3 Reasons Diversity Isn’t Working

Today in the United States (and all over the West, for that matter), “diversity” is the fashion. Governments and universities promote it as an inherent good; businesses talk incessantly about “diversifying” their workforce. The idea is that putting people of different ethnic groups together will make things better. Since we’re all so different, coming together to solve problems will make them easier to solve, right?

Unfortunately, this fixation on diversity is causing quite a few problems of its own:

1. It doesn’t make for cohesive communities. In 2000, Robert Putnam at Harvard gathered data on different communities in the United States. He wanted to find out about social capital: how people interacted with their neighbors, how they made friends, how much trust they had in local government, and so on. Putnam, being a Harvard man, isn’t exactly the kind of guy who would want to portray diversity in a bad light. But that’s exactly what his research ended up doing. His findings were so discomforting that he spent years trying to find other explanations:

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 capital 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 statistically taking them all into account, the connection remained strong: Higher diversity meant lower social capital. 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.”

“People living in ethnically diverse settings appear to ‘hunker down’ — that is, to pull in like a turtle,” Putnam writes.

So the general trend seems to be that more diversity means less sense of community. But is this inevitable? How likely is it that we might ever find a very diverse community that’s also very cohesive? A more recent study gives us an answer. Zachary Neal and Jennifer Watling Neal at Michigan State University simulated 20 million virtual “neighborhoods” made up of two distinct “populations” and found the same result that Putnam did.

After 20 million-plus simulations, the authors found that the same basic answer kept coming back: The more diverse or integrated a neighborhood is, the less socially cohesive it becomes, while the more homogenous or segregated it is, the more socially cohesive.

This is because people like to form thedes. A thede is a social group with its own identity, its own sense of self. Everyone’s got a thede or two. Remember how you and your friends in school had your own in-jokes, your own little catchphrases and games and traditions? That was a thede you had going there. Do you identify with your hometown? There’s another thede. How about your ethnic heritage? That’s a thede too.

When you’re dealing with humans, thedes are pretty much unavoidable. And in order to form thedes, people look for two things: people like them, and people nearby. Or as the authors of the study at MSU would put it, a sense of community comes from homophily and proximity:

These findings are sobering. Because homophily and proximity are so ingrained in the way humans interact, the models demonstrated that it was impossible to simultaneously foster diversity and cohesion “in all reasonably likely worlds.” In fact, the trends are so strong that no effective social policy could combat them, according to Neal. As he put it in a statement, “In essence, when it comes to neighborhood desegregation and social cohesion, you can’t have your cake and eat it too.”

So be it. Let them eat cake and form thedes.

2. It distorts our priorities. For an example of how ethnic diversity messes with our priorities as a society, look no further than the field of “diversity training”. Colleges and businesses pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for “diversity consultants” who—well, what exactly do they do? According to the American Conference on Diversity:

Leaders that attend our workshops are more empowered and more informed about personnel needs within a diverse workplace, as well as developmental opportunities.

• We design trainings to be meaningful and relevant for increasingly diverse workplaces.

• Our sessions are geared to cultivating teamwork and generating measurable outcomes.

• Our customized curriculum supports individual learning about inclusion as a gateway towards achieving cultural sensitivity.

Well, that didn’t tell us very much. Let’s hear from someone who’s been to one of these kinds of sessions. Jason Morgan at the University of Wisconsin—Madison was required to undergo “diversity training” as a teaching assistant. It doesn’t sound like it was very “empowering”, or “cultivated teamwork”:

We opened the session with chapter-and-verse quotes from diversity theorists who rehearsed the same tired “power and privilege” cant that so dominates seminar readings and official university hand-wringing over unmet race quotas. Indeed, one mild-mannered Korean woman yesterday felt compelled to insist that she wasn’t a racist. I never imagined that she was, but the atmosphere of the meeting had been so poisoned that even we traditional quarries of the diversity Furies were forced to share our collective guilt with those from continents far across the wine-dark sea.

It is hardly surprising that any of us hectorees would feel thusly. For example, in one of the handouts that our facilitator asked us to read (“Detour-Spotting: for white anti-racists,” by joan olsson [sic]), we learned things like, “As white infants we were fed a pabulum of racist propaganda,” “…there was no escaping the daily racist propaganda,” and, perhaps most even-handed of all, “Racism continues in the name of all white people.” Perhaps the Korean woman did not read carefully enough to realize that only white people (all of them, in fact) are racist.

And has any of this actually done any good for UW—Madison? Clearly, there are influential White people who love to push this “anti-racism” stuff as a way to assert their superiority over other White people, but is there any other reason for it? Is making every White man obsessively self-critical really beneficial to the working environment? If you can find any data to support the claim that “diversity training” has any actual benefit, let me know.

Again, this isn’t just in the United States. On the other side of the pond, there are “equality experts” calling for children’s books to dress witches in pink and fairies in dark colors in order to combat “racism” in toddlers—seriously:

From the Wicked Witch of the West in the Wizard of Oz to Meg, the good witch from the Meg and Mog children’s books, witches have always dressed in black.

But their traditional attire has now come in for criticism from equality experts who claim it could send a negative message to toddlers in nursery and lead to racism.

Instead, teachers should censor the toy box and replace the pointy black hat with a pink one, while dressing fairies, generally resplendent in pale pastels, in darker shades.

And that’s not all—apparently, using white paper is also racist:

Another staple of the classroom – white paper – has also been questioned by Anne O’Connor, an early years consultant who advises local authorities on equality and diversity.

Children should be provided with paper other than white to drawn on and paints and crayons should come in “the full range of flesh tones”, reflecting the diversity of the human race, according to the former teacher.

Finally, staff should be prepared to be economical with the truth when asked by pupils what their favourite colour is and, in the interests of good race relations, answer “black” or “brown”.

If your premises lead you to suggest an anti-racist color of clothing for fictional creatures in children’s books, you should check your premises.

But this sort of distortion of what’s important and what isn’t goes further. In the US, there are published articles demanding to know why there aren’t more Black baseball players, or more Black female scientists. The UK’s Police Minister wants to use “positive discrimination” to hire more non-White officers.

Does anyone really expect that the demographics of baseball should be identical to the demographics of the whole United States? Instead of just accepting that Black Americans probably just aren’t that into baseball these days, or that women aren’t interested in science as often as men are, this “lack of diversity” is seen as a major problem. With trillions of dollars in debt and an eroding social fabric, should we be hiring “diversity consultants”? Is trying to make kids pick brown as their favorite color really where our focus should be?

There are also opportunity costs to all this. If we’re paying “diversity consultants” six figures to share their deep wisdom on what is and isn’t racist, who are we not paying? That money could be spent on medical research or improving infrastructure. Instead, it’s being used up by programs that have no logical end. How much diversity is enough? Any arrangement can be considered too exclusive, too segregated, too divided. Should Bangladesh be “diversified” with Europeans and Africans? Should Japan become less Japanese? Should Africa be flooded with Italians and Cambodians in order to make it more multicultural?

3. It breeds prejudice. Another drawback to living in an ethnically diverse environment is that it can actually lead us to develop a more biased view of other groups than we’d otherwise have. It’s silly to get upset over a lack of Black American baseball players or a lack of Asian garbagemen, but then again, the push for an ethnically diverse society is what makes such things a concern in the first place. If you have to live somewhere your ethnic group is outnumbered, then it’s harder for you to form thedes within your ethnic group—and perhaps that really does harm your sense of identity. If every clerk you see at the DMV is Black, every gardener you know is Mexican, and every lawyer you meet is Jewish, are you really going to have a well-balanced perspective on the different kinds of people in the world? As John Derbyshire puts it:

I do like to think, though, that the experience of growing up around human nature in all its fullness—the good, the bad, the exemplary and the appalling—all packed into one’s own ethny, forms a better foundation for a mature adult view of human group differences than the coloring-book simplicities of the Diversity cult.

Here we see a contradiction in the logic of “diversity”: either the differences between ethnic groups are so important that we all need to live together, or those differences are so unimportant that we all can live together. If we really appreciate the diversity of the world’s peoples, why would we want them all in the same society, let alone the same neighborhood? As the old saying of Apuleius goes: Familiarity breeds contempt, while rarity wins admiration.

Our planet’s ethnic diversity is best appreciated when we have enough room to grow. Crowding us all into one place just isn’t working.