This letter is in response to Allison Hight’s most recent column, “Chaos Theories: Opposing views inhibit middle ground”.
I suppose it’s telling about someone’s personal predilections when they entreat the reader to go about “exploring any legitimacy” a racist and religiously bigoted view, such as that put forth in The Ground Zero Mosque, holds. What legitimacy, pray tell, does blatant bigotry have?
Sorry, but some views just aren’t legitimate; one should take it as a given that racism and religious bigotry is always mistaken and always illegitimate. We don’t need to investigate hate speech for “truth,” and it’s sad that someone would think one needs to. The suggestion that we must or suffer missing something of value is nothing but offensive.
Does the author really expect us to be consistent in “exploring any legitimacy” opposing views might have and consequently survey, for example, The Myth of the Twentieth Century or The Protocols of the Elders of Zion in order to locate the supposedly existent “legitimate” nuggets?
Hight can go ahead and tell the victims of the Nazi extermination camps whose lives were snuffed out because of racism that she feels we need to have a respectful sit-down with proponents of the ideologies responsible for their deaths as part of her noble quest to find the “legitimate” core of their thought, just as she, a white American who is not affected by the bigotry of such films as The Ground Zero Mosque, feels at ease telling the Muslims and Arabs both at home and overseas who are abused and murdered each day because of the kind of bigotry propagated in that film that what we really need to do is listen to racists and Islamophobes. That in itself is an evil which dehumanizes the victims of human hatred.
The problem isn’t that those who speak with passion against the bigotry expressed in films such as The Ground Zero Mosque isn’t that we’re afraid of someone else’s views or their consequences for “our established identities” (or should we be uncomfortable with opposing racism?), but that we happen to dislike racism and bigotry, apparently more so than the author of this article. Racism and bigotry — which “fears of Islamic practice” obviously falls under, unless you’re in the ranks with Geller and Spencer or a token liberal apologist for anti-Muslim bigotry — just isn’t legitimate.
Passionate condemnations of the views such as those expressed in The Ground Zero Mosque stem not from insecurities or close-mindedness but from opposition to and deep disgust with racism and bigotry and the harms such sentiments have inflicted on Muslims.
Maybe it comes from personal suffering resulting from that very brand of bigotry or knowing and caring about those who have suffered so. But our white American author doesn’t need to worry about being victimized by this hate. No, she can entreat us all, insultingly, to seek out its legitimacy.
Hight ignores that perhaps someone other than herself has taken the time to seriously consider issues of racism and bigotry.
Further, perhaps some have concluded, and rightfully so, that having a pleasant sit-down with hatemongers in order to seek out the “legitimacy” that (according to Hight) dwells in their views and that treating their views as if they’re valid expressions in the sphere of public discourse in fact does little but enable racism and bigotry.
As much as it might pain Hight, in this case the truth is “one-sided”; the bigotry of persons such as Geller and Spencer is illegitimate, and there is no “middle ground” between bigotry and justice.
Stephen Pearson is a senior studying history.
