Social Cohesion, Race & Identity

Who the heck would want to be like Betty or her ad man ex, Don?

That's what I asked myself recently when I passed a Banana Republic window display featuring the retailer's new "Mad Men"-inspired clothing collection.

"Are you a Betty?" read a poster with a lustrous photograph of a thin, blond model looking almost as uptight and miserable as the former Mrs. Draper in the Emmy-winning AMC television series.

What's wrong with this picture: Even as the world is becoming increasingly interconnected and interdependent, we seem to be approaching conflicts more in zero-sum terms and with all-or-nothing politics.

Because digital networks and the global economy have humans more tightly bound than any time in their history, our well-being is inextricably intertwined with that of strangers from around the globe.

How would the American right have responded had Anders Behring Breivik been a Muslim? Luckily, we don't have to guess. In the immediate aftermath of Friday's terrorist attack in Norway, conservative Washington Post blogger Jennifer Rubin did us the favor of simply assuming that he was a Muslim. She then used the attack to denounce lawmakers who in the name of deficit reduction favor "huge cuts in defense" and to lambast President Obama for suggesting "that we can wrap up things in Afghanistan."

For nearly half a century, the term "inner city" has been code for poor and minority. But now white flight — the decades-long trend of affluent Anglos leaving the urban core for leafier suburban cul-de-sacs — has run its course. And "inner city" is about to take on a whole new meaning.

Terror came home to Norway on Friday. A bomb was detonated near the prime minister's office in Oslo and a gunman attacked a political youth camp on the island of Utoya. In the end, at least 87 people were killed, a nation was traumatized, and the world was again riveted by a terrorist attack experienced indirectly, but in real time, on television news reports and in 140 character bits via Twitter.

Mexican food and beer. That's what retired Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor suggests might pull this fractured nation back together again. Those were the tools she used to reach consensus in the 1970s when she was a leader in the Arizona Legislature.

"White Americans See Anti-White Bias on the Rise." That was a headline in the Wall Street Journal this month, and more than any other domestic index or statistic, it's that sentiment that should worry you about America's future.

While many commentators saw Barack Obama's election as signaling the emergence of a post-racial America, it might one day be seen instead as the symbolic moment all Americans became minorities.

The fourth-grade teacher in Virginia who performed a mock slave auction in her classroom April 1 — with the white kids pretending to buy and sell the black kids — was duly chastised by school officials for her racial insensitivity. Given that she meant to be giving a lesson on the Civil War, she should also have been scolded for pedagogical inaccuracy.

Since Libyan leader Muammar al-Qaddafi's Green Book was published in three installments -- in 1975, 1976, and 1978 -- every Libyan child has had to study it in school; but many, perhaps most, Libyans make fun of it in secret. Western analysts have tried to tease out the book's logic on governance, searching for clues to the intellectual influences on Libya's eccentric strongman, but this is perhaps an overly optimistic endeavor.

It could have been a historic teaching moment. Instead, President Obama, the most famous mixed-race person in the world, checked off only one race — black — last year on his census form. And in so doing, he missed an opportunity to articulate a more nuanced racial vision for the increasingly diverse country he heads.