There ARE bigots in the world, many of them in the United States. I am not going to make the uneducated and uninformed Ann Coulter response and say "...well I don't know any racists, so there aren't any..." because I can say rat, I have known racists. I have known them. And my sin, (my "bigotry" if you will) was remaining silent in the presence of true racism.
I am not going to get into the details of my work history beyond saying that from age 18 to age 22, I worked (full time) in a warehouse to pay my way through university. I worked full time on two different shifts (transitioned from the 3rd shift to the 1st shift) and transitioned from picking and shipping TO filling and receiving. And in doing so, I got to know many warehousemen on both shifts all of them many years, (in some cases, decades) older than me. And the guys on the nightshift were the newbies who were only working temporarily for the company whereas the guys on the day shift were the "lifers" (in a prison sense.) All except me, because I eventually graduated university.
Of the lifers, these guys were pretty much all white, all Irish, and (most of them) hated black people. They hated them. They had NO USE for them, none. N1--er this and N1--er that, rat, I heard that every day from these guys. Fuck that n1--er. I heard it so much, I turned a deaf ear to it. Now remember, I was a very young adult there, just a much older kid. I was a big kid, they couldn't physically muscle me but I was still intimidated by my co-workers. They were very union and they would have worked together to alienate me if I had said anything to management about their racism. And they were openly racist (there were no blacks on the day shift) so they would joke about it all the time at break. I couldn't believe what I was hearing day in and day out.
But I said nothing. I remained silent. And I left and never came back to that place.
Point it this, there are REAL bigots out there in the world. Real ones. And the ones who DO judge someone based on nothing other than skin color, well, these people don't generally take offense to being called bigots. The guys in the warehouse, they were openly and happily racist with one another. They bragged about it, laughed about it. They never took offense, they took PRIDE in their racism. I didn't hate them for it rat. Instead, I felt sorry for them. I felt sorry for them because this was going to be their life and there was no one that was ever going to cure them of their ignorance.
But I still have a sin of bigotry. My sin was remaining silent in the presence of racism (tolerating it) out of fear that I would get my ass whooped or (if not that) alienated by the lot of them.
