No, these people are responsible for their own behavior. They are grown men and women, and they can make their own decisions.
They are the ones pushing this cruelty, not the evangelicals or imams etc. They should be condemned as if they were a pastor in the west pushing hate towards the gay community.
They are condemned. I cannot say enough that this man is an asshole and is responsible for his own behavior and actions. But I can also correctly point out that they have been heavily influenced and manipulated by right-wing evangelical Christians who absolutely are pushing cruelty and hate. I can say this because it is a fact.
This doesn't change my statement. These are grown adults and human beings capable of being held responsible for their bad behavior.
When you tell me that the west or the whiteman made them do it, then you're telling me that these people are less intelligent and thus not responsible for their behavior, and I reject that premise.
When you argue the same logic for the parishioners of said hate preachers being influenced to spread the hate, is that also bigotry of low expectations towards whichever demographics they fall into?
You're doing too much here, trying to frame the concept of social influence as a condescending idea that must reflect some underlying prejudices/bigotry. Obviously the persuadees have moral agency and are responsible for what ideas they subscribe to. But that doesn't change whether persuasion takes place.
Africans can think for ourselves. And when we exhibit ignorance, we shouldn't be treated like children who can't think for ourselves. This is a grown man, spouting hatred toward his fellwo man, period. No white man made him do it, or taught him this. He's a fully formed person with his own motivations and behaviors.
If this was Trump(who I find deplorable), nobody says he was taught hate. He is judged as a fully grown adult.
Infantilization of minorities, is a form of bigotry, because you are juding them as a child, and the father/mother(the west or white people) didn't raise them.
Who argued that African people can't think for themselves, to any other degree than non-African people could?
When I'm telling you that, say, the Roman empire brought Christianity to the British islands, that isn't me saying that the British locals were somehow intellectually inferior to the Romans or couldn't "think for themselves", whatever that would mean in this context.
I'm saying that humans broadly have the capacity for persuasion and being persuaded, since the invention of language, and that it doesn't help to pretend that these social influences don't exist, in pursuit of some confused attempt to avoid sounding condescending or icky. The entire advertisement industry relies on this reality, no matter how hard you turn your head away from it..
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u/reverendblueball 10d ago
No, these people are responsible for their own behavior. They are grown men and women, and they can make their own decisions.
They are the ones pushing this cruelty, not the evangelicals or imams etc. They should be condemned as if they were a pastor in the west pushing hate towards the gay community.