Bigotry - Do we have the right?

George Brandis has asserted that every Australian has a right to be a bigot.  

The question is whether we have the right to raise our children as bigots.

As a child growing up in regional Queensland in the seventies, i was exposed to a huge expanse of bigotry.  Racial jokes were a staple in the household, generally all centred around how 'black' people were lazy and make funny noises when you hit them with your car.  

The jokes didn't stop there, of course.  Women couldn't drive well, didn't know their place and generally had no useful purpose other than sex.  These are the cultural norms in which i grew up.

That's not to say that my parents were the worst proponents of this.  They were influenced by the social zeitgeist, and by comparison to some other family members were positively tolerant.

There's a point to this story.  To this day, as a forty-something year old highly educated man, who has traveled the world and worked with a vast spectrum of people, I still feel the influence of those times.  I catch myself thinking things that I would have heard in my childhood.

As an example, I recently saw a Holden Commodore with a dent down the passenger side, and a woman driving.  "That's what happens when you let your girlfriend drive your car", thinks I.  Top three logical issues with this thought:  1.  The dent was likely not done today; 2.  The dent was just as likely to have happened through no fault of anyone in that car; 3.  Why is that her boyfriend's car?

This story is that this is only the tip of the iceberg.  I have deliberately chosen a mild, but illustrative example.  As someone who has been trained to be a self-aware professional, I monitor and reflect on my own thinking processes.  And the truth is that there is some racist and sexist stuff in there from time to time.  I consciously reject it, but it's there, and i can't help but feel like that makes me a lesser person than i could otherwise be.

The big difference, of course, is that i never say it.  I never make racial and sexist jokes around my kids. Ideally, I'd prefer that they picked up as little of this as possible from the outside world.

And that's the point of writing this.  Bigotry limits our own understanding of and effectiveness in the world, because we cling to illogical assumptions.  

Whether or not you think that Australians have the right to be bigoed, we do not have any moral right to inflict these limitations on our children.  I do not want to see racism become an underlying thread in the cultural discourse, and it disappoints me to see a 'leader' in our society advocate to normalise this.