Why I don’t have empathy towards former bigots

I grew up in a very conservative, very religious environment, and for as long as I can remember, I have been pro-queer and pro-trans. I have always had a curious mind and have always questioned everything around me. To me, it made sense that if God created me, he wanted me to use my brain, and justice was derived from logic and reason. (I later came to learn that that school of thought is called rationalism.) I was ten years old when I started having questions about the existence of God. When we first got the internet at home, I was so excited to research and learn new things. I got so sucked into the world of discussion boards and online debates. I spent hours and hours researching. I wrote on blogs and online magazines. I became a leftist when I was about 15. My friends made fun of me, telling me that I will grow out of it. My dad told me that I was brainwashed by Marxists.

My sister came out to me before I even came out to myself, and I was the first one in our family she came out to. She told me it was because she knew she could feel safe with me. Ironically, just a few years earlier, she had been arguing with me over my beliefs on LGBTQ rights.

There was a very brief time when I tried to be homophobic, which is when I pretended to be religious—and I really mean tried, because I didn’t actually believe in it, because it felt deeply dissonant with my conception of ethics and justice. I just thought it was what I was supposed to believe if I wanted to be religious.

I’ve never been able to relate to people who get sucked into their environments and have their beliefs shaped by them. Maybe it’s an autistic thing—it definitely is—but I’ve always been told that humans need belonging and community, and that that shapes their belief system, and that has always felt like a foreign thing to me, like I was an outsider learning about a foreign species, not something I have ever been a part of.

And yet I see people—fully grown adults—talk about themselves as if they were victims of manipulation because they got sucked into far-right ideology. I see people who want to convince others, and have maybe even convinced themselves, that it wasn’t their fault that they were racist, as if they slipped and fell and… oops, they were now bigots.

On one hand, I recognize that ideology is a social and cultural force, and that humans can be susceptible to manipulation. On the other, I reject the notion that that’s all there is to forming one’s beliefs, as if humans don’t have agency over their beliefs.

I can sort of understand if it were a child, or if these people grew out of their bigoted beliefs when they grew to become adults. That wasn’t my experience personally, but I can sort of get it. But for fully grown adults to hold bigoted beliefs, and then play the victim when they change their beliefs, I just don’t buy it.

Having your beliefs shaped by your environment might have been true in the past, but we live in the twenty-first century. If you have the ability to share your beliefs on social media, you have access to all the information you need not to have those beliefs.

I don’t have empathy for people who voted for a fascist three times and after the third time decided that “that wasn’t what they voted for”. Nor do I feel sorry for them because people aren’t embracing them with open arms, praising them, forgiving them. Frankly, I think voting for a fascist—three times!—speaks to their character. Even if they no longer support fascism, by their own admission, they are people whose beliefs are easily swayed, people who might very easily fall for the next fascist who appeals to their self-interest.

I want to be clear that I’m talking about people who voted for fascism as an example. What I’m talking about applies to all kinds of bigotry.

If you used to be a bigot and now you aren’t anymore, the first thing you need to do is stop playing the victim. Stop feeling sorry for yourself. Stop telling yourself that you were manipulated, brainwashed, lied to. Because we’re all exposed to the same lies, the same propaganda, but many of us are able to see them for what they are, and yet you want us to believe that you weren’t able to. You were either wilfully evil, or you chose to give up your agency. And if really want to move forward, if you really want to grow, you need to stop giving up your agency—stop seeing yourself as the victim—and take accountability for your past beliefs. Anything less than that makes you not a former bigot, but a dormant bigot. If you don’t hold yourself accountable, if you keep telling yourself that you were “manipulated” into being a bigot, I don’t trust that you’re not going to be “manipulated” into being a bigot again, and again, and again…