Adios, America: The Left's Plan to Turn Our Country into a Third World Hellhole (12 page)

Are you seeing the pattern? There’s no justification for civil rights laws without blacks. But under the “diversity” regime, parasites from the entire world came in and announced,
Here’s a new agenda for the civil rights movement and it doesn’t include you, black America.
After pretending to care about black people for approximately six minutes, Democrats ran off and redefined “civil rights” as the right to get an abortion, the right for a lesbian to take a date to her high school prom, and the right of foreigners to vote in America on ballots printed in their native language. And thus ended the brief era of liberals’ pretending to care about black people. At least lesbians and the abortion ladies are
American
lesbians and
American
abortion ladies. Without reason, the Left has appropriated the black experience in America and given it away to foreigners. But they’ll never pay a price for it, because African Americans still bloc-vote for the Democrats.

It’s understandable that the Democrats would want to dump “integration” the first chance they got. Democrats could never accept the fact that “civil rights” was about correcting specific and severe injustices done to
American blacks, principally because they were the ones who had perpetrated the injustices.
²⁷

But why did Jesse Jackson and the “rainbow coalition” give away blacks’ unique claim to America’s sympathy to people who never experienced oppression in the United States? Jews are very protective of the Holocaust as a unique event. For fifty years, there’s been a raging debate about whether the Turkish slaughter of more than a million Armenians in 1915—another chapter in the glorious history of “diversity”—can be described as a “genocide.” It’s one thing to adopt quotas and affirmative action as a response to slavery and the Democratic policies of Jim Crow. But to apply these policies to people who have never set foot in this country is insane. We owe you nothing.

LIBERAL RESEARCHER ADMITS THE TRUTH: DIVERSITY SUCKS

Even when Third World immigrants aren’t trying to blow up the First World, as in Boston, ethnic “diversity” is all downside. Members of the same ethnic group know each other, care about each other, help each other. Leaving aside the exciting parts of diversity, such as terrorism, civil wars, and ethnic cleansing, the greater the diversity, the higher the transaction costs. Even after almost four centuries together, blacks and whites haven’t yet achieved what anyone would regard as perfect harmony.

Robert Putnam, Harvard professor and author of
Bowling Alone
, has spent years studying the effects of ethnic diversity on a community’s well-being. It turns out diversity is a train wreck. Contrary to his expectation—and desire!—Putnam’s study showed that the greater the ethnic diversity, the less people trusted their neighbors, their local leaders, and even the news. People in diverse communities gave less to charity, voted less, had fewer friends, were more unhappy, and were more likely to describe television as “my most important form of entertainment.” It was not, Putnam said, that people in diverse communities trusted people of
their own ethnicity more, and other races less. They didn’t trust anyone.
²⁸
The difference in neighborliness between an ethnically homogeneous town, such as Bismarck, North Dakota, and a diverse one, such as Los Angeles, Putnam says, is “roughly the same as” the difference in a town with a 7 percent poverty rate compared with a 23 percent poverty rate.
²⁹

Putnam refused to publish his study for seven years because he didn’t like the results. As a “liberal academic whose own values put him squarely in the pro-diversity camp,” the
New York Times
said, he had hoped to find another explanation. He reran the numbers, accounting for differences in crime rates, age, income, marital status, home ownership, education, language, mobility, and every other factor under the sun. But no matter how many variables he accounted for, Putnam kept getting the same results: Diversity damages social cohesion.
³⁰
When Putnam finally released his study in 2007, he included an incongruous statement of his personal admiration for diversity—leading critics to complain that he was “straying from data into advocacy,” as the
Times
put it.
³¹
The disadvantages of diversity were in the cold, hard numbers. The advantages were in Putnam’s hopes and dreams.

Diversity from immigration harmed social harmony even more than America’s traditional black-white racial diversity. “[B]oth ‘percent black’ and ‘percent immigrant,’” Putnam said, have a “significant and independent” negative effect on social capital. But comparing “percent black” with “percent immigrant,” he found that the “more consistent and powerful” degradation of social capital came from “percent immigrant.”
³²

Leaping out from Putnam’s graphs is the fact that wealthy, wildly diverse San Francisco repeatedly comes in dead last in social capital. This is one problem you can’t blame on the blacks—that city is 42 percent white, 33 percent Asian, 15 percent Hispanic, 6 percent black (and 100 percent
fabulous
). Notwithstanding all the blather about Asians being the “model minority” and Hispanics being such “hard workers”—compared to you-know-who—people who live in communities dominated by the traditional black and white races trust their neighbors a lot more than they do in places like San Francisco with large immigrant populations.
³³

This is especially noticeable in Southern towns, where black and white Americans have been living together forever. In San Francisco, only 29 percent of people trust their neighbors. By contrast, in each of these three mostly black and white North Carolina towns, more than 40 percent of people trust their neighbors:

       
   
Greensboro: white: 48 percent; black: 40 percent; Hispanic: 8 percent; Asian: 4 percent.

       
   
Winston-Salem: white: 51 percent; black: 35 percent; Hispanic: 15 percent.

       
   
Charlotte: white: 50 percent; black: 35 percent; Hispanic: 13 percent; Asian: 5 percent.
³⁴

Also unlike San Francisco, people in these towns trust one another without regard to race. In San Francisco, the correlation between “same race” and “trust” is quite high.
³⁵

There’s nothing good about diversity, other than the food, and we don’t need 128 million Mexicans for the restaurants.
³⁶
True, America does a better job than most at accommodating a diverse population. We also do a better job at setting compound fractures. But no one goes around mindlessly exclaiming: “Compound fractures are a strength!”

5

THIRTY MILLION MEXICANS

S
O DIVERSITY IS NOT A STRENGTH. BUT THE STRANGE THING IS, IT’S NOT EVEN
diverse. In
New York Times
–speak, “diversity” simply means “non-white.” Most of the time, it means “Mexican.”

The first recorded use of “Diversity is a strength,” according to Nexis, was on November 16, 1989, and we haven’t been able to get rid of it since. The phrase appeared in a
Boston Globe
retrospective about court-ordered busing in Boston in the 1970s—which illustrated the wonders of diversity by inciting race riots.
¹
The second use of this grating cliché was in a 1992
Los Angeles Times
article gassing on about diversity at A. G. Currie Middle School in Tustin, California. The school was celebrating diversity by flying sixty-five flags to represent its students’ home countries. Principal Dan Brooks said he planned to turn Currie into a “model multicultural school,” adding that although many view diversity as an obstacle, he saw “diversity as a strength.”
²
By 2009, the most recent year for which statistics are available, A. G. Currie Middle School was 91 percent Hispanic.
³
There’s “multicultural” for you. Nine percent more Mexicans, and it will have achieved
perfect “diversity.” Compared with other schools in California, A. G. Currie scored a D− in math, a C in language, and a C+ in science, for an overall grade of D+.
⁴
Diversity is a strength!