A book that could save lives: Adam Rutherford’s How to Argue with a Racist reviewed

In the award-winning musical Avenue Q, filthy-minded puppets sang about schadenfreude, internet porn, loud sex, the uselessness of an English literature degree — and racism. Or, more specifically, they sang about the ubiquitous human habit of

stereotyping people by race:

Everyone’s a little bit racist, sometimes.Doesn’t mean we go around committing hate crimes.Look around and you will find,No one’s really colour blind.Maybe it’s a fact we all should face.Everyone makes judgments…Based on race.

The puppets were right: everyone makes judgments based on race. Humans are lazy creatures who like mental short cuts. Thinking in shades of grey is more effortful than thinking in black and white. Evaluating a new person afresh, based on their unique characteristics, is slower than falling back on a ready made judgment. If you’ve spent time with a two-year-old, or if you’ve used psychedelic drugs, you might have glimpsed what it’s like to see an individual blade of grass as itself, and not just as an exemplar of the category ‘grass’.