Prejudice grows most lethal when embedded in a harmonious total-design narrative
Evidence
However repulsive the quoted sentence may sound, “it is importantly less objectionable than the sequence of sentences within which it is deployed.” The sequence, Ricks points out, “is a more insidious incitement to prejudice than any single sentence.” Prejudice is most powerfully itself when expressed in “plausible processes of corrupted reasoning, by the disguising of a non-sequitur” (Ricks, 1988:41). Indeed, it is only when anti-Jewish sentiments are riveted in an enticing vision of a total, harmonious design, which the Jews allegedly disturb and prevent from implementation, that old Judeophobia turns - at least potentially - into modern genocide. It is only the admixing of resentment of “the other” to the gardener’s self-confidence that is truly explosive. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 415
Categorization
Category: Causal Relationships
- DEEPTHINKING: The claim that prejudice becomes genocidal only when fused with a gardener’s totalizing vision is a dense, paradigm-shifting framework about how ordinary bigotry escalates.
- SEED: An essay angle: how modern rhetoric embeds dehumanizing premises inside appealing visions of order, cleanliness, and harmony rather than open hate.