Imagine a girl who grows up with an abusive father that beats and abuses her, now imagine that same girl grows up and goes on to have dysfunctional relationships with men. Try as she may, she tends to attract the same kind of dirt bag over and over again. This basically describes my birth mother, who had many, many unsuccessful relationships with men for years. Yet, towards the last fourteen years of her life she managed to find one man with whom she had a successful relationship with who treated her like a queen. As her son, I have to wonder how easily she could have become bigoted towards men, as I think it’s easy enough to sympathize with such an individual in her shoes, who might tend towards radical feminism if you knew their history, even though you may not agree. Why not should the same not be true in other scenarios?

Truth be told I’ve been gnawing some thoughts about this topic, afraid to post because of my thoughts being “too far out there” or being seen as “defending bigots” but in reality, I feel like I have something to say about this. For the most part I do not believe in the year 2025 in a society that has never been as diverse as it is today, that most people who are raised by bigots maintain that influence throughout their lives. In fact, I think most of the time these opinions are formed by bad experiences and traumatic experiences as a result of negative interactions. Yet, like the example of a radical feminist who we may empathize with if we were to sit down and share a beer with our troubled female friend, we may see that bigots aren’t “bad”, but have been persuaded by a series of bad interactions.

It’s much easier to simply write somebody off as “bad” or “evil” because if we were to sit down and talk to them, we may realize that we can sympathize with a part of their pain and their story and if we could understand where someone was coming from who we thought was a bad person, then we would have to reevaluate what we thought about ourselves, and wouldn’t that be scary? We ought to consider the example of Daryl Davis who befriended Klansman and collected their hoods, converting them from their bigoted ways. Of course this is considered too radical of a suggestion. We should focusing on healing each other, not hating.