Racism defeats education

hat history

You said:

What might be the religious equivalent of racism? About the best I can think of is "sectarian," although "cultist" is possible but would not incorporate non-believers. Many years ago when I was in the States I took a teenage Vietnamese immigrant girl to a place where they test one's English for English-class placement purposes, and in the room were also some large, extremely black, refugees from Ethiopia. She screamed in terror -- demons, demons -- and would not stay in the room. Was she a racist or just confused about what constitutes a demon (often in Vietnamese demons are often pictured as large and black much as in the States they are often pictured as red). No -- I don't think she was a racist. She was ignorant and superstitious, but this was overcome readily enough and now she gets along with black classmates just fine. Some people are different -- they are closed minded and tend to judge others (they are hypocrites if they also believe the Bible) and want to look down in some way (convince themselves they are superior) to pretty much anyone who is different from what they happen to be -- it can be race, nationality, accent, religion, politics, sex, sexuality, life style, economic status, even musical taste. This goes by the generic label "prejudice," although I think this too weak a word and we need something that conveys the wrongness and bad karma such thinking and attitudes involves.

ChatGPT said:

You’re circling something real here, and I think your instinct that “prejudice” is too thin a word is exactly right. It names the behavior, but not the moral deformation behind it.

On the narrow linguistic question first: the religious analogue of racism is usually taken to be sectarianism or religious bigotry. Sectarian captures hostility within a shared religious universe (Catholic vs. Protestant, Sunni vs. Shia), while religious bigotry covers hostility toward entirely different faiths. Cultist doesn’t quite work because it describes structure or origin more than attitude, and as you note, it misses non-believers altogether. Historically, confessionalism sometimes carried this weight, but it has softened into a neutral sociological term.

But that only scratches the surface, and your story about the Vietnamese girl makes clear why. What she exhibited was not a settled moral stance but a collision between inherited imagery and sudden sensory reality. That is fear born of symbolic confusion, not a doctrine of superiority. Racism—properly speaking—requires a belief in hierarchy or contamination, not merely shock or misrecognition. Once corrected, her reaction dissolved. That alone disqualifies it from being racism in any morally serious sense.

What you’re really pointing at in the second half is something broader and darker: a habit of soul rather than a single opinion. People who need difference in order to rank themselves above it. Race, religion, accent, politics, sexuality—these are interchangeable tokens. The underlying move is always the same: moral self-elevation through exclusion.

Several older words get closer to what you want.

Bigotry is stronger than prejudice and carries moral condemnation, but it still focuses too much on opinions rather than disposition.

Pharisaism (used outside Jewish contexts) once named exactly this: outward righteousness combined with inward contempt. It has fallen out of favor, partly because it risks unfair caricature, but conceptually it’s very close to what you’re describing.

In theological language, the most accurate term may simply be pride—not vanity, but spiritual pride: the conviction that one’s own standing, beliefs, or identity confer inherent superiority. Augustine and Aquinas both treat this as the root of other moral failures. From that angle, racism, sectarianism, and class contempt are not separate vices but different masks worn by the same one.

From a Buddhist-inflected perspective—which I know resonates with you—the closest equivalent is avidyā (ignorance) coupled with mana (conceit): misunderstanding the nature of self, then defending that misunderstanding by ranking oneself against others. That framing has the advantage of explaining why the behavior is not just wrong but karmically corrosive. It damages the perceiver first.

If you wanted a single modern term that carries real moral weight, you might call it exclusionary moralism or hierarchical contempt, but those are analytic, not visceral. English is oddly poor at naming settled moral smallness without sounding either clinical or shrill.

So I think you’re right: we lack a word that clearly says this is not just an error of belief, but a failure of character that harms both the holder and the world. Older traditions had that clarity; modern language mostly flattens it into “bias” and moves on.

If there’s any consolation, it’s that your example shows the difference vividly: ignorance can be cured by understanding; contempt resists it, because contempt is doing emotional work for the person who holds it.

You said:

It's a personality trait, this being a bigot. My mom seemed to think all the world's ills could be cured with education, but we need to see some people are bigots, some people are selfish, some people are superstitious, etc.

ChatGPT said:

Yes — and this is where your mother’s view, generous as it is, runs aground on human reality.

Education can correct false beliefs. It is much less effective at correcting character. A person may learn new facts and simply recruit them in service of the same underlying disposition. The target changes; the posture does not.

That’s why your phrasing matters. Bigotry is not primarily an epistemic failure (“they don’t know better”), but a temperamental orientation: a tendency toward suspicion, ranking, boundary-policing, and moral simplification. Such people often enjoy the certainty it provides. Education threatens that certainty and is therefore resisted or selectively absorbed.

You’re also right to resist collapsing everything into one mushy category. Some distinctions matter.

A superstitious person misattributes causality; once the causal story is clarified, the superstition may evaporate, as with the Vietnamese girl. A selfish person prioritizes their own welfare; that can sometimes be moderated by incentives or empathy. A bigot, however, derives psychological stability from exclusion itself. The out-group is not incidental; it is structurally necessary.

This is why bigotry is so adaptable. When one justification becomes socially unacceptable, another appears. Race gives way to culture; culture to “values”; values to “common sense.” The vocabulary shifts, but the emotional engine remains intact.

Older moral systems were blunt about this. Aristotle would have called it a hexis—a settled disposition. Christian moral theology would label it a vice of the will, not the intellect. Buddhist analysis would see it as clinging to a rigid self-concept that requires contrast to exist. Different languages, same diagnosis.

None of this implies fatalism. People do change. But they usually change through disruption, not instruction: personal loss, moral shock, sustained exposure that bypasses argument, or simply aging into a different emotional economy. Classrooms rarely do this. Life sometimes does.

So I think you’re right to insist on naming the difference. Treating bigotry as mere ignorance is not just inaccurate; it can be morally evasive. It absolves the person of responsibility and overestimates the power of explanation. Some traits are not cured by knowing better, because they are not caused by not knowing.

That doesn’t mean we stop educating. It means we stop pretending education alone is a universal solvent — and we become clearer-eyed about the kinds of human material we are actually working with.

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