Harvard sociologist Robert Putnam writes:
In areas of greater diversity, our respondents demonstrate:
* Lower confidence in local government, local leaders and the local news media.17
* Lower political efficacy – that is, confidence in their own influence.18
* Lower frequency of registering to vote, but more interest and knowledge about politics and more participation in protest marches and social reform groups.19
* Less expectation that others will cooperate to solve dilemmas of collective action (e.g., voluntary conservation to ease a water or energy shortage).20
* Less likelihood of working on a community project.21
* Lower likelihood of giving to charity or volunteering.22
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Fewer close friends and confidants.23
* Less happiness and lower perceived quality of life.24
* More time spent watching television and more agreement that ‘television is my most important form of entertainment’.25
As Gerteis and Mosaic colleagues Douglas Hartmann and Penny Edgell put it in work published this year: “We are at a crucial and unprecedented moment. Across otherwise deep political and social divisions, Americans have come to appreciate diversity and to explicitly promote it.”
In their study, based on a survey in 2003 of more than 2,000 respondents, they found that fewer than 5 percent considered diversity mostly a weakness in American life. Forty-three percent said it was mostly a source of strength, and 50 percent replied that it was equally a source of strength and weakness.
But that doesn’t tell the whole story. The authors noted that in school and at work, Americans are taught to value difference, and they know by now that a positive reaction to diversity is the culturally acceptable answer.
The authors found disagreement and concern about exactly what diversity means.
“Black or white, happy multiculturalist or ambivalent realist, Americans of all stripes see it as a problem if there are simply groups with no national culture to unify them,” they wrote.
Using the same survey to conduct in-depth interviews with respondents in Atlanta, Boston, Los Angeles and Minneapolis-St. Paul, Hartmann and a colleague found that people were often tongue-tied when it came to explaining diversity’s value.
They also seemed unable to talk about issues of race and inequality. Here diversity-speak emerges as a kind of “happy talk” in which “racial differences can be simultaneously acknowledged and even celebrated at the very same time that race and its problems are downplayed and disavowed.”
America has a lot at stake in its capacity deal with diversity.
In 1970, the United States was 83 percent non-Hispanic white, 11 percent black, less than 5 percent Hispanic and less than 1 percent Asian. Today, largely as a result of immigration reform in 1965, America is 66 percent non-Hispanic white, 15 percent Hispanic, 13 percent black and a little more than 4 percent Asian.
The younger the population, the less white it is. According to Mark Mather of the Washington-based Population Reference Bureau, in 1980, 26 percent of America’s under-20 population was minority. By 2006, 42 percent of the under-20 population—but only 20 percent of the 60-and-up population—was minority. The gap is only going to widen.
According to an analysis by Mather, those states with the biggest gap in the proportions of the older and younger populations spent the lowest share of their economies on public education. The three most racially homogenous states—Maine, Vermont and West Virginia—had the highest proportional spending on higher education.
Called “the Florida effect,” it is not a new finding. White taxpayers are generally reluctant to support a public sector they view as mostly benefiting people who aren’t white.
In 2002, economists Dora Costa at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Matthew Kahn at Tufts University surveyed 15 recent economics papers on the impact of diversity on social capital and found that all had “the same punch line: heterogeneity reduces civic engagement. In more diverse communities, people participate less as measured by how they allocate their time, their money, their voting and their willingness to take risks to help others.”
STANLEY ROTHMAN WRITES: It is commonly believed that increases in black enrollment will produce positive assessments from students about their educational experience. But in fact the correlations went in the opposite direction. As the proportion of black students rose, student satisfaction with their university experience dropped, as did their assessments of the quality of their education and the work ethic of their peers. In addition, the higher the enrollment diversity, the more likely students were to say that they personally experienced discrimination. The same pattern of negative correlations between educational benefits and increased black enrollment appeared in the responses of faculty and administrators. Both groups perceived decreases in educational quality and academic preparation as the number of black students increased. Faculty members also rated students as less hard-working as diversity increased.
