Extroverted Intolerance

Feel free to call me oversensitive (you wouldn’t be the first) and accuse me of having a serious case of confirmation bias going on, but it sure seems that these days, more and more people seem to be perfectly comfortable expressing their intolerant views and attitudes in public. You may have noticed it too.

Our research here at the Center for Respectful Leadership seems to support my gut feelings. Studies indicate that over the past few years there has been a measurable uptick of intolerant and disrespectful speech and behavior in public and in our workplaces, much of it tinged with hate.

In the US, typically, it has been directed at traditional minorities such as African Americans, Jews, Latinos, Asians, and members of the LGBTQ+ community. Other examples of intolerance skew along political and religious lines, with hate-filled screed flying in from the extremes, including some from the left, but far more from the religious and nationalist right, and the so-called alt-right (White Supremacists, Nazis, etc.), much of it laced with threats of violence and/or actual violence.

Recently, we’ve seen public school boards – school boards! – having their meetings disrupted by angry, screaming, and threatening mobs upset about everything from mask mandates, to books about the holocaust, to the mistaken belief that Critical Race Theory was being taught in middle schools (it’s not ) and that somehow it was teaching white children to hate themselves (it doesn’t ).

In early February , a Jewish student in Florida, driving by a group of Neo-Nazis yelling anti-Semitic slurs on a street corner in Orlando, was spat on, punched and pepper-sprayed by some members of the group after they noticed the Israeli flag on his license plate.

Last Fall, after an extraordinary rise in assaults on Asians in the US, Harvard University released a study indicating that nearly 25% of all Asian households feared being threatened or physically attacked.

And strangely, actor/comedian Whoopi Goldberg added to the pile of public disrespect when she claimed on ABC’s The View that the Holocaust was about “man’s inhumanity to man” and “not about race.” When she was challenged by a co-host who correctly pointed out that the Holocaust was driven by white supremacy, she countered, “But these are two white groups of people.” While she was wrong in the facts (the Nazis considered the Jews an inferior race), she was right in the perception by many that Jews are part of the same “race” as whites, as is explained intelligently here . She eventually and sincerely apologized but was still suspended by the network.

Sadly, the problem of public intolerance and disrespect is not limited to the US. In 2021, the UN Commissioner on Human Rights published a report and action plan with this deeply troubling conclusion:

“There is a rising tide of incitement to discrimination, hatred and violence against persons based on religion or belief, both online and offline, often fueled by radical nationalist politics. In the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, an upsurge in hate speech and discrimination targeted at Jews, Muslims, Christians, Baha’is and minority groups has been observed.”

Bottom line: bigots all over the world seem to be particularly emboldened right now.

By the way, those who claim that traditional majorities (in the US that means heterosexual, Christian, whites) are also the targets of bigotry and hate speech by some on the left are not wrong. But we cannot allow ourselves to be fooled by false equivalencies, according to the FBI and international police agencies, the overwhelming majority of public hate-speech, threats of violence and actual violence are coming from people who hold rightwing and far right views, not from those on the left.

I’m not going to go into the reasons (there are many) why this is happening. But I am going to say, and I think all reasonable people agree with me, that no matter who’s doing it, this behavior is not good. In fact, this trend, which I’m calling an explosion of “extroverted intolerance,” is deeply, deeply troubling. All decent, caring people who strive to live respectful lives – and I know there are many of you reading this - should know about it and be very concerned.

As we move into 2022, we at CRL will keep looking at this highly disturbing development and recommending tactics and strategies that individuals and organizations can take to stop it from continuing to metastasize.

Gregg Ward is the Founder and Executive Director of The Center for Respectful Leadership and the author of the best-selling, award-winning book, The Respectful Leader .