Summary Of Malcolm Gladwell's Troublemakers

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Malcolm Gladwell’s “Troublemakers” is an article in which he explores the way societies make generalizations. Malcolm explains how Ontario has banned pit bulls due to a boy being attacked and people viewing that one example to be enough to distinguish all pit bulls as vicious and bloodthirsty. He goes on to employ that all dogs even resembling pit bulls or that have some pit bull mixed into them have been banned as well, because anything that looks like a pit bull has now been deemed dangerous for the people in that society. Not only does Malcolm point out other ways societies generalize people, like racial profiling a terrorist, but he distinguishes how steps could have been taken to eliminate the threat of the pit bull but it seemed to just …show more content…

Another word for generalization is stereotyping or profiling. Malcolm points out how the New York City Police Department started sending officers in to the subways to do random searches of passengers bags, to look for terrorists, due to the transit bombings in London. The police commissioner says they have a policy against racial profiling but then how are they picking out which peoples bags to check? The police commissioner explains how making a generalization based off of looks is incredibly useless. Not only did the 9/11 hijackers shave to look American but the London bombers were all of a different ethnicity and couldn't be easily picked out of a group based on looks. Profiling is seemed as inefficient because terrorists aren't stupid and show up looking exactly how you assume they would, because clearly they would be profiled by everyone who sees them. So, in turn, anyone could be seen as a terrorist if someone profiles them but we don't ban people of the same ethnicity as a previous terrorist, society might not completely accept and trust them but they don't ban them. How then could we look at a pit bull and just assume that it is a brutal killer. Generalizing, or profiling, has so many holes in it. No one can truly look at someone and see what they are like. Profiling them just makes a social gap between people and creates

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