Consider the following people:
- George is a circuit court judge in a large city. He is well-respected by his peers and highly involved in the community.
- Karen is an attorney who works as a criminal prosecutor. She is also involved in on the boards of several charitable organizations.
- Joan is a married mother of three beautiful children. She has a successful career selling real estate.
- Jeff is a pediatrician who works at a major hospital. He makes regular appearances on TV and radio, speaking out to advocate for increased awareness regarding children’s health issues such as lead paint, child obesity and the need for immunizations.
- Keith is a highly successful musician and the father of a young daughter.
- Sandra coordinates a government program that evaluates child development throughout a major metropolitan area.
- Sharon, married to a medical student, works as an assistant at a large law firm.
- Lori is a court reporter. Last year she married a career Air Force officer.
Do you have images of these people? I do, because I know them. They are friends of mine (I changed their names).
I would bet, though, that there are many people whose images of these accomplished people would change instantly if I told them a few more facts: Three of these people are African-Americans. Two are recent immigrants and the remaining three are gay. I know that learning these details might be difficult for those who would rather not associate with different-seeming others. After all, getting to actually know these people would make it difficult to make sweeping generalities about them.
And sweeping generalities must continue to be made, even in 2006. How do I know? Every few months, someone who doesn’t know me well enough assumes that I hold bigoted attitudes against anyone other than Caucasian heterosexual citizens. I am regularly told about “those gays” and “those black people,” as though we should (or could) meaningfully categorize people in such ways.
The derogatory comments I hear are not just whispered in the far corners of rooms. I force myself to listen to AM radio to hear the latest and greatest rants (I’d recommend this, on occasions, for anyone who wants to have a well rounded idea of what drives people’s thoughts). In the course of listening to AM radio I hear many talk show hosts blasting immigrants, gays and Blacks, painting them with unfair, derogatory and often shocking generalizations. The airwaves are currently bristling against anyone who happense to be an immigrant, even if a legal immigrant.
I am not easily shocked, but I was truly shocked when I recently heard unabashedly bigoted comments spewing out of the mouth of radio host Michael Savage a few weeks ago. According to Savage’s web site [1], he has ten million listeners. Apparently, this sort of hate mongering is acceptable to many radio license holders. Anything for a buck, right?
In my (limited) experience, the people who have the most ignorant and hateful attitudes against gays and blacks are the people who never have regular contact with gays and blacks. I’ve regularly spoken to people who lash out at gays, for example. When I hear this, I sometimes ask whether the speaker has any friends who are gays. I’ve never yet heard an affirmative answer. When I ask a racial bigot whether he or she knows any African-Americans, they invariably say something like “Sure, there’s a guy named Freddy in the mail room at work.”
It recently occurred to me that my own attitudes toward gays changed in the 1980s when I actually started getting to know gays as friends and acquaintances. Before I knew gays, I felt awkward and nervous about gays. It’s been many years since I’ve had that feeling. Looking back at my own experience, I can understand how someone who has no personal relationships with gays, minorities or recent immigrants might feel uncomfortable around them. Being uncomfortable makes it a lot easier to maintain distance from others that seem to be different. Maintaining distance makes it a lot easier to support legislation that deprives such folks of basic dignity and civil rights.
It frustrates me that those who are most in need of getting to know minorities work the hardest to sequester themselves out into the suburbs to minimize such exposure. I don’t pretend to know how to solve this issue. I wish I did though. It’s all exceedingly ugly.
Here’s a impractical thought experiment: how about a national labeling law? Let’s pass a law that requires anyone who makes a derogatory statement about a gay person, a black person or an immigrant on the public airwaves to immediately follow that derogatory statement with an additional statement, something similar to the following:
“I have___________gay/black/immigrant friends.”
For the worst offenders, I suspect the answer would be a small number, often zero.
Again, this is a labeling law. Just like we need to know how much trans fat is in a potato chip, we should be entitled to know the foundation (or lack thereof) for the insensitive and bigoted statements that we continue to hear on public airwaves in 2006.
The speaker’s failure to associate with the kinds of people he (or she) attacks can be used by listeners to size up the credibility of the speaker. If speakers claim to actually have friends whose status they are vigorously slamming, let those friends step forward to defend the attacker.
If speakers admit that they don’t actually associate with the types of people they are attacking, then we will at least have the satisfaction of knowing that such stations and hosts have actually labeled themselves for what they truly are: bigots.
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