As a scholar of bigotry, it has been stunning to watch how easily the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has caused the masks of civility to fall from so many people and how easily the most unhinged rhetoric has fallen from their lips. Watching antisemitism and Islamophobia spill out onto the streets of the United States has been truly horrifying. But it has also been instructive, for those who have the stomach for it, to observe how bigotry works as a way of ordering the world.
Some people think of bigotry as a mental malady of the ignorant or as the character flaw of people they envision in cartoonish terms.
Some people think of bigotry as a mental malady of the ignorant or as the character flaw of people they envision in cartoonish terms: unkempt buffoons with heavy Southern accents in pickup trucks covered in Confederate flags; Christian fanatics carrying placards outside Pride events. While such people exist, professionals of all types are bigots, too. After all, the state-sponsored sadism that was Jim Crow and even the terroristic Ku Klux Klan were created by college-educated men. No one is immune to bigotry, no matter their race, religion, sexual orientation, gender or political ideology.
In my research, I have identified 20 rules of how bigotry functions as an ideology. Regarding the spike in antisemitism and Islamophobia in the wake of the Hamas-Israel war, here are two rules that are particularly relevant:
- Bigotry makes you immoral.
- Bigotry presents itself as philosophy.
The most obvious immoral argument that has arisen from this new outpouring of bigotry is the demand for collective punishment, which is a war crime. This bigotry stretches across the entire American political spectrum. We saw it from self-described progressives who responded to the killing of innocent Israeli men, women and children with “this is what decolonization looks like,” and we see it from self-described conservatives who respond to the killing of innocent Palestinian men, women, and children in Israel’s retaliatory bombing with some variation of the claim that there are no innocent Palestinians in Gaza. Each side holds the immoral position that collective punishment is not just acceptable but necessary.
A belief in collective punishment follows a belief that all members of a group can be held responsible for the actions, real and fabricated, of any member of said group. This is the logic of race riots, such as the ones in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1921 and Rosewood, Florida, in 1923, where white Americans murdered every Black man, woman and child they could find and destroyed thriving Black communities. It’s the logic that led to Japanese Americans being rounded up and placed in concentration camps after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor.
It’s the same logic that launched every pogrom against Jewish people in the history of the world and the harassment of Muslims after 9/11. Here in the United States — thousands of miles away from where Hamas attacked Israel and Israel invaded Gaza — Jews and Muslims are being harassed on the street and on college campuses because bigots hold them responsible for events happening on the other side of the world.
We can see how these two rules are manifesting themselves in the current public debates in Congress, in print and online over the unfolding events in Gaza. To be clear, neither being pro-Israeli or pro-Palestinian is bigotry unto itself. But what we’ve been seeing are bigoted individuals latching on to both sides of the debate to advance their own bigotry toward Jews and Muslims in general and Palestinians in particular.
Because bigots are aware of how morally repugnant their hatred is to others, they attempt to disguise it as something else.
Because bigots are aware of how morally repugnant their hatred is to others, they attempt to disguise it as something else, in this case as progressive or conservative political ideologies. This allows them to poison serious discourses and give the appearance of political conviction when their only conviction is to their narrow hatred of people they deem to be not as human.
Of course none of this commits the bigot to believing in collective punishment as a universal principle. Both conservative-masking and progressive-masking bigots will support collective guilt and punishment until whatever group they identify with is on the guilt and punishment end of the principles they previously applied to others. Bigots do not seek intellectual consistency and inevitably exempt themselves from the morally nihilistic universe they impose on everyone else.
Anyone can be a bigot if they choose to be. I emphasize choice here because one chooses to adopt or maintain a bigoted worldview. Knowing that, it’s incumbent upon progressives, conservatives, pro-Israeli advocates and pro-Palestinian advocates to show complete intolerance toward the bigots operating in their midst and not ignore it when it happens on their side of the political divide. The complete rejection of collective punishment is a logical place to start because if it is not rejected, then bigotry becomes normalized, and the unthinkable becomes possible. This is why the philosopher Karl Popper argued that a tolerant society must be intolerant toward intolerance. Every compromise with bigotry is a step toward bigotry.