Various forms of
bigotry are very often excused by saying that a person only became a bigot
after having a bad experience with (insert marginalized group here). But bad
experiences are not responsible for such beliefs, because the person in
question has most likely also had negative run-ins with those of dominant or
privileged groups and did not hold those groups responsible.
This judgment is
often made when a member of a persecuted population does something that
matches a stereotype. A white person who has been assaulted by a racial
minority could use that as justification to hate that ethnicity and say the
stereotypes are true, but odds are that they've also been attacked by other
white people, or known someone who has, and didn't decide that whites are
violent. I've known straight people who were sexually assaulted by gay people and
concluded that the gay community is mostly composed of rapists, but they don't
look at all the hetero folks who commit rape and decide that straight people
are sexual predators. I've known people who were cheated out of money by Jewish
individuals and used that as justification for anti-Semitism, but they've also
been swindled by plenty of non-Jewish peers and they don't associate financial
scams with non-Jews.
This is not at
all to say that a person from an oppressed group is justified in doing abusive
or otherwise unethical things, or that they shouldn't face social/legal
consequences for it. I'm saying that these behaviors are not due to their
minority status. (Certain behaviors may be connected to oppression, such as a
poor person who robs others out of desperation, but that's a topic for a whole
other discussion.) To develop bigotry toward a disadvantaged populace because
someone of that group has wronged you, you must have already believed
stereotypes about them in order to make that connection and generalization. A
person who does this while not holding dominant groups responsible for those
same actions, and not assigning overall blame to dominant groups, does so
because they see such people as the default—yet another example of their
preexisting unawareness of privilege.
