Liberal sympathy can conceal the same reductively suspicious logic it opposes

Evidence

The liberal Claire, who up to this point has stood out in defense of the committee’s original selection of Mo’s design, here exposes the assumptions underpinning her interrogation: that there is a difference between Mo and the rest of “us” and that Muslim opinion forms a “continuum”—apparently with the qualities of a conveyor belt to terrorism—along which adherents of the faith obviously position themselves. For all Claire’s initial sympathy, her classic liberal position here is revealed as both reductive and self-serving. Mo responds to these sallies with a combination of flippancy and sarcasm, before making the salient point that other architects have not had their work judged by reference to their cultural background. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 286

Categorization

• XREF: Directly usable for reading Naqvi’s Home Boy, where self-consciously liberal Manhattanites extend conditional sympathy to the Pakistani narrator while holding him to a suspicious Muslim stereotype — the ‘continuum to terrorism’ assumption is the same move Changez faces in interviews.
• DEFINE: Naming what ‘contest versus quietly reinforce’ looks like at the level of characterization: Mo and Claire are written as symmetrical self-caricatures, which complicates who is being indicted.