Kristof on American prejudice toward the Muslim world

Kristof's essay ("Message to Muslims. I'm sorry." http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/19/opinion/19kristof.html) is, as always, perceptive. It resonates with a general tendency that we humans have to create broad categories, ignoring the variation. This comes with a cost: caricature and prejudice. We all do it.




What Kristof misses is the fact that other cultures turn Americans into caricatures. I would bet that if you polled a million Muslims, many would see Americans as imperialist, arrogant, selfish, God-loving, capitalists. And if you printed in the Iran Daily, on Ramadan, a picture of hundreds of Americans mourning the death of their families and friends on 9/11, wouldn't the Iranian population also protest, asking for balance? Americans are guilty of Muslim hatred. But sadly, we are not alone in our capacity to express prejudice, pigeon holing a heterogenous group of people into clones. And often, as social psychologists have carefully documented, our prejudices operate unconsciously.  Not only do we all harbor antagonism toward those who are outside our primary inner circle, but we often vociferously deny such attitudes.  What is necessary is a dialog between those in the sciences who have dedicated a life time to uncovering the nature of our unconscious biases and those in the fields of humanitarian efforts who attempt to protect those who are subjected to the harmful consequences of such biases.