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“Just about the only serious argument anyone tries to make in favor of diversity echoes Jonathan Alger, a lawyer who has argued before the Supreme Court in favor of racial preferences: “Corporations have to compete internationally,” he says, and “cross-cultural competency is a key skill in the work force.” This argument assumes that people get along best with people like themselves, that Koreans, for example, can do business most effectively with other Koreans. Presumably, if the United States has a large population of Koreans they will be a bridge between Korea and the United States. For that to work, however, Korean-Americans should not fully assimilate because if they do, they will lose the qualities that make them an asset. America should give up the ideal of Americanization that, in a few generations, made Englishmen, Dutchmen, Germans, Swedes, the Irish, and all other Europeans essentially indistinguishable. Do we really want to give up the idea of assimilation? Or should only racial minorities give up on assimilation? More to the point, is a diverse population really an advantage in trade or international affairs? Japan is one of the most racially homogeneous nations. It would be hard to find a country that so clearly practices the opposite of American-style diversity, but it is one of the most successful trading nations on earth. If diversity were a key advantage, Brazil, Indonesia, Sudan, Malaysia, and Lebanon would be world leaders in trade. Other great trading nations—Taiwan, Korea and China—are, if anything, even more closed and exclusionist than Japan. Germany is likewise a successful trading nation, but its trade surpluses cannot be attributed to cultural or racial diversity. Only since the 1960s has it had a large non-German minority of Turks who came as guest workers, and there is no evidence that Turks have helped Germany become more of a world presence or even a better trade partner with Turkey. The world’s consumers care about price and quality, not the race or nationality of the factory worker. American corporations boast about workforces that “look like America,” but they are often beaten in their own market by companies whose workforces look like Yokohama or Shanghai. If we really took seriously the idea that “cross-cultural competence” was crucially important, we would adjust the mix of immigrants accordingly. We might question the wisdom of Haitian immigration, for example, since Haiti is a small, poor country that is never likely to be an important trade partner. And do 32 million Mexican-Americans help our trade relations with the world—or even with Mexico? Canada is our number-one trading partner. Should we therefore encourage immigration from Canada? No one ever talks about immigration in these terms because at some level everyone understands that diversity has nothing to do with trade or influence in the world. The “cross-cultural competence” argument is artificial.”

Quote by Jared Taylor

Work

White Identity: Racial Consciousness in the 21st Century

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Author

Jared Taylor
Jared Taylor

Jared Taylor, born on September 15, 1951, is an American journalist known for his views on racism and immigration issues. He was the editor of 'American Renaissance' magazine and has contributed articles to various publications, including 'The American Conservative' and 'The New American'. more

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“The racial conflict and self-segregation described [...] are not what we would expect if widespread assumptions about the advantages of diversity are true. The prevailing view in the media and some parts of academia is that race is not even a legitimate biological category, and that it is only because of prejudiced conditioning that we even notice it. This view ignores the large body of scientific work that suggests racial and ethnic consciousness is deeply rooted in human psychology. Our species seems to have an instinct for determining who is in our group and who is not. Studies of individuals point to unconscious processes in the brain that reflect a suspicion of people unlike ourselves, leading some researchers to conclude that ethnocentrism is part of human nature. At the same time, studies at the group level show that ethnic conflict is universal. In all countries, diversity of religion, ethnicity, or race causes conflict. For the better part of the post-war period, sociologists and political scientists downplayed ethnic conflict, on the assumption that it was a pre modern relic that would be replaced by competition based on class or professional affiliation. This has not happened. As one researcher has concluded, “ethnicity based on common descent tends to be more important than class based on common interest. Blood runs thicker than money.” It is from two directions, therefore, that scientists have begun to question the view that ethnic or racial mixing can be easily achieved. Laboratory investigations of individuals have found what may be tribal or ethnocentric instincts, while analysis of societies suggests that diversity invariably brings conflict.”

“There is a theoretical framework that explains ethnocentrism. As the Belgian authority on ethnic relations Pierre L. van den Berghe put it more than 25 years ago, “The degree of cooperation between organisms can be expected to be a direct function of the proportion of the genes they share; conversely, the degree of conflict between them is an inverse function of the proportion of shared genes.” Van den Berghe used the word “organisms” because he found this principle true in animals as well as people. When there is great genetic distance between strangers—in the case of humans, when they are of different races—conflicts are sharper. It is easy to understand the first part of van den Berghe’s proposition. People everywhere make great sacrifices for their families. The evolutionary explanation is that everyone shares more copies of his distinctive genes with close kin than with strangers. All forms of life can be viewed as striving to pass on their genes to future generations. Each individual therefore has a “genetic interest” in close relatives, which helps explain solidarity and cooperation within families.”

“Chimpanzees are our nearest living relatives, and offer hints as to how our distant ancestors may have behaved. Chimps live in bands within territories, and show a ferocious in-group out-group consciousness. It has long been known that males drive off intruders from other bands and kill their young if they can. Psychologists watching chimps in Uganda found that even females are murderously territorial. On three occasions they saw females drive off invaders and kill their babies. People often behave according to genetic similarity theory, and the scholar who has probably written most extensively in this field is J. Philippe Rushton of the University of Western Ontario. “Genetically similar people tend to seek one another out and to provide mutually supportive environments such as marriage, friendship, and social groups,” he has written. For example, spouses tend to resemble each other, not just in age, ethnicity, and education (r = 0.6) but in opinions and attitudes (r = 0.5), intelligence (r = 0.4), and even in such things as personality and physical traits (r = 0.2). They are even like each other in undesirable traits such as aggressiveness, criminality, alcoholism, and mental disease. It is possible to predict how happy a couple is by know.”

“There is a field of study called “happiness research,” which tries to analyze what makes people happy. Prof. Michael Hagerty of the University of California at Davis surveyed decades of international happiness research and found that “for the most part, the top-rated countries are small and homogeneous.” As he explained, such countries “have a similar world view and a similar religion, so that it’s easier for them to communicate and to understand each other’s motives.” He also noted that “they don’t have race problems.” In the conclusion of his 148-country diversity survey Tatu Vanhanen wrote, “It is easier to establish harmonious social relations in ethnically homogeneous societies than in ethnically divided ones because people are more helpful towards each other in ethnically homogeneous societies.” There can, of course, be many different kinds of division in a country: language, religion, race, class, etc. However, of all these, race seems to be the most difficult to bridge.”

“As Bangladeshi human rights lawyer Zia Haider Rahman has written, “Anyone who has worked in the field of international development, as I have, will tell you that nation-building in states that are ethnically homogenous, all other things being equal, is an easier task than nation-building where there is diversity.” According to one model of conflict, sectarian violence occurs most easily when one ethnic group is large enough to impose cultural norms in public areas but not large enough to make sure everyone abides by them. Researchers at Brandeis University concluded that when groups are separated in clearly demarcated territories there is little violence because no group tries to force its rules on another. Milica Zarkovic Bookman, who is an expert on ethnic struggle, especially in the Balkans, underlines the significance of race: 'Assimilation takes place in the spheres of religion and language most easily and is most successful among people who are culturally similar to the dominant group. When race is the distinguishing feature, assimilation efforts become irrelevant.”

“Thomas A. Kochan, a professor at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, has probably researched corporate diversity more extensively than anyone. His conclusion after a five-year study? “The diversity industry is built on sand.” Prof. Kochan initially contacted 20 major companies that have publicly committed themselves to diversity, and was astonished to find that not one had done a serious study of how diversity increased profits or improved operations. He learned that managers are afraid that race-related research could bring on lawsuits, but that another reason they do not look for results is “because people simply want to believe that diversity works.” Like other researchers, he found “the negative consequences of diversity, such as higher turnover and greater conflict in the workplace,” and concluded that even if the best managers were able to overcome these problems there was no evidence diversity leads to greater profits. “The business case rhetoric for diversity is simply naive and overdone,” he says, noting that the estimated $8 billion a year spent on diversity training did not even protect businesses from discrimination suits, much less increase profits. Common sense suggests that it is hard to get dissimilar people to work together. Indeed, a large-scale survey called the National Study of the Changing Workforce found that more than half of all workers said they preferred to work with people who were not only the same race as themselves, but had the same education and were the same sex.”

“A 2008 Wall Street Journal article entitled “America’s Universities are Living a Diversity Lie” summed up findings in this area: 'To this day, few colleges have even tried to establish that their race-conscious admissions policies yield broad educational benefits. The research is so fuzzy and methodologically weak that some strident proponents of affirmative action admit that social science is not on their side. In reality, colleges profess a deep belief in the educational benefits of their affirmative-action policies mainly to save their necks. They know that, if the truth came out, courts could find them guilty of illegal discrimination against white and Asian Americans.' The New York Times agrees, noting that decades of promoting diversity have not succeeded in getting students to mix. The article concludes: 'No one has a formula for success; there is not even a consensus about what success would look like. Experts say that diversity programs on college campuses amount to a constantly evolving experiment, which in some cases in the past may have done more harm than good.”

“Here is the thing, though, the real, true thing I still have trouble admitting: I can't protect you from everything...I can't protect you from spending a lifetime caught between the beautiful dream of a diverse nation and the complicated reality of one. I can't even protect you from the simple fact that sometimes, the people who love us will choose a world that doesn't.”