ESPN's racist bluders

This scandal involves 2 incidents in which a "racist phrase" was both published and said over the air by ESPN employees. The phrase, "Chink in the Armor," was used to describe a loss for the New York Knicks after the uprising of Jeremy Lin's  fame. The men who said and published the phrase have maintained that they did not mean the phrase in any racist or negative way. Regardless, the company apologized for the statements and released their apology on their website found here. The issue is whether the statement deserved apology, by whom the apology should have been given, and whether the actions taken by ESPN were reasonable and satisfactory. The accompanying video found on that website makes the case for the side that argues that ESPN acted too quickly and the measures they took were too severe while also discussing the over sensitivity of race in America.

Critical Thinking

Important aspects of critical thinking are synthesizing, applying, and evaluating. These skills are important because in order to think critically you need to be able to come up with a wide array of ideas and then apply them to whatever problem or scenario is at hand and finally evaluate which one is the best. Evaluation is the most important of these three because it is what leads to the final result. It is easy to come up with a lot of ideas, they just will probably not all be good ideas. Evaluating which one is the best idea, without bias, will give the best result.

Another crucial part of critical thinking that the readings mentioned is that it has to be self driven and self disciplined. There is no point in knowing how to think critically if you don't force yourself do it and make sure you do it at the utmost quality. For really smart people, from my experience, this is a problem because they're used to always being right and just trust themselves to be right all the time and so although they do know how to think critically they don't always practice it. Practicing critical thinking, and having the drive to do it is what we should probably be teaching students in college but as a student, I know checking my work is boring so I don't know how well that would be received.