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Gregory Rodriguez:
Together, apart: A dissection of diversity
People in the most diverse areas
are the most likely to withdraw -- even from those with whom they have
much in common.
By Gregory Rodriguez, Los Angeles Times
People all over the planet are on the move, and whether anyone likes it
or not, with each passing year Western nations will become more
racially and ethnically diverse. But is that a good or a bad thing?
According to most American politicians, diversity is a national boon.
You've heard the rap: Diversity is our strength. We should celebrate
it, blah, blah, blah. But are they all protesting too much?
I've always suspected that what's beneath all that celebrating is a
deep fear and an article of faith. Armed with hate-crime statistics and
gang stories, the media love to keep us informed of all types of racial
and ethnic conflict. But through it all, assorted do-gooders,
foundation program officers and government functionaries still promote
the belief that the best solution to the conflicts created by social
diversity is diversity itself. That's why they arrange those cheesy
multi-culti community events and tiresome "dialogues" in which the
black activist meets the Korean-American activist, white kids go to day
camp with kids of color, etc. The idea is that more contact breaks down
barriers and helps us achieve Rodney King's dream that we'll all just
get along.
But according to a provocative new study by Robert Putnam, one of
America's preeminent political scientists, it's just not true. Putnam
isn't regurgitating so-called conflict theory -- the notion that
diversity strengthens group identities, thereby increasing
ethnocentrism and conflict. He's not predicting racial Armageddon. What
he did find in analyzing a massive survey of 30,000 Americans, however,
is a whole lot more interesting and complex than either "Kumbaya" or
"Crash." Diversity, he argues, is turning us into a nation of turtles,
hunkered down with our heads in our shells.
According to the study, there is a strong positive relationship between
interracial trust and ethnic homogeneity. The less diverse your
community, the more likely you are to trust the people in it who are
different from you. The flip side is also true: The more ethnically
diverse the people you live around, the less you trust them. So
interracial trust is relatively high in homogenous South Dakota and
relatively low in wildly diverse Los Angeles. But don't think it's just
because we don't trust people of different races.
In addition to asking respondents what they thought of people from
different backgrounds, the survey inquired about whether respondents
trusted people of their own race. The answer was surprising. It turns
out that in the most-diverse places in the country, Americans tend to
distrust everyone, those who do look like them and those who don't.
Diversity, therefore, does not result in increased conflict or
increased accommodation, but in good old-fashioned anomie and social
isolation.
According to Putnam, residents of diverse communities "tend to withdraw
from collective life, to distrust their neighbors, regardless of the
color of their skin, to withdraw even from close friends, to expect the
worst from their community and its leaders, to volunteer less, give
less to charity and work on community projects less often, to register
to vote less" and to spend more time sitting in front of the television.
Putnam considered and had to reject all kinds of other explanations for
his findings. In the end, some adhere to this pattern more than others,
but the numbers are discouraging all around: Diversity depresses trust
and sociability somewhat more in poorer neighborhoods, but altruism
suffers somewhat more in richer areas. It seems to affect sociability
more among conservatives, but it's also a problem among liberals. The
effect is felt more among whites, but nonwhites are not immune.
Twentysomethings seem a bit less distrustful than older generations but
not enough to alter the overall pattern. Women are equally as affected
as men.
None of this means that we are doomed by diversity. But it does suggest
that simply celebrating it and promoting it is not going to help us get
along. Putnam points to a need for everyone to construct new social
identities. He recalls growing up in a Midwestern town in the 1950s,
when religious affiliations acted as strong social barriers between
neighbors. Three decades later, he says, Americans had "more or less
deconstructed religion as a salient social division." Although it was
still personally important, religion's power as a social identity had
diminished significantly.
More important, perhaps, whites and nonwhites will have to create a
more generous and expansive sense of "we." If, as the study suggests,
increased diversity leads us to withdraw even from our own kind, we may
indeed find some sense of togetherness and common purpose in a truly
broad, overarching identity called American. Maybe once we achieve
that, we'll volunteer more, vote more and be more willing to pay to fix
our bridges.
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