There are plenty of highly-educated, highly intelligent bigots. Likewise, there are plenty of people with almost no education to speak of who are opposed to bigotry. Bigotry isn’t about education or intelligence, it’s far more insidious and rooted in our psychology. A lot of it is subconscious - we all have innate in-group bias, for example.
All of us are susceptible to bigotry, and the best way to prevent it is to be aware that you’re not immune to it and check whether your knee-jerk reactions are justified or not.
i should say educated in related issues. it’s demonstrable that even simple exposure to different kinds of people reduces bigotry.
people who are bigoted can be educated, of course, but most likely they won’t really know much about the people they’re bigoted against, even when they dedicate their life to thinking about them.
transphobes for example, barely think about anything other than trans people all day. they start transvestigating cis people as we’ve seen here.
I’m also not trying to suggest being uneducated automatically makes you a bigot either. some obvious hyperbole has been used.
Exposure doesn’t always help. Most people become less bigoted from exposure but a few double down on their bigotry and get worse. I guess it depends on where your bigotry comes from.
For example, I’m trans myself and don’t exactly pass. Despite this I’ve faced very little direct bigotry from people. The ones I’ve read as transphobic have all been very well-educated, including a woman with a Master’s degree in humanities who sounded a lot like mid-downfall JK Rowling. She’d clearly been exposed to trans people and the discourse in general, to her detriment.
Most reasonable people intuitively get respecting people’s wishes to live their own lives. It requires a certain amount of bad personality traits and/or indoctrination for them to believe the lives of others are a threat to them and want to intervene so I think there’s diminishing returns from educating people beyond basic explanations and a few quick etiquette rules of thumb.
There are plenty of highly-educated, highly intelligent bigots. Likewise, there are plenty of people with almost no education to speak of who are opposed to bigotry. Bigotry isn’t about education or intelligence, it’s far more insidious and rooted in our psychology. A lot of it is subconscious - we all have innate in-group bias, for example.
All of us are susceptible to bigotry, and the best way to prevent it is to be aware that you’re not immune to it and check whether your knee-jerk reactions are justified or not.
i should say educated in related issues. it’s demonstrable that even simple exposure to different kinds of people reduces bigotry.
people who are bigoted can be educated, of course, but most likely they won’t really know much about the people they’re bigoted against, even when they dedicate their life to thinking about them.
transphobes for example, barely think about anything other than trans people all day. they start transvestigating cis people as we’ve seen here.
I’m also not trying to suggest being uneducated automatically makes you a bigot either. some obvious hyperbole has been used.
Exposure doesn’t always help. Most people become less bigoted from exposure but a few double down on their bigotry and get worse. I guess it depends on where your bigotry comes from.
For example, I’m trans myself and don’t exactly pass. Despite this I’ve faced very little direct bigotry from people. The ones I’ve read as transphobic have all been very well-educated, including a woman with a Master’s degree in humanities who sounded a lot like mid-downfall JK Rowling. She’d clearly been exposed to trans people and the discourse in general, to her detriment.
Most reasonable people intuitively get respecting people’s wishes to live their own lives. It requires a certain amount of bad personality traits and/or indoctrination for them to believe the lives of others are a threat to them and want to intervene so I think there’s diminishing returns from educating people beyond basic explanations and a few quick etiquette rules of thumb.