Let me amend my statement: Not all racists are unreasonable or ignorant in a general sense, but racism itself can only persist through unreason and ignorance. Hence, anyone with racist opinions must necessarily have a piece of mental landscape with a sturdy fence around it, even if reason has free reign over the rest.
I appreciate you revising your statement, but I
still don't buy it. I just don't believe that if we were all Mr. Spock, in control of our emotions and ruled by logic, that we would suddenly be good people without prejudices or blindspots. As I said before, rational thinking does not automatically lead to empathy or attunement with others and their plights. This stubborn adherence to the supremacy of rational thinking is a concept I encounter over and over again in sf circles and it always perplexes me. To those of us who don't just blindly accept that everything can be fixed by thinking about it, it comes across as a quirky obsession. I sometimes wonder if this logic worship isn't a reformulation of that old Natur/Geist dichotomy, with the ideal being cerebral instead of spiritual. Wherever it comes from, philosophically, it is not something I am willing to take for granted as a given, and I've been offered no evidence that more rational beings are happier, more successful, better people, sexier, less racist, or whatever.
I also don't believe that thinking about one's own prejudices magically makes them vanish simply because they might be, under rigorous analysis, non-rational. Rational thinking is just as useful for rationalization as it is for self-analysis, and it's extremely difficult for the person doing the thinking to tell which one they are indulging in if they themselves are the subject (hello, observer bias!). I could probably go on, but I've already tackled this once, on the thread about rational thinking a few months ago. I didn't convince anyone that enshrining rational thought was perhaps a flawed approach to better understanding ourselves then, either.
P.S. I apologize for the thread drift, kmmrlatham.