“I think it has a lot to do with our politics, and why certain segments of the population feel left behind. Mormonism gets criticized quite a lot. People say it’s a cult — and I’m not Mormon anymore, so I really have a dog in this fight. But I think of a cult as anything that maintains ideological purity by ostracizing members who depart from that purity. And I did experience more of that at Harvard and Cambridge than I did at BYU. I did feel like there was more of a culture of not being able to depart from the rules of what it’s OK to say. And that’s not to say that I think if someone is expressing a racist view, that we all have to just pretend like it’s fine — I think you should absolutely attack the idea. But I think we need to stop attacking the people.
But I think we need to stop attacking the people.
“I’ve had every kind of appalling view that you can imagine: I’ve had sexist views, I’ve had racist views, I’ve had homophobic views. And the only way that I was able to change my mind is that people let me express my beliefs, and they gave me an opportunity to hear myself say the words, and having that experience, I learned I never wanted to say those words again, actually. They weren’t really my words. They came from somewhere else.
“I’m just not sure there’s a real point to smugly kind of saying, ‘Well I’m very educated, and these people are very ignorant, and I’m better,’ because I kind of just think, if you had their life, you probably would have their views. I think that — maybe I have to think that I did have that life and I did have those views. Education I really believe is a privilege.
Education I really believe is a privilege.
It cannot be allowed to putrefy into arrogance, and we always need to be attacking the bigotry and the prejudice. But I don’t think we should be attacking people for not having an education that there’s no way they could possibly have had.”
-Tara Westover from an interview on WBUR on 12/31/18
