About an hour or so ago, thepaperpilot made a blogpost named “Prejudice on the Left”, talking about how many leftist “figures”, so to speak, still fuck up when it comes to defending groups they ostensibely stand to defend. In particular they bring up Graham Platner being given a pass for sexual harrassment and nazi ties, and the heavy misogyny that surrounded Amber Heard’s trial.

Leftist online commentators have been accused of harassment, defended zionism, and made countless remarks dismissive of the marginal communities they fight for. Point being that being a progressive doesn’t free you of the prejudices you’ve internalized. We all have our political journeys.

And… yeah, agreed.

I think a lot of people on the left think they’re free of prejudice because they, themselves, have experienced prejudice. They divide the world into oppressors and victims and obviously place themselves on the right side of that equation. This isn’t something unique to the left, Elif Bautman famously commented how “everyone thought they were dumbo”, but it is important to point out in the case of a political alignment that seemingly stands to be more aware of social biases and prejudice.

I have a few different beliefs on why this may be. The first and most obvious is that they just want to give themselves an excuse to not have to think too hard, the equivalent of “how can I be racist? I have a black friend.” Bigoted is seen as something You Are, and something you Choose to Be, rather than a descriptor of actions you take, making them not bigots because they don’t choose to be. No hard thoughts to think, parachute for your mind.

A different, slightly more layered reason, is that they may believe that experiencing bigotry is a “lesson” of some kind. I see this sentiment a lot around Israel: “How could they do this? The people who experienced the holocaust, and they learned nothing from it!” Because a massacre is a teacher, you see, it is a way to be taught a lesson in humility. The bullets are a coincidence. To be less of a snippy shit, my point is that suffering teaches you jack shit other than to be afraid for your own life. If you look at the history of actual holocaust survivors, you see many of them learned the lesson of “I can’t trust any of you fuckers” and exactly because of that incentivized the founding of a state where they won’t be attacked for being jewish. The lesson wasn’t “this mustn’t happen to anyone,” it was “this mustn’t happen to me”.

Maus has a pretty funny, if painfully real example. The comic (which, if you haven’t read, I cannot recommend ENOUGH) is the true story of the comic author’s father surviving the holocaust. The story is told through the lens of humanoid animals to represent how heavy race was to every social dynamic at the time. The jews are mice, the nazis are cats, the germans are pigs. The story switches between telling us the story of the father, and the (then-)current day where the author is speaking to his father and helping him do chores and the like.

In one of the modern-day sections, they pick up a hitchhiker, and the father has… choice words on the decision.

In general I see a lot of people look for excuses to be vile to other people and be allowed to. Typically the excuse is that they are “punching up”, even if they’re kicking someone who’s already down in their stomach.

Everyone thinks they’re dumbo.