I recently had a realization about a certain through line found across all bigotries while commenting on Robert Horvath’s tweet. This NAFO individual in the screenshot makes a statement that’s very similar to those I’ve seen since the start of the war. It’s always something along the likes of “maybe some Russians are good, but the rest of them are [insert whatever you want here].’’
What I realized is that I’ve seen this before, but in a different context. I’ve seen this when racists post a video of black Americans looting a store or assaulting random pedestrians. I’ve seen this when xenophobes post videos of Muslim immigrants harassing people. I even heard it once from an old white American man who told me about how he served with a black guy in the Army. The guys was nice, he liked him, but “it’s a shame about the rest of them.”
The same thing is happening here. A single example is being shown as an allegedly demonstrative piece of evidence that proves that they’re all like that. It’s not just one video showing specifically these black people committing this crime. It’s an insightful look into their true nature, you see. “These things are happening all the time, you know. Only some of them are caught on camera, but we know that there’s a lot more where that came from.” Switch to the other side of the pond and you get the same thing - here’s an admittedly awful act by a member of a group. Let’s take it and stretch it all the way across every member of that group, regardless of all other facts and circumstances.
And that’s the thing, there’s no facts that can convince a bigot to think otherwise. Their view is already made up; they’re all like that. You can show a racist both individual examples and statistics about millions of black Americans leading normal, middle-class lifestyles in suburbs just like the ones they live in, far away from the crime seen in supposedly representative videos, but it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter that most immigrants end up working jobs to feed their families, sending their kids to school to receive and education, and learning the local language and customs - their mind is already made up. Each piece of “evidence” that proves their bigotry is undeniable, any evidence to the contrary is dismissed.
I know this isn’t the most profound insight, many people have written in-depth on this phenomenon, but the reason it hit me so hard was that I finally connected the Russophobia I see online to other bigotries against other groups at a fundamental level. It makes it so much more disappointing to see Russians who call out hatred against themselves, against “collective responsibility,” as it’s commonly called, still engage in nearly identical behavior when it comes to, again, sharing videos of members of other groups behaving in awful ways, and smearing the entire group with an undeserved stigma.