The Downside of Diversity?
Demographers tell us that American society is becoming increasingly racially and ethnically diverse. In fact, current projections suggest that if current patterns continue, somewhere around the year 2050, whites will cease to be a numerical majority in this country --that for the first time since the Native American Indian population gave way to European settlers and their descendants there will be more non-whites than whites in the U.S.
Of course, whites will still be the largest racial/ethnic group in the country; they just won't constitute a numerical majority. In many metropolitan areas and in a few states around the country, whites are already a minority. Liberal scholars and activists -- yes that includes me, I suppose -- have consistently maintained that this racial/ethnic/cultural diversity represents a positive change, rather than a problem for American society.
This is because multiculturalism and diversity bring people in closer contact with each other. According to the "contact hypothesis" (one of the core principles in the sociology of race and ethnicity) more interpersonal contact with people from different backgrounds will lead to greater communication, understanding, mutual respect, and social harmony. Combined with globalization of the world in general, it is ultimately good for American society that we are becoming so culturally diverse.
However, a new study fundamentally challenges this basic assumption about the benefits of living in a culturally diverse society. As the Boston Globe reports, Harvard political science professor Robert Putnam has released the results of a comprehensive survey of over 30,000 respondents around the country and has found some rather sobering, perhaps even shocking results:
[Putnam's study] found that the greater the diversity in a community, the fewer people vote and the less they volunteer, the less they give to charity and work on community projects. In the most diverse communities, neighbors trust one another about half as much as they do in the most homogeneous settings. The study, the largest ever on civic engagement in America, found that virtually all measures of civic health are lower in more diverse settings.
Putnam knew he had provocative findings on his hands. He worried about coming under some of the same liberal attacks that greeted Daniel Patrick Moynihan's landmark 1965 report on the social costs associated with the breakdown of the black family. There is always the risk of being pilloried as the bearer of "an inconvenient truth," says Putnam. After releasing the initial results in 2001, Putnam says he spent time "kicking the tires really hard" to be sure the study had it right. Putnam realized, for instance, that more diverse communities tended to be larger, have greater income ranges, higher crime rates, and more mobility among their residents -- all factors that could depress social cohesion, independent of any impact ethnic diversity might have. "People would say, 'I bet you forgot about X,'" Putnam says of the string of suggestions from colleagues. "There were 20 or 30 X's."
But even after taking all these factors into account statistically, the connection
remained strong: Higher diversity meant lower social cohesion. In his findings, Putnam writes that those in more diverse communities tend 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, to agitate for social reform more but have less faith that they can actually make a difference, and to huddle unhappily in front of the television."
After reading the Boston Globe article and after getting over my initial shock, I sat back and reflected on what it means for American society in general and me in particular as one of many who has sincerely believed all along that cultural diversity does indeed produce more benefits than costs for American society.
As I tried to understand and explain these findings, I remembered something that poet and activist Audre Lorde once said. Her words struck me as a profound rebuttal to the study's results:It is not our differences that divide us. It is our inability to recognize, accept, and celebrate those differences."
In other words, I think that the respondents in this study may not have been reacting to high levels of racial/ethnic diversity per se, but rather, to the political discourse that continues to frame such demographic changes with trepidation.
The war on terrorism, the war in Iraq, diminishing individual liberties, volatile economic times, environmental degradation, and human rights abuses around the world have all created a perfect storm of factors that have made Americans more fearful, uncertain, pessimistic, defensive, and/or distrustful of many things, not just increasing racial/ethnic diversity. You might think of it in terms of the basic animal instinct of recoiling and withdrawing when threatened-- the "fight or flight" instinct.
When you add racial/ethnic diversity into the mix, it is understandable if humans retreat into the basic primordial, "homo-social" tendency of feeling more secure and comfortable around others who look like them, or as translated into the American racial vernacular, people who belong to the same
racial-cultural group that they belong to.
This would explain why people living in racially homogeneous communities would probably not feel as threatened with the state of the world's affairs as would people in racially diverse communities. In racially homogeneous communities, they feel more socially supported and integrated into their social environment -- a finding that I'm sure Prof. Putnam's research confirms.
If we were to change the present political and social climate and all of those factors I mentioned that make us feel threatened, racial/ethnic diversity would not bother the vast majority of Americans nearly as much. In other words, as Audre Lorde observed, it is this political and social climate that has made it much more difficult for us as a society to recognize, accept, and celebrate our racial/ethnic differences.