Mother Bones
I'm going to have to pull out my piece of the discourse again and say that bigotry is NOT a mental illness nor an intellectual disability.
It is a social. Ill.
And--wait!! I need some people to consider this seriously before jumping in with superficial arguments, because this is my field(s) of expertise converging, I am not just throwing this off the top of my head as of five minutes ago.
Flash Mob Of One
@_L1vY_ I don't know that I agree 100% with that, having been raised in a religious household. One's capacity to reason is strongly determined by their upbringing.
With that said, when you're grown and on your own, that changes significantly. I deconverted at 19, after one year out of the house. (Though it took two years for me to stop thinking about demons and Hell.)
On the point of feeling powerful, though, 100%. People love the power that various forms of control, including bigotry.
Mother Bones
TL;DR: People are bigots because it makes them feel better, not because they can't reason.
The REASON it is so important to separate these concepts. Is because. One of the ways bigots get people hauled off to camps, is to conflate mental illness / disability with wickedness in the mind of the public.
Because THEN people get more scared of someone with a developmental disability than of someone who is a "dapper" Nazi.
And then guess who suffers and is killed.
Mother Bones
People are not bigots because they cannot reason, but because they have learned to hate and have contempt on the basis of group membership.
Their behaviors and thoughts seem irrational because they are. Emotions are by definition not rational, and they are using an emotion state to drive their behavior. Because it benefits them and ultimately feels good.
That's why the way to counter it is to socially deflate that good feeling, the gratification resulting from acting on bigotry.
Mother Bones
And yes, there are socially constructed aspects of disability that would be GREAT to have social interventions for. It would help a lot. But it would lessen unfair disadvantages for the target population.
Social interventions for bigotry lessen unfair ADVANTAGES for the target population.
Mother Bones
A social ill requires social. Interventions. Group-level interventions.
Mother Bones
Second of all, bigotry is not a disability because disability is at least partly an individual condition that can often be successfully mitigated w/individual interventions (mobility aid, medication, glasses, PT, therapy, etc.)
Bigotry is a group-level, socially learned process that isn't effectively changed by individual interventions (like therapy).
For effective intervention it requires group-level interventions (laws limiting discrim. behavior, social actions like shunning, mockery, etc.)
Mother Bones
First of all, bigotry is not a disability.
In fact it is the OPPOSITE of a disability. It is a constructed process that promotes unfair access for the person who engages it, it does not reduce access or create barriers for them. It is to unfairly advantage them.
Also bigotry is a behavior and thought process that is learned. It can be unlearned. Most of the time people do not bother because unlearning is hard AND reduces unfair advantage.
Flash Mob Of One
@_L1vY_ That said, there are always the Benjamin Lays of the world, out there unable to gaslight themselves into believing the worst things, and then taking that perspective and making it very public.
So I don't totally buy the "they are a product of their time" mentality either.
Flash Mob Of One
@_L1vY_ Yep, it's complicated. I only insert that point to demonstrate that.
Mother Bones
@FlashMobOfOne Yes, so was I. A Christian Fundamentalist household with a Nazi adult in charge. I escaped with an intention to change and the unlearning takes painful decades. But the alternative is re-enacting it. 🤷🏻♀️
Flash Mob Of One
@_L1vY_ In an ideal world, that's how it would work, I agree.
Our species, for some weird reason, seems to have this instinctive need to mete out their trauma on the next generation.
I don't know why.
Mother Bones
@FlashMobOfOne We experience abuse, harm, and physical/mental injury in those systems (such as terror, anxiety, depressive shutdown, trauma, etc.,) and it is our responsibility as adults to learn not "pay it forward" by re-enacting it on others.
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