If you are a white person who would like to treat black people as equals in every way — who would like to have a set of associations with blacks that… - Malcolm Gladwell
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If you are a white person who would like to treat black people as equals in every way — who would like to have a set of associations with blacks that are as positive as those that you have with whites — it requires more than a simple commitment to equality. It requires that you change your life so that you are exposed to minorities on a regular basis and become comfortable with them and familiar with the best of their culture, so that when you want to meet, hire, date, or talk with a member of a minority, you aren’t betrayed by your hesitation and discomfort. Taking rapid cognition seriously — acknowledging the incredible power, for good and ill, that first impression play in our lives — requires that we take active steps to manage and control those impressions.
Malcolm Timothy Gladwell (born September 3, 1963) is an English-born Canadian journalist, bestselling author, and speaker. He has been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 1996.
Biography information from
Wikiquote·
Portrait adapted from
Wikimedia Commons, PEN American Center (CC BY)
Success is a function of persistence and doggedness and the willingness to work hard for twenty-two minutes to make sense of something that most people would give up on after thirty seconds.
If suicide is a coupled act, then Sexton’s character and pathology should be only part of the explanation for what happened to her. The same is true for Plath. Her friend Alfred Alvarez believed that too many people have painted her as “the poet as a sacrificial victim, offering herself up for the sake of her art,” and he’s absolutely right. That distorts who she is: it says her identity was tied up entirely in her self-destructiveness. Coupling forces us to see the stranger in her full ambiguity and complexity.
We think we can transform the stranger, without cost or sacrifice, into the familiar and the known, and we can’t.
