Wow.
Here's where I am on multiculturalism. I originally liked the idea when I first heard of it in the late 80s. I read the Closing of the American Mind, Cultural Literacy and Multicultural Literacy and concluded that Americans were provincial and that we assimilate into a dumb and bigoted contemporary pop culture. Something must be done. Now I think that multiculturalism's promise has been eclipsed by its implementation and that it is long past time to expose the flaws and the deceptions.
Recently Robert Putnam of Bowling Alone fame has dropped a bomb:
The truth, Putnam found, is that the greater the amount of multiculturalism and diversity in a society, the lower the level of civic engagement and shared sense of community cohesiveness. The multiculturalists who have dominated our social thinking for nearly 50 years got it all wrong.
There are a lot of ways to explain this, and the simplest two I find credible are:
1. Americans are less interested in citizenship than they ought to be. So acceptance of 'diversity' is a defacto acceptance of an anything goes, or better a 'whatever' attitude towards civic involvement. When you know that every group gets their day of opinion, and nobody is supposed to be offended, then the idea of civic engagement is lost because one accepts that there is no common goal. Diversity is diversity of type and diversity of goals with no attempt a synergy. It is merely a declaration of the presence of difference without any acknowledgement about common goals, and methods of attaining those goals. When the goal itself is mere diversity, you have a fait accomplit without actually having accomplished anything collaboratively. We all know the multicultural metaphor, it is not a melting pot, it's a tossed salad. People refuse to melt.
2. The diversity industry is nothing more than a whitewash for a racial nationalist agenda. The NAACP, despite the fact that its name says 'colored people' is not really talking about 'people of color'. They are in fact of blacks, by blacks and for blacks. They don't get along with MALDEF or any Jewish or Asian organizations of the same stripe.
I think that it's about time that the cracks in multiculturalism start to show up. It took a national emergency to wake a lot of former liberals up, and I'm one of them. My record shows some happiness in digging Nathan Glaser's "We're All Multiculturalists Now", but no longer. Here are some other angles.
A trip to Greensboro, NC proved to me that all diversity isn't equal:
As a big city creature, there's a certain level of cunning and wariness I have among crowds. There's a lot to expect from people when there are millions of them in close proximity. Living in LA and NY has made me come to expect just about anything from just about anyone. It's the characteristic of the large set. But when you downscale, you reduce variety by definition. And so I am coming to appreciate that there are various flavors of diversity. Growing up in Southern California, sure you speak a little Spanish, but you also learn to distinguish Veitnamese from Japanese from Chinese from Korean from Philipino. I can't say I'm so good differentiating Indians from Pakistanis, but I'm not completely inept. Point? It's more than just 'Asians'. And let's not even get started on 'Hispanics'.
In Greensboro at the conference there were many testimonies of pride in their own diversity, but there was not one Asian in the whole joint. I haven't seen one during the whole trip, not even at the airport. As far as I can tell, Greensboro's diversity is a species of black and white. And so, I may very well imagine, is the case for other Southern cities of its size and shape.
I made an in analytical opinion piece on diversity earlier this year which covered several different ways of thinking about diversity. The piece called All About Diversity did not look specifically at the Community Perspective which is Putnam's important angle, but did look at the empowerment perspective, the political perspective and the market perspective.
As far as the community perspective goes, I do tend to agree with Putnam. We Americans rather like diversity, I think, so that we can feel more comfortable doing our own thing. And certainly our recent blowup here about 'radical black assimilationism' made it clear that for a certain cut of black cultural nationalists, there ain't no future in the Rodney King directive. We cannot all just get along, and perhaps the point is that a lot of us don't want to. So blacks are free to be black as they define it, Asians are free to be whatever it is they are. It's all cool so long as everybody shows up and nobody is excluded. In that way diversity creates nothing new, at all. It explains a lot about PC, which is the language of polite condescension necessary for people who think it's important to be physically close but not spiritually intimate or philosophically aligned.
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