How to persuade people to turn away from bigotry?

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So broken down into its bigoted or not bigoted parts ...And apolgize for actually sounding naive ...but am thinking it IS a necessary Lesson, that should be imbued into all younger peoples minds from childhood . Similiar to medical training
" Under the Skin" we are all just tissues and organs . And most human anatomy is similiar . And emphasis on the word humans . Regardless , we are all just humans . It is the things we accept into our brains that are mostly what makes us , different . Could go on and on on this concept and particulars . But I think ,perhaps this maybe a easily understood idea .

^
I think it might help a bit to teach that kind of thing in schools, along with critical thinking skills, but when a kid's parents have other ideas, I suppose it might be the parents who win. My first school tried to Christianise me, but they failed because my parents didn't try to do anything of the kind. Similarly, I doubt a school would be able to wokeise a kid if their parents weren't already woke. Not that I'm knocking wokeism.

As I see it, there's a problem here - if your values are about compassion, that kind of rules out taking kids off their parents by force, and if that isn't done, then those compassionate values can't be very effectively put into the kids' noggins.

The left has always had to fight the right wing with one hand tied behind its back in that kind of way, which probably explains why it loses so often.

Yep, the Sharrif experiments in the 1960s (jigsaw classroom) funded to study whether integrated classrooms would reduce bigotry/prejudice showed the biggest impact on alleviating prejudice young people pick up from mum/dad is being asked to spend time with people of a different race to complete tasks.

therein lies the problem in the US, segregation (both enforced and setup through deliberate housing policies and intimidation and persecution of black families) have largely kept most white kids across the US from ever meeting a black kid until they enter the workforce. Even in integrated schools, black kids either tend to be a minority and/or socially tend to mix with other kids from their own local neighbourhoods. Effectively social apartheid. Any wonder most white Americans still carry archaic views of black people.

It's not just America. In Australia if you walk onto any university campus students tend to drift into their own ethnic groups. Social stratification happens. In the US its just accentuated due to past history.

then it becomes like social studies, most kids learn for the sake of grades and then forget. If you go to a typical American school which is largely all-white school (with maybe Asians and a few hispanics) teaching them about African-Americans is like teaching these kids a geography/hisory class, about some people who live far far away and a long time ago. they largely learn about black people from the internet.

When I was in high school in the mid-late 90s, we learned a good deal about African-American history. This is considering that at the time, history classes just glossed over many things (due to a change in teacher and the differing paces of the teachers, I ended up not learning about WWI until college).

My schools in the UK never taught me any history beyond 1700. If I'd picked it as a special subject instead of science it might have been different. But times have probably changed. I remember the Tories trying to get the history teachers to talk more about "great heroes of British history," but the teachers told them there was no such thing when you looked into it.

Yeah bigotry often needs role models to compare contrast providing ammunition for the aforementioned bigots to denigrate said groups. So in the US and UK "heroes" of the past (empires, warriors, inventors, explorers and settlers) are often invoked who the bigot will enthusiastically connect themselves to as if they carry the genes of greatness despite doing nothing of note in their own lives.

I notice a lot of people from thee UK romanticise the Anglo-Saxons and Vikings as some type of mythic heroes of the past but know little of the brutish short lives these people lived, the bloodshed they spilled, the lack of technological advancement, literacy or the living conditions in a typical viking or Anglo-Saxon village. then more modern heroes aren't so romantic or heroic when you dig into what they actually did, what they believed or how they achieved their success at the expense of others.

Many of the tories are "toynbeeists", toynbee believed in manifest destiny of certain cultures who evolved in a crucible of hard environments to be more intelligent and sturdy and therefore natural selection favoured them over cultures who lived in bountiful plentifulness along the equator and insinuates the latter were indolent and needed more "advanced" peoples (like the English) who out of the goodness of their own hearts bought culture and civilisation to them. A kind of natural order of things.

Plenty in the wellspring of propaganda for the would be bigot to draw from.

Transphobe Has TOTAL Change of Heart After Hearing Trans People’s Stories: “I’d Like to Apologize” on the YouTube channel The Humanist Report, Mar 21, 2025:



From the description on YouTube:

^^^ Many individuals are on a mental journey. It may sound like this elderly man was entirely swayed by listening to stories, this is certainly an important step on the road of deradicalization and bias training but its not the beginning or the end.

Hearing stories about de-radicalising racists, all have in common that they first had to go through a period of self-doubt asking themselves questions about their own beliefs. this can take months or even years.
two things need to happen
1. Self doubt feeds motivation
2. Motivation is needed to be receptive to listen

I think this elderly man was already on his journey. It would not have been easy if for decades he was conditioned to internalise beliefs about gay and trans people. Casual bigotry is reinforced by the social environment. His journey is not over. His best friends/family/co-workers continue to transphobes (highly likely) then he needs to think about if he publicly claims he's had his "road to Damascus" and is enlightened about trans experiences but privately he still finds trans jokes funny or continues to privately embrace and enable his friends beliefs.

that's why I said his journey is not over. Imagine being in an high school and all your peers are basically casual bigots who hold negative views about people of colour, gay/trans and most common, negative views about people who are neurodivergent. Carrying different views means openly challenging your racist, homophobic, transphobic or ableist peers. But that means a lonely and stressful existence. So you conform to social norms. that's why high school is a hotbed and a factory for churning out bigots.

It takes more to deradicalize your mind than watching a couple of YouTube videos. I think the elderly man was already receptive to hear the message, but only after some lived experience involving self-reflection. Now he needs to continue that journey and it requires some time/space away from an environment that perpetuated his previous bigotry.