In Defense Of Prejudice Analysis

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Judging a Book by its Cover “In Defense of Prejudice”, the author Jonathan Rauch, indicates that it is foolish to believe eradicating racism and other forms of prejudice is possible. The article describes the war on prejudice as the “most uncontroversial social movement in America”. Universities, work places, newsrooms and Capitol Hill have declared anti-discriminatory policies in an attempt to eradicate prejudices. The majority of society believes that the elimination of prejudices will make society fair and safer for the minorities. Jonathan Rauch declares himself as not racist in spite of the fact that he is a strong believer in not eradicating prejudices. He describes and promotes the idea of Intellectual Pluralism, which permits the expression…show more content…
Society is immensely focused on eliminating prejudice words since it is believed they are violent. Eliminating words is not an easy task when context comes into play. Huckleberry Finn can use a word prejudice against African Americans and not cause as much controversy as the very utterance of the word by stranger. The author speaks about a memory on a subway when he over heard a group of teenagers using a derogatory term against homosexuals. He explains the fear he felt when he heard the term since he was homosexual himself. He felt threatened and targeted immediately upon hearing this word. In time he realized the teenagers using the word did not even notice his existence. It was then Jonathan realized that it is not the prejudice words that are dangerous; it is the violence the stereotyped to represent. Jonathan explains that the time and energy wasted on sorting out these various contexts and then trying to eliminate the words takes away from actually eliminating physical violence and criminals. He describes the tactic of eliminating derogatory words as a scapegoat for actually stopping violence on the

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