The Other Side of Diversity

Researchers at Harvard are documenting what has been commonly known for decades:

[Putnam's] research shows that the more diverse a community is, the less likely its inhabitants are to trust anyone– from their next-door neighbour to the mayor.

This is a contentious finding in the current climate of concern about the benefits of immigration. Professor Putnam told the Financial Times he had delayed publishing his research until he could develop proposals to compensate for the negative effects of diversity, saying it “would have been irresponsible to publish without that”.

The core message of the research was that, “in the presence of diversity, we hunker down”, he said. “We act like turtles. The effect of diversity is worse than had been imagined. And it’s not just that we don’t trust people who are not like us. In diverse communities, we don’t trust people who do look like us.”

My time spent at BYU-Hawaii, where Caucasians are a minority, taught me that people by their very nature are good and well intentioned, but that in generally prefer being among others who are similar to themselves.

Hence, Chinese students would always clump together with Chinese students. Japanese students, while outwardly friendly and polite, would guard their inner cliques with an almost xenophobic zeal. White rich kids from California would naturally find their surfing comrades and “hunker down” together.

Oftentimes, especially for students whose first language was not English, these homogenous insticints would prove most detrimental. Asian students in paticular would “clique up” and put themselves in situations where they would be required to speak English as little as possible.

The bond of a common language and heritage are not chains easily broken. I’ve found that political correctness generally muddles attempts to overcome these obstacles and gives each individual a sense of being patrnoized. It takes a lot of initiative and frankness to break down the barriers.

Those that are successful in overcoming diversity will forge relationships that will last a lifetime.

But for the American society itself, I fear and believe our communities will become more segregated and alienated from one another as time progresses.

If history teaches us anything, it is that nations are more often corroded and ultimately destroyed from internal divisions as opposed to being conquered by those from outside.

October 10th, 2006 in Current Events |