ABCDE OUTLOOK sunday, september 12, 2010 INSIDE


A time not to kill John Grisham vs. Virginia. B5


We don’t mind taxes Except the unfair ones. B3


BOOK WORLD, B6-8 Chimp change If our genetic differences are so small, why do humans rule over chimpanzees? B6


Team America Two authors explore the mythologies and pathologies of Washington at war. B7 If Mikey doesn’t like it A guide to cooking smart, healthy and easy — for a picky kid. B6


5 by Ted Koppel


Conservatism is not racist.


So why do people believe it is?


The false assumptions behind an old story of intolerance


by Gerard Alexander F


rom an immigration law in Arizona to a planned mosque near Ground Zero to Glenn Beck emoting at the Lincoln Memori- al on the anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, the contro- versies roiling American politics in recent weeks and months have featured an ugly undertone, suggesting meanness, prejudice and, in the eyes of some, outright racism.


And it is conservatives — whether Republican politicians, Fox News commentators or members of the “tea party” movement — who are invariably painted with that brush. There is power in the accusation of racism against conser-


vatives, one that liberals understand well. In an April 2008 post on Journolist, a private online community for liberal journalists, academics and activists that has since shut down, one writer proposed a way to distract conservatives from the campaign controversy surrounding the Rev. Jer- emiah Wright, Barack Obama’s pastor. “If the right forces us all to either defend Wright or tear him down, no matter what we choose, we lose the game they’ve put upon us,” Spencer Ackerman wrote. “Instead, take one of them — Fred Barnes, Karl Rove, who cares — and call them racists.” No doubt, such accusations stick to conservatives more than to liberals. It was then-Sen. Joe Biden, a Delaware Dem- ocrat, after all, who described presidential candidate Obama as “the first mainstream African American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy.” If a conserva- tive politician had offered such an opinion, his or her career


might have ended; Biden was rewarded with a spot on Oba- ma’s ticket. Liberal missteps on race and ethnicity are ex- plained away, forgiven and often forgotten, while conserva- tive ones are cast as part of a sinister, decades-long story of intolerance and political calculation, in which conservative ideology and strategy are conflated with bigotry. That larger story is well-known and oft-repeated — and, I would argue, vastly oversimplified and simply wrong in its key underlying assumptions. But its endurance explains why the party of Lincoln is so easily dubbed the party of Strom Thurmond or Jefferson Davis, and why many critics believe that an identity politics of white America now tilts conservatives against not just blacks but also Hispanics, Muslims and anyone else outside their nostalgic and mono- chromatic description of the American way of life. The narrative usually begins with Barry Goldwater oppos- ing provisions of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and with Richard Nixon scheming to win the presidency through a “Southern strategy” — appealing to the racial prejudice of working- class whites in the South to pry them away from the Demo- cratic coalition assembled by Franklin Roosevelt. In this tell- ing, bigoted Southerners were the electoral mountain to which the Republican Moses had to come, the key to the GOP winning the White House. Wooing them entailed much more than shifting the party slightly away from Democrats on racial issues; in return for political power, Republicans had to move their politics and policies to where bigots want-


race continued on B4


Gerard Alexander is an associate professor of politics at the University of Virginia and a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. His most recent Outlook article, on Feb. 7, was “Why are liberals so condescending?”


Girls don’t think pink. Boys don’t think blue.


by Wray Herbert A


bout halfway through this ir- reverent and important book, cognitive psychologist Cordel- ia Fine offers a fairly technical explanation of the fMRI, a


common kind of brain scan. By now, everyone is familiar with these head- shaped images, with their splashes of red and orange and green and blue. But far fewer know what those colors really mean or where they come from. It’s not as if these machines are taking color videos of the human brain in ac- tion — not even close. In fact, these high- tech scanners are gathering data several steps removed from brain activity and even further from behavior. They are measuring the magnetic quality of he- moglobin, as a proxy for the blood oxy- gen being consumed in particular re- gions of the brain. If the measurement is different from what one would expect, scientists slap some color on that region


DELUSIONS OF GENDER How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference By Cordelia Fine Norton. 338 pp. $25.95


of the map: hot, vibrant shades such as red if it’s more than expected; cool, sub- dued tones if it’s less. Fine calls this “blobology”: the science


— or art — of creating images and then interpreting them as if they have some- thing to do with human behavior. Her detailed explanation of brain-scanning technology is essential to her argument, as it conveys a sense of just how difficult it is to interpret such raw data. She isn’t


gender continued on B4


Wray Herbert’s book “On Second Thought: Outsmarting Your Mind’s Hard-Wired Habits” has just been published.


T


he attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, suc- ceeded far beyond anything Osama bin Laden could pos- sibly have envisioned. This is not just because they resulted


in nearly 3,000 deaths, nor only because they struck at the heart of American fi- nancial and military power. Those out- comes were only the bait; it would re- main for the United States to spring the trap. The goal of any organized terrorist at- tack is to goad a vastly more powerful enemy into an excessive response. And over the past nine years, the United States has blundered into the 9/11 snare with one overreaction after another. Bin Laden deserves to be the object of our hostility, national anguish and con- tempt, and he deserves to be taken seri- ously as a canny tactician. But much of what he has achieved we have done, and continue to do, to ourselves. Bin Laden


Reporting is such tweet sorrow: Chris Cillizza explains why Twitter had the Worst Week in Washington. B2


Let’s stop playing into bin Laden’s hands


does not deserve that we, even inad- vertently, fulfill so many of his unimag- ined dreams. It did not have to be this way. The Bush administration’s initial response was just about right. The calibrated com- bination of CIA operatives, special forces and air power broke the Taliban in Af- ghanistan and sent bin Laden and the remnants of al-Qaeda scurrying across the border into Pakistan. The American reaction was quick, powerful and effec- tive — a clear warning to any organiza- tion contemplating another terrorist at- tack against the United States. This is the point at which President George W. Bush should have declared “mission ac- complished,” with the caveat that un- specified U.S. agencies and branches of the military would continue the hunt for al-Qaeda’s leader. The world would have understood, and most Americans would probably have been satisfied.


But the insidious thing about terror- 9/11 continued on B5


Ted Koppel, who was managing editor of ABC’s “Nightline” from 1980 to 2005, is a contributing analyst for BBC World News America. He will be online Monday, Sept. 13, at 2 p.m. ET to chat. Submit your questions and comments before or during the discussion.


B DC MD VA B


myths about prostitution. B3


Even now, Muslims must believe in America


by Tariq Ramadan J


ust a short time ago, Europe seemed to be the part of the West where fears of Islam were most evident, with its bitter controversies over headscarf bans or the construction of mosques


in France, Germany, the Netherlands and Switzerland. Yet in recent weeks, Amer- ica’s relationship with Islam appears to have changed. The battle over a planned Islamic community center near Ground Zero in New York and the proposed burn- ing of the Koran by a Florida pastor have revealed similar worries, and journalists and intellectuals (including, ironically, European ones) have been quick to de- scribe the rise of Islamophobia in Amer- ica. Polls show that nearly half of Amer- icans have unfavorable views of Islam, and the fear of this faith in America is un-


deniable. But is it as simple as xenophobia and racism? I do not believe so. Natural and understandable concerns can be transformed into active rejection and open racism when political discourse and media coverage fan the flames for ideolog- ical, religious or economic interests. That is what is happening in America today. The great majority of Americans do not know much about Islam but none- theless fear it as violent, expansionist and alien to their society. The problem to overcome is not hatred, but ignorance. The challenge for Muslims in America is to respect the fears of ordinary people while resisting the exploitation of those fears by political parties, lobbies and sec- tors of the media. To meet this challenge, Muslims must reassess their own in- volvement, behavior and contributions in American society.


islam continued on B5


Tariq Ramadan, a professor of contemporary Islamic studies at St. Antony’s College at Oxford University, is the author of “The Quest for Meaning: Developing a Philosophy of Pluralism.”


BOOK REVIEW


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