Whatever Happend to the Person?

Gerard Russell, of the Carr centre for human rights policy at the Harvard Kennedy school, hopes the Nobel Prize for Literature will go to a Syrian poet known as Adonis. Why? Not because his poetry is better than that of the other candidates but because:

The significance of honouring Arab poetry is obvious. It is the most eloquent and intellectually cogent response to those who belittle and malign Islamic culture; it shows that the Nobel prize committee is capable instead of seeing its depth and richness. What is reductively called "Muslim outreach" has become a dialogue only with clergy and politicians. A people can also be represented by their poets and their playwrights.

Adonis may happen to be an Arab but that doesn't make him a representative of all Arabs. Inability to treat people as individuals rather than a representative of some fictitiously homogeneous group or community is the same kind of thing that leads to racism.