When bigotry is, and when it isn't

Several weeks ago the State of Arizona passed a law aimed at illegal immigration, which has so excited the sensibilities of educated America (NB: not just liberal America) that it has provoked calls for boycotts of the state, and I think maybe even the baseball team. We're all properly outraged by those rednecks living down there in Phoenix and Tucson. They didn't celebrate MLK's birthday either, you know.

Okay, so the people of Arizona are bigots (not all of them, prolly. Just the middle-aged white Republicans.) Where it gets weird is when we pass over the ocean a few days later, and the Prime Minister of Great Britain gets caught, on what he thought was a dead mic, calling a middle-aged women from the Northern English town of Rochdale a bigot. This "gaffe," as the newspapers are now calling it, is so serious that Labour's support has cratered in the days since it was aired. "How dare you diss Mrs. Duffy? That's my aunt," reads a headline in the London Times.

Now, it was true that Gillian Duffy didn't actually tell Gordon Brown that he should make all immigrants carry their papers on them at all times, and allow police to stop anyone who they thought was in the country illegally. What she asked him, essentially, was why he wasn't doing those things. But Gillian Duffy is not a bigot. Or at least, it's wrong to accuse her of being a bigot. So why is that?

I offer three possible explanations:

1. Brown's comments fit the classic Kinsley-esque definition of a gaffe, which is when a politician accidently tells the truth. In this case, the truth would be that Duffy is a bigot, only you're not supposed to say so, and especially not during an election.

2. Arizona voters are bigots, and Duffy is not, because white Southern Americans are probably all racists, if you scratch them hard enough, whereas white northern English working class people are all salt-of-the-earth miners and miners' wives who spend their spare time singing "The Red Flag" in their rocking chairs, waiting for the tea to boil, knitting scarves for the strikers.

3. Gillian Duffy is not a bigot because she is a person. She clearly has done some good in the world. She is worried, understandably, about where the money is going to come from to pay for her living expenses now that her husband has died and she is on a pension. She's worried about crime, because she is old and feels threatened. She is worried about education for younger people and the world that her grandchildren will inherit. Whatever her views on immigration, she is more than that. The Arizona voters, on the other hand, are simply the Arizona voters. A big, amorphous bloc of people with no personality or face, with the exception of the noxious Republican governor who signed the bill into law. They can safely be demonized because we don't actually have to answer to any particular person for doing so.

I like all of my explanations but I like the last one the best because it gets to the problem that critics of racism and bigotry have when they talk about racism and bigotry. Very few racists--at least, very few of the ones that I know, and I know quite a few--wear sheriffs' hats and walk around spitting tobacca' juice and swinging baseball bats and hitting colored people over the head just for their daily exercise. They are often otherwise decent people who are afraid, or who are busy and therefore don't care to think too hard about issues like immigration policy, and so some kinds of ready-made, handy explanations appeal to them. So they create stereotypes about who the problematic people are, and what needs to be done about them.

But they're not the only ones who dream up stereotypes, I don't think.