Ignorance knows no boundaries

A couple of years ago, I wrote a column for the IDS in which I satirically applied Religious Right, anti-gay rhetoric to the greek system. I criticized it as a "deviant, so-called alternative lifestyle" and warned against a "Hellenic curriculum" for elementary schools which would attempt to recruit "our children". At the end, I explicitly labeled it as "satire." In reply, I got one threatening anonymous phone call and one letter to the editor from a sorority woman cluelessly dissecting my essay point by point, as though it could have been meant seriously.\nThat much was fairly predictable. What I hadn't expected was that some of my, um, liberal friends and acquaintances would say, "Way to go! I guess you showed those fraternity snots a thing or two, eh?"\nFrom this I learned that many liberal and progressive people don't mind bigoted, Religious Right rhetoric, as long as it's directed at what they consider suitable targets.\nAt about the same time, OUT, IU's GLBT People's Union, developed a "Safe Zone" program involving stickers for office doors, assuring all who entered would encounter no discrimination based on race, sex, sexual orientation and the like. I thought it a cheap but harmless symbolic gesture until I saw the text on the stickers, "Bigotry, harassment and ignorance will not be tolerated."\n"Ignorance" will not be tolerated? That word stuck in my mind the way a popcorn husk sticks in your teeth, refusing to dislodge no matter how you worry at it with your tongue. Bigotry should not be tolerated, but it's open to considerable debate what bigotry is and how it can be identified. Such debate is part of what a university ought to be about. Harassment, which is easier to define and identify, should not be tolerated either. But ignorance?\nEveryone is ignorant. We are ignorant about different things in greater or lesser degrees, but everyone is ignorant about something. Ignorance is not "The Enemy"; Ignorance can be educated. Clinging complacently to one's ignorance is stupid, but you'll find just as much of that in the gay community, as I know from long and dispiriting personal experience.\nWhen the stickers first began going up, I expressed my unease to a few people, including staff at the GLBT Student Support Office, and found I wasn't the only person who felt that way. Ignorantly, I supposed that word might get around, and when the production of a new full-color version of the stickers was announced, I ignorantly dared to hope that the text had been revised. But my ignorance was swiftly corrected. "Ignorance" is still not tolerated by Safe Zone stickers.\nAm I being too picky? I don't think so. Those stickers are intended to encourage people to think before they speak, to pick words carefully. Most of us in our lives have found long, disowned sentiments coming out of our mouths, sentiments that lurk in the prepackaged thoughts with which language provides us. \n"Ignorance" on the Safe Zone stickers is notably ill-chosen. Ignorance is not in itself immoral. I coordinate the GLBT Speakers Bureau, and when we speak to classes or other groups, we expect to encounter ignorance. If we reacted to ignorant questions by self-righteously shouting "Ignorance will not be tolerated!" we'd be useless. My objections to ignorant, carelessly chosen words can be explained in a patient, sensible way ' just as I'm trying to do here.\nWhat do I think should be done? I'd like to see the word "ignorance" blotted out from the present edition of the stickers and removed from future revisions. Those of us who object to its presence can make our objections known, rationally, to the people who display them. The thoughtlessness reflected in the misuse of "ignorance" on the stickers undermines the honorable (although, I still believe, misguided) impulse that produced them.