Even the biggest champions of postracial fantasy are beginning to recognize the failure of desegregation:
To the extent that the word “desegregation” remains in our vocabulary, it describes an antique principle, not a current priority. Today, we are more likely to talk of diversity—but diversification and desegregation are not the same undertaking. To speak of diversity, in light of this country’s history of racial recidivism, is to focus on bringing ethnic variety to largely white institutions, rather than dismantling the structures that made them so white to begin with.
And so, sixty years after Brown, it is clear that the notion of segregation as a discrete phenomenon, an evil that could be flipped, like a switch, from on to off, by judicial edict, was deeply naïve. The intervening decades have shown, in large measure, the limits of what political efforts directed at desegregation alone could achieve, and the crumbling of both elements of “separate but equal” has left us at an ambivalent juncture. To the extent that desegregation becomes, once again, a pressing concern—and even that may be too grand a hope—it will have to involve the tax code, the minimum wage, and other efforts to redress income inequality. For the tragedy of this moment is not that black students still go to overwhelmingly black schools, long after segregation was banished by law, but that they do so for so many of the same reasons as in the days before Brown.
One hopes it won’t take another 60 years for them to figure out that diversity is inevitably doomed to failure too. The reason segregation is inevitable is because diversity+proximity=war. And the fact that it is inevitable is based on sound and impeccable logic.
All these diverse groups came from somewhere, right? And, for the most part, they once belonged to the same population group, right? So, the process of separation and eventual segregation occurred naturally and spontaneously through a combination of factors such as free association, sexual selection, and tribal mobility.
The current diversity and multiculturalism fad is nothing more than a short-term artificial artifact of wealth, peace, cheap international travel, and anti-national governments. Take away just one of those four supports and the entire edifice collapses in violence and bloodshed.
To talk about being pro-segregation or anti-segregation is a category error. It’s no different than claiming to be pro-biology or anti-gravity. It’s a normal human dynamic, and as such, it can be resisted with effort, but only for a short time from the historical perspective.