No not at all.:rolleyes: I am simply pointing out that diverse societies have a lot more potential flash-points than non diverse ones. What happens is either the societies p various ethnicities merging or dome sort of duality taking hold.
The US is a highly homogenous society in many ways. That reduces the scope for tension. A black and a white person will still speak the same language, have a similar religious doctrine, celebrate Christmas, Easter etc and watch the same sports. Plus one is clearly a dominant culture. When you have places whose groups do not even have those things in common, you have greater scope for conflicts and that inevitably leads to at best an informal apartheid.
Worth remembering: ethnicity is not the ONLY kind of diversity.
As I said earlier, my son has friends and classmates of many different ethnicities. So, is his group of friends “diverse”?
Well, yes and no. Diverse ethnically, sure, but not culturally. Our neighborhood ranges from middle-class to upper middle-class. Our black, Chinese, Mexican, Indian and Iranian neighbors are mostly educated professional people who grew up themselves in middle class neighborhoods. So, regardless of my son’s friends’ skin color, it’s generally safe to say that they all play in the same soccer leagues, eat the same junk foods, like the same Wii games, read the same Percy Jackson books, watch the same TV shows, listen to the same Katy Perry songs…
And that makes a HUGE difference. My son has many black and Latino friends, but because they’re middle class kids like himself, he doesn’t see them as different in any way. And that’s wonderful- but it doesn’t necessarily prepare him for ALL kinds of diversity. If he ever moves to a city with a true ghetto or a large barrio, he MAY find that he’s not truly prepared for what he finds.
Sometimes it seems to work, sometimes it doesn’t. I’ve spoken to people from the former Yugoslavia who emphasize how thoroughly integrated everyone was there, and how shocked they were when everything fell apart so bloodily. Jews were well-integrated into German and Austrian society before WWII. On a large scale, multicultural or bicultural societies sometimes work, sometimes not. Canada seems to handle ethnic diversity well, but nearly split in half over the language divide. India went through a bloody partition after independence, but since then appears to have handled its diversity pretty well. I don’t think there’s a clear rule for how this works.