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…
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