I am so amazingly frustrated by my student’s papers.Honestly, they are worse than the papers they turned in earlier in the semester. I’m not kidding. One of the paper topics was on an article by Kwame Appiah called “Racisms.” Its a nice little paper that tries to lay out exactly what is wrong with being a racist. He isn’t just relying on the “it harms people” approach. He ends up claiming that sincere racists have a “cognitive incapacity,” which I think is straight comedy. He begins by talking about racialism, which is the belief that we have heritable characteristics that can be used to subdivide humanity into races. Stated like this, it isn’t obvious that this is bad; folks with dark skin are more likely to get a certain kind of melanoma, which is good to know if you are trying to avod dying of cancer.
Things get ugly when you start using this belief in racialism in order to make moral distinctions between races. This leads Appiah to differentiate two kinds of racists; intrinsic and extrinsic. An intrinsic racist believes that others, like them, have a higher moral value simply because they share genetic material. This is similar to the higher moral value we place on family members and though not necessarily bad it can lead to really bad behavior; I am more closely related to whites, so I only hire whites. Extrinsic racists meanwhile believe that other races have inherited certain morally deplorable characteristics; the Irish are drunks.
Great, everything is cozy. Only, a bunch of my students can’t seem to get this. Maybe, I’m a bad teacher, only I don’t think so. You understand Appiah’s position and I didn’t spend 2 hours explaining it to you. But check out this claim “Extrinsic racists are people that will listen to think logically or they will not so it should be possible to convince them not to be racists.“ What? No.
Back to grading.
I don’t know how you were able to respond “no” to that sentence or fragment of a sentence. I couldn’t even determine what they meant to say. Did you mis-quote your bad students paper?
Obviously your response should have been: Extrinsic racists are for a belief but only can realize the disuade to open their minds. Without they will not open to last continue for in mind.
Man, I wish that was me misquoting someone. The sad truth is that this is how well many of my students write.
Dr. Wagner, I’m not sure whether to be impressed or afraid that you can mimic this style of writing. I know I can’t, I’ve tried.
The thing is, I am fairly certain that I know what the student was trying to say. Appiah makes a distinction between those who are simply ignorant racists and those who are sincere racists. The ignorant racists are capable of seeing reason. That is, they can be convinced that their racist beliefs are wrong. The sincere racist, on the otherhand, has a cognitive incapacity. So, it should be possible to convince an extrinsic racist, through reason, not to be a racist. Or, you can’t and they are basically crazy. Only, I have to be extremely generous to get that idea out of what was written, hence the “no.”