There’s the Good, The Bad, The Ugly, & then,there’s the rest of us.
You can be a tribalist and still have close friends from the tribe you hate.
A man can be a misogynist, even if he has a mom and sisters be loves; or female friends he's fond of.
A woman can hate men and still desire to have a romantic relationship with a man, or be married; & this holds even if you have beloved brothers.
You can be a racist but have close friends from the race you detest; or desire to relocate to the country occupied by people of that race.
You can be a religious fanatic and have good friends or a love interest from the religion whose worshippers you'll gladly annihilate in a second.
One can be a paedophile and still run the largest philanthropic project for Children in the country.
We've seen all these scenarios play out over and over again, throughout history.
Basically, people can be any one of these vices: misogynistic, tribalistic, men-hating, racist, fanatic etc and still sustain some harmless measure of interaction or even relationship with products of their hate.
The human mind has the uncanny ability to compartmentalize, and hate is not always defined by instant revulsion or dissociation from those we hate.
Whenever people want to dismiss an allegation of being xenophobic, racist, misogynistic, tribalistic etc, they are quick to mention how those claims are impossible because;
They have brothers/sisters at home, they have Black/Asian/White friends or their favorite colleague in the office is Igbo/Hausa/Yoruba or from so-so country.....
Or their ex was a Christian/Muslim.
Unfortunately, none of these serve as proof of the absence of an existing prejudice because humans are a complex race of people and our emotions are a convoluted web of both the explainable and the un-explainable.
Also, we can consider ourselves to generally be good people, yet still sustain some of the most dehumanising biases against others not of our kind.
The same holds true for people we love or respect; some of the people we all hold in esteem have character palettes more textured than we know.
We often think of character flaws via a monolith perspective of black or white. So, if we know someone to be good to us, we can't imagine them as wicked to others.
Realistically speaking, very few people are either black OR white. Most have whites in their black, or blacks in their Whites.
The Jewish doctor who treated Adolf Hitler’s mom considered the war monster to be a sweet soul. On the other hand, Gandi was repeatedly reported to be intensely racist.
Gaddafi was considered a power-drunk dictator by the West, but many Libyans swear he was the most benevolent leader.
On the other hand, Mother Theresa was referred to as the angel of death by people who worked close to her as reports of the poor conditions of her homes surfaced, despite the huge amount of money she raised; plus, it has been reported that while she raised more than $30 million for the poor, only 7% of the funds were actually used for the poor.
While she is the image of charity globally and was even canonized by Pope Francis 1 in 2016, she was famously connected with questionable figures like Charles Keating who was eventually convicted of fraud and racketeering, and she defended Jesuit priest, Donald McGuire who was convicted of sexually molesting multiple children, asking that he be reinstated to ministry after he was initially removed.
But this article isn’t even about any of these popular figures. It’s about the rest of us; the entire sum of humanity.
You can consider yourself to be a good person, and still sustain a bias untenable with your general bearing.
And I’m not talking about people who are intentionally deceitful, or knowingly sustain duplicitous personalities.
I’m talking about how the best of us, the most random amongst us who would generally consider ourselves to have a healthy approach to life, can lack self-awareness and sustain blindspots in areas that are significant to others.
