LAWRENCE — American popular culture tends to think of bigotry as the product of ignorance that can be cured by increased education. But what if popular culture is wrong? A University of Kansas professor has written a new book that takes a deep dive into the topic of bigotry and how it functions in a critical, nonpartisan way.
“On Bigotry: Twenty Lessons on How Bigotry Works and What to Do About It,” by Nicholas Ensley Mitchell, assistant professor of curriculum & teaching, comes out July 10 from Bloomsbury Publishing.
“I say in the introduction this book will not teach you to win an argument,” Mitchell said. “If that is what you are looking for, then this book is not for you. Why? Because arguing with bigots is useless. We already know what they are going to say: You’re inferior, and I’m superior.”
Instead, Mitchell said, the book can demystify bigotry for people.
“I think for people who experience bigotry as either a victim or as someone bigots try to convert to bigotry, it is truly an assault on the mind that can be overwhelming,” he said. “What the book is trying to do is present bigotry in a way that helps people understand what they are encountering because you can’t truly resist an idea until you understand how it molds people, how it instructs people, how it defends itself and how it demands people behave.”
The book begins with a preface and introduction on Mitchell’s experience growing up in Louisiana and first becoming aware of bigotry during the gubernatorial campaign of David Duke, former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.
Mitchell defines bigotry as “the intellectual and moral commitment to the belief that the proper arrangement of society is one in which those deemed superior are allowed to harass, discriminate against, oppress and harm those whom they deem to be inferior, degenerate or threatening. Bigotry can be directed externally, toward groups to which the bigot does not belong, or internally, toward the bigot’s own group.”
Mitchell said that his writing has been guided by 11 assertions about bigotry, including:
- Bigotry corrupts everything it touches.
- No group is immune to bigotry.
- All bigoted behavior exists on a spectrum that ranges from the petty to the profound.
- Being a bigot is a point of identity in the same way that religion and politics are.
Mitchell said that he chose to write the book as a series of essays rather than traditional academic prose.
“If someone is going to do me the honor of reading this, I want them to enjoy reading it and get it the first time,” he said.
“On Bigotry” is divided into four parts with each chapter framed as a lesson. A researcher who studies curriculum theory and pedagogy, Mitchell emphasized in the book how bigotry is taught, not something people possess naturally. And anything that is taught has curriculum that can be analyzed.
Part one focuses on how bigots think about the world. The lessons examine how bigotry makes a person immoral, destroys a person’s ability to think rationally and how all forms of bigotry are intertwined.
“I look at how bigots think about the world and your — the subject of their bigotry — place in it,” Mitchell said of part one. “Bigots think it’s morally justified and required. It can destroy a sense of reason and logic to the point where it ignores anything that challenges their belief system. For example, if a bigot were to say women are inferior to men, they’d have to ignore the fact that women dramatically outpace men in degree attainment to maintain that belief.”
About all forms of bigotry being intertwined, Mitchell said, “If you were to say you hate white people, you are also misogynist, antisemitic, homophobic and more, because white people, like any other group, can be all of those. Bigotry is its own political ideology and economic order. Beliefs like racism, sexism, xenophobia and ableism are synonyms of bigotry; liberalism, conservatism and progressivism are not.”
Part two examines how bigotry teaches people to think. Mitchell further examines how no one is born with prejudice and how bigotry is taught.
About part two, Mitchell said, “Bigots are messed up on so many levels because they have been taught to ignore human suffering because the person suffering doesn’t check the right box on the census. No one is born this way. They are made this way. The hard truth is that all bigots begin as victims, and I use that word deliberately, of other bigots.”
Part three looks at how bigotry disguises itself. The lessons examine how the practice attempts to legitimize itself by adopting an official air of intellectual rigor to hide the deep-seated irrationality. Mitchell explores how bigotry presents itself as a philosophy, as a concern, whether for society or the so-called sanctity of a given race or class, and finally how bigotry presents itself as a science.
“Only the most galling bigots will present themselves as such,” Mitchell said. “For everyone else, they try to present their bigotry as something else because they are aware of how their ideas sound to ordinary people. Liberal, conservative, critical theory, colorblind — it doesn’t matter. Bigots will cosplay their ideas as anything that they think will work.”
Part four of “On Bigotry” tackles how the practice teaches people to act politically and how bigotry seeks to shift the Overton window to such a degree that society gives them the political power to solve both real and imagined problems the country is currently facing by convincing people that bigotry is simply another form of intellectual diversity among the other points on the political spectrum.
Mitchell describes bigotry as “a form of identity politics” with “a firm belief in a rather brutal and demented moral and political ordering of the world. When we understand bigotry as a form of identity and identity politics, then how it teaches people to act politically for the goal of winning the culture war becomes clear.”
The lessons examined in part four include how bigots take advantage of members of targeted groups who advocate for their own inferiority, how bigotry demands action from bigots, how bigots want people to think they are unintelligent and how bigots claim they are the true victims. The final lesson explores how bigotry cannot be disproven as bigots will always fabricate one more reason to justify their claims of superiority to drag their targets into debates over their humanity that drain them of the energy necessary to resist bigotry.
The conclusion retells a viral story, “the World is a Punk Bar,” about an incident where a patron of a punk rock bar watched a bartender refuse service to a customer. Thinking the bar is an open, accepting venue, the customer asks why the other was refused. When told the potential patron was wearing swastikas and other racist symbols, the narrator learns that the reason the bar does not tolerate racism from one patron is it could lead to that person returning with others who share the beliefs, which could further multiply until the venue is known as a racist-friendly bar. Mitchell asserts the story is a perfect metaphor for how bigotry takes over communities and why it is necessary to show complete intolerance for all forms of bigotry, regardless of who does it and why.
In the end, “On Bigotry” has seven suggestions on how to resist bigotry, including:
- Teach young people that bigotry is morally wrong.
- Reject tolerance of difference as a cultural goal and embrace the acceptance of difference.
- Embrace the audacious hope that things can be better.
“Bigotry has put society on what I call a highway of pain,” Mitchell said. “All we have to do as a society is take an off-ramp. The point of the book is I want people to recognize it and think about how they can react to it. The whole world is like that punk bar. You can’t let bigotry in.”