Usually when a person doesn't want to seem bigoted they say a phrase like the following “I don’t care if a person is black, white, purple, gay, straight, or whatever. All I care about is if they’re a good person.” this isn’t the super positive message of tolerance as it may sound. Imagine, if you will, that you’re talking to someone. You tell them about yourself in way of hobbies, skills, occupation, and the various things that make you up.

Now imagine they say that they don’t care. They don’t care what you like to do for fun, as a job, where you’re from, where you live, or basically anything you told them. True, comparing one’s race, sexuality, and gender orientation to hobbies and skills is a bit of a stretch. But the sentiment remains. You cannot claim to be compassionate or even tolerant, if you must ignore certain parts of a person.

All these things, sexual orientation, gender identity, race and ethnicity, religious identity, hobbies, and skills are components that make up a person’s identity. It’s what makes them them. Sure, when (some) people say the phrase, they mean it as they don’t hold negative prejudices to the aforementioned aspects of a person, and have no problems with them. But, more often, when people say it they mean to say just that they must turn a blind eye to those things in order to even consider someone a person, maybe even a good person. If you take a painting, strip its color, texture, and size; do you really still have a painting?

Artistic metaphors aside, if you must overlook these perfectly natural facets of a human being in order to consider them so, then you cannot truly consider yourself compassionate. You don’t have the right to pick and choose what parts of a person get to make up their identity, reducing them to their more basic traits. Now in no way am I suggesting that for every new person you may come across you must find out every little thing about them and throw a parade about it. Should a person reveal something to you, in whatever way that happens, then it is their right to decide what you can do with the information.

Really, it’s the phrasing that I have an issue with. The ambiguity it has allows those with no actual desire to be compassionate, to hide under a thinly veiled cloak of self-righteousness. As if not being overtly bigoted is the same as being a saint. Doing the bare minimum of not snarling hate-filled rhetoric hardly makes you a decent person. People say the “I don’t care if you’re…” line when they’re being called out on something, as a flimsy shield to stand behind to excuse whatever they’ve said. They think that saying they ignore intrinsic parts of a person’s identity is somehow a good thing.

If you truly consider yourself a compassionate person, then understand that it cannot stand on ignorance. People, for better, worse, or something in between, are made up of the sum of their parts. To deny the existence of those parts is a shade more cruel than hating them. Indifference is the root of some of the greatest injustices our world has seen. We are all different and we’re only going to get more so. To ignore and deny change, does more harm than good. And there’s enough harm in the world.