Canned Diversity and "Hidden" Conformity

"Okay, class, we are going to learn to be diverse today!"

Canned diversity refers to the kind of politically and socially mandated emphasis of "diversity" that is used as an excuse to maintain the exportation of jobs to foreign countries and the importation of cheap labor at home. What is not recognized or acknowledged in this social agenda is that cross-cultural diversity exists naturally in the larger world, even though there is a dramatic loss of culture and language as a consequence of development and western acculturative pressures. Very few if any societies in the world permit or could afford radical pluralization of its culture by opening its ranks willy-nilly. Classrooms across Southern California are reaching over 90% Hispanic constituency, and this is heralded as "diverse" even if the fact of over 90% any one ethnoculture is just the opposite of diverse, but in fact very mono-cultural. In such situations, which are quite common place in states like California these days, ratios were much more balanced and "diverse" thirty years ago than they are today after 25 years of unmitigated illegal immigration. Mexico certainly doesn't permit this, nor France, Japan, China, or any other country. So, we must ask, why is it the thing to do in the United States. Each group strives to maintain some sense of cultural integrity that is inherent to its sense of tradition and adaptation and identity in the larger world. This sense of cultural integrity gains a material form in geographical identification of a social grouping to a region and an area and a sense of political-territorial sovereignty. American culture has been no exception, and should be no exception, to this rule. Where radical pluralism has been found to exist, especially in colonial or post-colonial contexts, it is almost never a good thing, as it usually results in tight-fisted authoritarian government and a chronic history of bloody strife across the social cleavages of competing ethnocultural groupings.

 It is largely also used to assist in the stratification of society and its polarization between upper and lower classes, reflected in the general closing of the ranks of the upper classes and the loss of social mobility of the poorer Americans. It has certainly dehorned and defanged the American middle and poorer classes from organizing any effective collective response to the unrestricted and illicit invasion of foreign labor and foreign money. All the minority groups can boast exclusive, often extreme, "minority-only" associations, membership groups, clubs, and parties, but if poor white American organize themselves they are automatically branded racists and declared illegal by society. It is the double standards this represents--the promotion of racism among some groups, and its denial among others, that is the core contradiction the US has been unwilling and unable to confront and resolve. Either permit all groups to practice racist and ethnoculturally exclusive agendas. In other words, it should become "Viva la Raza" for all groups, or for none at all. To be consistent and non-contradictory, Americans can afford no less and no more than a completely color-blind (but not ethnoculturally insensitive) strategy. In other words, to be non-contradictory and to regain a sense of its original self as a guarantor of universal political equality, regardless of social condition, then it must eventually outlaw and taboo racism and ethnocentric political action for all groups, and not just for one. It has served to undermine the very basic constitutional guarantee of political equality of all people under the law, as it has allowed some "specially designated" groups to become more equal than others.

I do not knock diversity. I myself am a cross-cultural anthropologist by training and by choice. This means that I am a scientist of diversity. But I am knocking misguided and poorly intentioned efforts and forcing or promoting diversity to occur where it would not, and possibly should not, otherwise have happened. This kind of diversification can in fact be called neo- and post-colonial diversity, or radical pluralization that comes from the political incorporation of distinct ethnic groups who would not have otherwise become incorporated. Diversity exists naturally in the world. Leave the Americans alone long enough, and you will see the emergence of local and regional differences between, for instance, Southerners and Northerners, Westerners and Easterners, that is characteristic of natural processes of diversification.

Poly-lingualism is neither necessarily a highly desirable characteristic of a society. Great if individuals know more than one language. But to foist multi-lingualism upon a total society is to enforce a "tower of Babel" kind of situation. Cultural groupings and societies function best when everyone in it is communicating in the same idiom and the same linguistic medium. I have been a student of inherently multi-lingual societies, and there are both advantages and clear disadvantages that are a consequence of such complex, and often chaotic environments.

The kind of logic that has driven these agendas to foist diversity and multi-lingualism upon American society is largely a kind of naive sociologism that confuses individuals with groups, and that vastly over-simplifies the inherent complexities of psychological, behavioral and cultural realities.

Mandating diversity will not eliminate competition for resources upon an ethnic level--it only really disguises it with rhetoric like "the Kings new clothes." If the mandate for diversity has a hidden agenda of the denial and discrimination of American traditional culture and ethnicity, at the celebration of the promotion, advancement and achievement of other ethnocultural groupings in society, then it is really sanctioning and setting the stage for these so-called minority groupings to operate in the larger social arenas in an exclusive, racist and ethnocentrically biased manner without fear of recrimination or consequence. Like O. J. Simpson, whose own blood was all over the murder scene of his wife, racial arguments become an excuse for the legitimization and social acceptance and excusing of almost any kind of behavior that would otherwise not be permitted, if the racial veil were completely removed.

I like and in fact prefer diversity in almost any context and situation I find myself in. I find exclusive any group dealing to be insufferable in the long run. But I want it in a genuine and open way, not forced, not coerced, not sanctioned or constrained by hidden powers that demand conformity to their own hidden agendas.

The American government should one day wake up and smell the humus. The same group of people who put them into power in the first place, namely the American people, can take them out again. One day the American people will eventually awaken from their prolonged slumber, and come to the realization that if they do not organize themselves collectively to protect their own property and opportunity structures in the world, then surely nobody, not even the American government, will. They will eventually come to the crystal clear understanding that the future interests of their posterity are being consistently sold away, at their own expense, for the interests of what amount to only a small privileged handful of people in the larger world. The Americans, under the right circumstances, are capable of sustained collective action, and are capable of organizing themselves and sacrificing their private interests for the good of the whole. The American government these days especially, does not necessarily embody or represent the spirit or the collective interest of the American people

By the way, it is time to allow the Mexican government and the Mexican people to take matters into their own hands, to work themselves to solve their problems of chronic corruption and poverty, and to quit foisting the consequences of these unsolved problems upon the United States. It is time for the United States government not only to stop looking the other way, but to stop encouraging it from continuing.