What is the standard for determining veiled bigotry?

[LoZoccolo]

A lot of times I see a person's words or actions pronounced to be "veiled bigotry" by somebody else. The use of the adjective "veiled" implies that it at least is not immediately apparent as bigotry, or it may even try to look like the opposite of bigotry. What, then, is your standard of determining if something is veiled bigotry?

[illinoisprogressive]

1. With me, it's sometimes just a bad feeling I get and know it's wrong

[LoZoccolo]

4. I find that's the best criteria for making an accusation against someone. n/t

[Solo_in_MD]

2. There is no rationale one. Everyone follow their own bias, some see racism everywhere others do not

[EST]

3. I find it useful, and generally accurate, to attribute the

"standard" to the unrecognized and undiagnosed bigotry of the accuser.
In most instances, the shortcomings one sees in others, unless patently obvious to all, are evidence of a mirror.
See sig line.

[noamnety]

5. I don't get your sig line at all.

"One creates as much pain in the world when one takes offense as when one gives offense."

The targets of hate crimes cause as much damage as the people committing hate crimes, unless they shut up about it?
People who have crosses burned in their yard cause as much much pain as those who burn crosses, unless they shut up about it?
Rosa Parks should have just sat in the back of the bus?

I am always impressed by the gall of those who are offended by anyone who challenges their right to be racist or sexist.

[TahitiNut]

7. We don't see the world as it is - we see it as we are.

What we find most intolerable in others is something we hate in ourselves.

[noamnety]

8. This sounds dangerously like "homophobes are all gay"

Sometimes people are just racist sexist classist assholes.

[TahitiNut]

9. Q.E.D.

:shrug:


“We do not see the world as it is. We see the world as we are.” ... is from the Talmud.
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%E2%80%9CWe+do+not+see+the+world+as+it+is.+We+see+the+world+as+we+are.%E2%80%9D&btnG=Google+Search

Seeing in another that which we hate in ourselves is a parphrase from the Bible ... motes, logs, and eyes.
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=You+cannot+love+or+hate+something+about+another+person+unless+it+reflects+something+you+love+or+hate+about+yourself.+&btnG=Google+Search

[EST]

10. And, if it is to be fixed, who does it and how?

Well spoken.
Reformed smokers and drinkers can be the worst nags in the world, unwelcome pigs at the wedding.
"Born agains," sexually and socially conflicted, intellectually dishonest self-haters, all cause way more trouble than we deserve.

Perhaps the most difficult of life's lessons is that of brutal self-honesty and it is absolutely the most gratifying. It seems so simple, doesn't it?

Oh, so difficult and slippery to get it that we really are the masters of our own universes.

[TahitiNut]

11. Doing the 'right' thing for the 'wrong' reasons can be as bad as doing the 'wrong' thing for ...

... the 'right' reasons, imho. We seem to find all kinds of reasons to attack one another. How can any 'reason' to attack other human beings be 'right'? We lose sight of the positives. Probably the most obvious example is the exhortation to "tolerate diversity." "Tolerate"? (This one just blows my mind.) I don't "tolerate" a weekend brunch buffet with a multitude of choices and a wide variety of taste treats. I revel in it. I don't "tolerate" the cornucopia of human diversity - a wide range of individually unique people each able to inform, provoke, amuse, and interact. I revel in it.

[gollygee]

6. I think it's bigotry with some perceived loophole

like if people say they're "color-blind" so what they're doing couldn't possibly be due to bigotry. Well, people aren't really color blind in that sense of the word. If someone says that, I'm suspicious of them.

Or if people say, "I have friends who are . . . ". That's perceived as some kind of loophole too - they can't be bigots because they have friends of the group about whom they are about to say something bigoted.

[Lurking Dem]

12. "Hollywood liberal"

used to be (often still is) a veiled term for Jew.

Consider the McCarthy hearings which went after so-called communists and socialists, many of whom were Jewish, in Hollywood. A number of them had served the US in WWII (over half of the U.S.'s eligible Jews), lost whole branches of their families and were being condemned as "unAmerican."

That one stuck for a long time.

The "well spoken" African American is another famous veiled phrase.

They give the people who state them an "out". You are left having to prove they meant it in a bigoted fashion and there is always reasonable doubt.