I was talking to a cousin of mine the other day. He obviously felt safe with me, and at some point he said something terrible about Muslim people. It was not criticism of Islam, or of a government, or of an ideology, or of the behavior of particular people. Those things can be discussed and argued about like anything else. He said something dehumanizing about Muslim people as a group.
I felt uncomfortable immediately. I also hesitated to tell him how awful I thought it was, because I could already see how it would go. He would defend it. He would give me examples. He would tell me about something he had seen or heard or lived through, and none of it would answer the actual problem, which is this. How did the behavior of some people become permission to strip the individuality from millions of people he has never met?
So I told him. I said, you just described a billion people you have never met, and you know better than that. He got defensive, exactly the way I knew he would, and he started in with the examples, and I let him finish and then I asked him the question I really wanted to ask, which is the one below.
Bigotry is almost too small a word for it, but it's still a useful place to start. The bigot takes a characteristic or a behavior or a belief that belongs to some members of a group and applies it to the whole group. Sometimes the observation underneath the prejudice even contains a piece of truth. Maybe some members of that group really do behave that way. The failure comes when we turn some into all, stop seeing individuals, and then hold one group to a standard we would never hold our own group to.
If I see ten people from one group behave badly and decide the group is bad, what happens when I see ten people from my own group behave exactly the same way? Do I condemn my entire group, or do I suddenly rediscover individuality and say, those are just ten assholes?
That inconsistency is the whole thing, and it's worth sitting with.
It also exists on a spectrum, and we shouldn't pretend otherwise. There is a difference between noticing that someone is unfamiliar to you, feeling uncomfortable around them, holding a stereotype about them, actively disliking them, and finally dehumanizing them. Those are not the same act. What matters is what you do with the first reaction.
Because the first thought that enters your mind is not always one you chose. It may have been installed years ago. It may have come from fear, or from experience, or from your family, or from hearing the same thing repeated until it sounded like a fact. You are not responsible for the arrival of that thought. You become responsible the moment you can see it.
And that's a much more interesting question than deciding who is a bigot and who is not.