Okay, first and most importantly, if you’re old like me, you’ve probably already read the title to the tune of the old Dr. Pepper jingle. If you’re not that old, here’s a link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jvCTaccEkMI (and yes, that is David Naughton, of American Werewolf in London fame). Also, now you’re probably gonna have that stupid song stuck in your head. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!! You’re welcome.

Secondly and probably much less important is this: A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a post on the advantages of acceptance over tolerance, and one of the comments I got was from a very nice woman who is very tired of all the bashing people by accusing them of being racists, bigots, etc.

She was making a very good point that it is entirely possible to dislike someone based entirely on their personality, and that doesn’t necessarily make them a bigot. It is a point on which she and I agree.

However. I also don’t want anyone thinking that I believe we should accept bigotry, in any of its forms: racism, sexism, homophobia, etc. I want to be clear that I believe that that stuff is not okay.

The problem is that we’re all bigots, in one way or another.

In all fairness, if you’re like me, you live in an area where it’s easy to believe you’re not bigoted. I mean, in my personal circle, everyone is pretty much just like me. We’re all white, middle- to lower-middle class, moderately educated, Christian (at least nominally), rural, straight, patriotic, and reasonably conservative (even me, although I’m more of an Eisenhower era conservative).

It’s easy to fool myself into thinking that, yeah, I’m one of the good guys. I don’t hate/dislike/distrust black folks, Asians, Muslims, Hindus, Catholics, LGBTQ folks, women, immigrants, asylum seekers (by the way, those two are not the same thing) hard-core rednecks, dazzling urbanites, rap music artists, owners of small dogs, or even Baptists.

The thing is, I can’t really say that if I don’t have to live it fairly regularly. Just because I like Aretha Franklin, have gone to a Black barber, and drive through the north side of Richmond with my windows down and my doors unlocked doesn’t actually make me not a racist. It just means I’m not unreasonably afraid of them.

Lemme tell you a little story: A few years ago, in one of my college literature classes, the discussion turned to why do we have to read all this weird stuff like international literature, stuff we would never normally read.

In my standard, bull-in-a-china-shop way, I mentioned that I have never liked reading books by women. I had forgotten that I was sitting in a class full of very feminist women, four of whom sat right behind me, and all of whom were in much better physical condition than me. If it hadn’t been for the diplomatic skill of the Professor (shoutout to Dr. Steven Petersheim!), I’d never gotten out of that room alive.

Eventually they calmed down enough that I could get to the point that I was trying to make (getting to the point is sometimes a problem for me, in case you hadn’t noticed), which was that, with the accidental exception of Andre Norton (who I didn’t realize was a woman until recently) when I was a kid, I’d always avoided reading books by women BUT, thanks to being forced to read novels by Doris Lessing, Jean Rhys, Willa Cather, Zora Neale Hurston, Elizabeth Gaskell, Buchi Emecheta, Ama Ata Aidoo, and others, I’ve learned to really appreciate female writers. That appreciation has led me to voluntarily read books by Margaret Atwood, Shirley Jackson, and others.

I would never have discovered what I was missing had I not been “forced” to read those books. The same goes for international writers: I’ve always been a very American/Eurocentric reader. If it wasn’t written by an American or a European writer, I wasn’t going to ever read it.

But college also opened up the world of international literature for me, and I’ve really enjoyed reading works by Salman Rushdie, Chinua Achebe, Aravind Adiga, and others.

Even so, before you start patting me on the back about what an unbigoted reader I am, I have to confess that I’m much more likely to give a neew male, American/European author a chance than I am to try a new male/female international author, or even a female American/European one.

Now I know that I have a lot of bigotries and biases about things other than literature, it’s just that, being a word guy, that was a bigotry that became pretty obvious to me, and even that came as a surprise. It’s the ones you don’t notice because they’re never really put to the test that are hard to find.

Getting rid of bigotries requires a constant effort, and (I think) that those bigotries we’re least aware of prevent us from enjoying and understanding much of the world around us.

I think that the trick of getting rid of bigotry is not to point it out in others (after all, the most bigoted are pretty obvious about it, even proud of it, and therefore easy to avoid), but to look for it in ourselves and work diligently and perpetually to root it out of ourselves.

One of the things that I try to do is whenever I see something that I don’t understand, or that bothers me, I ask myself why it bothers me, and whether it is really something worth being bothered about. That goes for the excessively tattooed, the really low-hanging jeans crowd, the abundantly pierced, the ear-gauged, the all-of-the-above group, along with the carrying a gun everywhere including church crowd, the clearly-not-thinking-about-what-their-latest-Facebook-post-says-about-them corps, etc.

Usually, it turns out that I just need to get over myself. I think we could all stand to do a lot more of that. Maybe the verse should go “Judge yourself before you judge others,” although I’m pretty sure that there are several other verses that cover that territory (something about a log in your eye rings a bell).

Anyway, I guess I’ve beaten that dead horse enough. Also, good luck getting that stupid Dr. Pepper song out of your head. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAH!!!!! Some things never stop being funny.