Unex­am­ined big­otry does­n’t go away. It just changes form and lives on in some sort of “social­ly accept­able” face. One of the most ubiq­ui­tous forms of mod­ern big­otry is the glar­ing dou­ble stan­dard.

We’re NOT “past all that” when it comes to priv­i­lege, mar­gin­al­iza­tion, and oppres­sion. Racism lives on. Misog­y­ny is in resur­gence. The LGBTQ+ com­mu­ni­ty is being active­ly leg­is­lat­ed against. Any­one who says that we ARE past all that is prob­a­bly try­ing very hard not to exam­ine their own behav­iors, atti­tudes, and beliefs.

Big­otry does­n’t real­ly go away with­out a lot of intro­spec­tion and ongo­ing effort, but it does change form. And while it’s no longer social­ly accept­able to spew slurs and Archie Bunker-inate the coun­try­side (although you might be sur­prised the places and con­texts these days where peo­ple are per­fect­ly will­ing to say the qui­et parts out loud), big­ots seem to be aware that there is a slight­ly more… diplo­mat­ic face for their prej­u­dice. “It’s not about X,” they assure you. “I care a whole lot about this issue that is NEXT to big­otry.” And then peo­ple who haven’t real­ly unpacked the sys­tem­at­ic and sys­temic ways their atti­tudes and beliefs impact mar­gin­al­ized com­mu­ni­ties par­rot the same thing.

I’m not mak­ing a val­ue judge­ment as to the results of the actions of these two groups, but one group is smirk­ing and dar­ing you to try to prove what they “real­ly feel in their heart of hearts” (while they think they’re slick and get­ting away with some­thing), and the oth­er group just has­n’t done any real self-analy­sis. But they both per­pet­u­ate harm and give ground cov­er to the oth­er. And fac­ing the work­ing end of these “big­otry-adja­cent” issues does­n’t real­ly feel any dif­fer­ent if it’s com­ing from a big­ot or a clue­less sta­tus quo defend­er.

How­ev­er, this shit is piss-easy to spot, and no one who thinks they’re slick is real­ly get­ting away with any­thing.

It’s the dou­ble stan­dard.

The dou­ble stan­dard betrays what’s real­ly going on.

While they’re busy try­ing to con­vince every­one that their motives are so unim­peach­ably pure, they are not notic­ing that they have clear­ly missed a thou­sand exam­ples of the thing in sit­u­a­tions out­side their big­otry.

Whether it’s every cliché, poor­ly writ­ten white guy by the hun­dreds that they let go past them with droopy eyes to sud­den­ly jump up, rabid and wild-eyed, to rant that they’re no racist or sex­ist, but they real­ly just care SO much about the writ­ing of a woman of col­or… or whether it’s het­ero­nor­ma­tive romance after het­ero­nor­ma­tive romance that goes unre­marked upon, but sud­den­ly the slight­est hint of an LGBTQ+ char­ac­ter is “shov­ing” sex and sex­u­al­i­ty “down peo­ple’s throats”… or whether it’s the inabil­i­ty to under­stand the labyrinthi­an con­fu­sion sur­round­ing the gram­mar of sin­gu­lar they, which sud­den­ly goes away when it’s being used on some­one who does­n’t have a bina­ry appear­ance.

Most of the expres­sions of this issue dove­tail with writ­ing because rep­re­sen­ta­tion mat­ters, but I’ll put the posts them­selves here under “Social Jus­tice Bard” because they are the mod­ern face of big­otry and the cam­ou­flage of choice for will­ful disin­gen­u­ous­ness.