Fred Reed observes that blacks and whites really don’t want to intermingle, for the most part, and that this is entirely normal behavior from the historical perspective:
We need to realize, but will not, that blacks are a separate people, self-aware and cohesive. They have their own dialect, music, and modes of dress, which they value. They name their kids LaToya and Keeshawn instead of Robert and Carol because they want to maintain a distance from whites.
The races spring from utterly different cultures. Compulsory integration is thus a form of social imperialism in which whites try to force blacks to conform to European norms. Blacks have no historical connection at all to Greece, Rome, the Old Testament Hebrews, Christianity, the Middle Ages, the Enlightenment, Industrial Revolution, to Newton, LaGrange, or Galois, to the philosophic tradition of Thales, Aquinas, Schopenhauer, or Hegel. Nor do Eurowhites have roots in Africa. No commonality exists.
We talk multiculturism, but try to impose a monoculture—ours—on blacks. Why? Why in school should we insist that blacks study things of no interest to them? It is reminiscent of policies aimed at stripping American Indians of their languages and traditions.
On the other hand, I as a white man have little enthusiasm for studying Shaka Zulu, the Great Zimbabwe, or African religions. Would not all be happier with their own schools in which they could maintain their own culture?
“Separate but equal” is in bad odor as a governing philosophy. It seems to be the only thing that works. If voluntary, wherein lies the evil? Less contact means less conflict.
Is there any evidence that blacks want to associate with whites? Or vice versa? In the universities, do blacks not clamor for black-only dormitories, black-only fraternities, and Black Studies? And what is wrong with this? Why should blacks not associate with whom they choose? And why should not whites?
Almost always, when the races do not have to mingle, they don’t. In Washington, blacks fleeing the crime of the city go to the heavily-black Prince George’s County, whites to Arlington, Fairfax, and Bethesda. Within Arlington, blacks cluster together in mini-barrios. So what? It’s their business.
Note that the togetherheid pushed endlessly on us is almost entirely rhetorical, preached by people who mean that others should practice it. I lived for years in the city with many liberal, racially correct friends. They spent all their time with other whites, and the restaurants and bars they patronized seldom had more than a token black, if that.
Ethnic mixing doesn’t work, gang. Not Moslems and Parisians, Irish Catholics and Protestants, Shias and Sunnis, Indonesians and Chinese, nor even New Yorkers and Alabamans. We think it should work, insist that it will, punish those who observe that it doesn’t. Yet still it doesn’t work. The greater the difference between groups, the less well it works. If we realized this, and let people do as they choose, the country would be much better off.
Another point that people fail to realize is that racial and cultural mixing is intrinsically destructive, even when it isn’t forced. I am, in part, an American Indian. I know virtually nothing of my tribal culture or history. I speak three languages, smatterings of two more, and I know precisely two words of my tribal language. What most people forget when they speak cheerfully of Arthur C. Clarke’s grand brown melange of humanity is that it means the death of almost every human culture, almost every human language, almost everything that is not the lowest and most vulgar common denominator.
Think about how Europeans look down on American lack of culture, or, conversely, think about how Americans look up to European culture. In the envisioned Grand Multicultural Amalgamation, the resulting culture will make American culture look refined.
As for the intrinsic desirability of racial intermingling, go tell that to a tribe of Indians that is dying out, or to African pygmies being hunted to extinction, or to orthodox Jews desperately trying to prevent their race from being intermarried out of existence how it’s all really for the best that they go quietly into the void.
Diversity is cultural death. For everyone.