as: “The odds against a working-class Southern woman born over a century ago being anything other than a bigot were slim to none”
No matter where a person is born in the US today, there is this thing called the internet. There’s a lot more information available today than there was a century ago, you just have to care enough to look. There’s also movies, television, and other media. Excusing bigoted behavior because of ignorance is just a lot harder to do today than it was a century ago. Besides people who are just too brainwashed by religious dogma to ever have a decent chance at thinking about certain issues for themselves, not a lot of people have an excuse anymore.
posted by esurience on
TS:
And excusing people’s behavior based on determinism just results in a self-fulling prophecy. People do change their minds on things. Maybe they were destined to change their minds because of the chemical reactions going on in their brain and the environment they were exposed to at the time. Even so, I’d think it would helpful for part of that environment to be saying “hey! change your damn mind already!” rather than saying “it’s determinism” 🙂
Also, if there are gods watching us in a cruel cosmic play, wouldn’t it be better to make things non-deterministic? Otherwise they could presumably figure out everything that was going to happen without bothering to run the simulation.
posted by TS on
Yeah, I exaggerate. After all, one of the main forces that shape the determinism of attitudes is derision. The great grandma was a bigot because she would have been derided for being anything else. And what we are trying to do by deriding Rod Dreher is change his attitude, or else make an example of him. We’re trying to make it so bigots live in a world they’re not welcome in, just as bigots, when they held the upper hand, tried to make a world we and others they didn’t tolerate weren’t welcome in. I just think we should be aware of it. Also, I suspect it won’t work.
posted by BobN on
And what we are trying to do by deriding Rod Dreher is change his attitude
You mean folks can stop presenting logical arguments and just deride him? Cool!
As for the claim that we’re just trying to turn the tables on the Drehers of the world, get back to me when we’ve managed to put a proposition on the ballot revoking freedom of religion…
posted by Jorge on
I think there is a danger of overusing the word bigot in that the other side will develop a resistance to it.
In my mother’s day they used to teach children in school that there were five races: white, black, yellow, red, and brown (I think). Hispanics were just mixed. There are a lot of people alive today when Brown v. Board of Education came out who came to realize there was something wrong about the racism it abolished. It took decades for that to happen, and it happened because people were given a chance to learn some new truths.
I frankly do not think you can call someone who is well-educated and following social customs a bigot. Where it is interesting is where we have a clash of competing social values, as we do here.
posted by Lymis on
No, Brian’s distinction has a lot of merit. First because it is true, and second because some of you are missing a critical distinction: what people do with their bigotry.
Bigotry is always wrong, granted, but there is a big difference. Quietly living your life, letting your bigotry affect your own choices of friends and activities, and approving or disapproving from the sidelines (“even to children like that”) on the one hand. On the other hand is taking your show on the road, especially with a national pulpit, and actively working to harm the people you are bigoted against.
There really is a difference between “not wanting your sister to marry one” and joining a group that puts on hoods and burns crosses, terrorizes people, and in all too many cases, murders them.
There really is a difference between feeling that gay people are making bad choices and doing something creepy, and setting up local and national organizations to change laws and Constitutions to permanently deny them things everyone else gets.
There also really is a difference between being uninformed about the facts of something you don’t particularly feel affects you, like the truths about the lives of whatever “them” you got going, and actively spreading lies and misinformation once you actually do have access to the information. There is NO possibility that the professional bigoted pundits have not been presented with access to the facts that discount their lies, and yet they continue.
In short, there is a big difference between ignorance (however willful – “I just don’t like thinking about things like that”) and deliberate, informed malice.
posted by Tony Esposito on
Sorry, Brian, but your grandmother was a bigot. To say that she was not a bigot because she was taught to hate by her elders is lame. I was raised a bigot but when I was old enough to think for myself, I was not. And it wasn’t a difficult transition. Apparently, for your grandmother, it was. A bigot is a bigot. Until, of course, you grow up. But most people never do.
posted by Patrick on
In regards to Mr. Dreher’s claim that half the country can’t possibly be bigots, I’d have to point out that half the country went to war to preserve their right to own other human beings.
Pretty much sinks that argument, don’t you think?
posted by brian levine on
Part of any reasonable definition of bigotry is belief that groups of people are inferior in the face of objective evidence to the contrary. Part of the reason we call people who believe that people are inferior due to their race or sexual orientation bigots is that we now have a large body of scientific evidence that this is not true.
In your grandmother’s time, objective evidence was unavailable and belief in inherent racial differences, i.e. bigotry seemed to be a reasonable explanation for racial differences.
In other words, give her a pass.
posted by Emrys on
Before declaring our present selves unbigoted, we need to live another hundred years and then time travel back to our current generation and reassess our thinking. We homo sapiens are continually redefining ourselves.
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