whose research revealed how destructive racial diversity as been to the fabric of American society.
I just did a quick scan on the guy to get a sense of what you say about him. I’ll need to take it a little further to come to my own conclusions.
But I’ve managed to make some of my own observations about juxtapositions of different ethnic groups over the years. A lot of the outcome seems to rely on how much emphasis is placed on the differences to begin with. In that way I have always seen this “diversity” language as a sort of Jim Crow Goes to College kind of pretense.
I’ll elaborate, by saying that I grew up in part in the south, and began school just a year or two after the Civil Rights Act had forced the school districts to integrate. There were a few black kids in our school in Tennessee back in the mid-60s, and mostly I remember that it seemed kind of a mutual understanding that we just not try too hard to mix, but at the same time I also remember a lot more (white) grownups having the attitude that to openly mistreat someone of a different ethnicity was just bad manners. People who got called “race bigots” by their fellow white folks were looked on with the same condescending disapproval with which one might use the term “trailer trash.”
Being identifiably racist was just seen as kind of lowlife, even while the criticisms I might hear about the integration of the schools were always a lot more concerned with federal interference and what that meant, than with any inherent problem of black and white going to school together. The outrage I think a lot of folks felt about those photos from Little Rock, for instance, was more about what was not in the shot: executive authority from Washington putting American soldiers in the street to bear arms against Americans. The happenstance of a few “race bigot” teenagers showing up to get in the picture with their signs, I have always thought was a lot more misleading than it is revealing.
(I also remember that when a black man came to be the new fifth-grade teacher the following year, around 1970, everybody wanted to be in his class: not because he was or wasn’t black, but because he was a MAN, and after four years we couldn’t stand nothing but women ordering us around all day….)
But I also remember that on my first day in fifth grade after we moved to Pennsylvania in 1971, all it took to get the whole class laughing their heads off at me, was a few words in my Dixie accent. So I take as a given, that nothing said by anyone who really knows a thing about the American south, will ever be taken seriously by those who don’t. But I know that I was treated with more open bigotry for being a southerner in a northern town, than I ever saw whites aim at blacks in the south.
I’ll tell you another little story from here in my adoptive home town in the Oklahoma panhandle. We have probably half Hispanic and half “white” folks here, and I have seen zero indication of this being any source of tension or disrespect. And the interactions between the two are everyday and commonplace, in every setting. Some of the Hispanics are Mexican immigrants, others are Chicanos with roots on this side of the border going back generations. Often this is a matter of a Mexican husband and Chicano wife or vice versa, a lot more common here than in Chicano-elitist New Mexico where Mexicans are called “mojados” (wet).
We have this little annual festival that includes a day of picnicking in the park every summer. The first time I went to one a few years ago, it was impossible not to notice, that down one side of the diagonal walkway that bisects the park, was the “white” side, and on the other, the Hispanic side. Different music, different food, different languages. But I didn’t see any sign saying “whites only”, and I didn’t see any indication that this highly-visible distribution of humanity was anything other than mutual preference. All these people know and do business and attend school together, but when it comes time to party with the family, what could be more natural than just to gather up with those with whom one shares a culture and heritage?
If that were what was being pitched as “diversity”, the ones pitching it would just be laughed off and told, “that’s what everybody prefers anyway, just to hang out with their own people.”
But this other thing, this Jim Crow Goes to College thing, is as racist, divisive and bigoted as it gets: “You: you’re white. Over there. You there: black. Go sit in the black corner. Asian? Right; your spot is right over there. Wait, we have three too few Hispanics in the reserved space for Mexicans, Cubans, Puerto Ricans, Guatemalans, Colombians, Argentinians and people from east LA; let’s see, if we run off one African-American — no, wait, we can’t do that, it would be racist….um, okay, how about one less Asian? No, they had relatives at Manzanar, that might be a micro-aggression…what to do, what to do….? Okay, all but two of the white people have to leave, the men, that is. What, that one’s gay? Okay, then we’ll crowd in just two more Hispanics instead of three….Okay, we’ve achieved diversity….”
Not a whole lot removed from a balcony or a drinking fountain that says “colored”, is it?
