A Canon in Racism

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A Canon in Racism Having spent my entire youth in the Northern Michigan region, I will admittedly say that I have not been exposed to a wide range of diversity. However, I proudly consider myself open-minded and accepting of other races and beliefs. Whether it is due to my parents’ worldview or simply the many hours my siblings and I spent in our younger years playing tag and Nintendo with the neighbor boy who happened to be of mixed race, racial discrimination or bigotry have never been active thoughts in my mind. A deep down hate for any race for reasons of color or religion is something that I just cannot comprehend. Until just a couple of days ago I was going through life thinking I was perfectly color blind. When researching for this essay I visited the suggested website in Malcolm Gladwell's essay, www.i-a-t.org (implicit association test) and was rated, to my surprise, as moderately prejudiced toward the black race. Yet my prejudice is subconscious, uninformed, and rarely if ever expressed. If I am “moderately racist”, I came to an important question (if only for my peace of mind): how should I (and others) judge my prejudice? In Gladwell’s essay, “Defining A Racist”, Gladwell is questioning on what grounds racially provocative comments should be judged. He proposes three criteria, Content, Intention and Conviction. Through these criteria, Gladwell focuses his disapproval on racial speech that is specific, spoken with malice, informed and thought out. With these considerations in mind, he judges bigotry in the written word most harshly of all. With that caveat aside, he continues on with his dissection of racist speech. In the Content criteria, Gladwell explains “...that hate speech is more hateful the more specific it is” (158). For example, calling a certain race a “name” is less racially hurtful than making a specific, groundless claim.
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