3 ms·

Not sure why you're downvoted. I'm always surprised when friends are shocked by racists in the US; the melting pot experiment definitely didn't work.

by okprod 6y ago

rayiner 6y ago
The melting pot worked as well as it can work. Certainly better than in Europe. (See Brexit, see France and Muslims, see Germans and Muslims.) And certainly more so than nearly anywhere in Asia. The problem is that you’re trying to solve a devilishly difficult problem that we don’t want to acknowledge is a difficult problem. When Iraq voted for the first time in 2005, it did so along strictly ethnic/sectarian lines. My home country of Bangladesh seceded from Pakistan because even though we were all brown muslims, they were brown Muslims who spoke a different language. Even Belgium to this day had huge economic disparities between French-speaking regions and Dutch-speaking regions. We should seek to build a tolerant multi-ethnic society, but that will fail if, under some false belief in the perfectibility of human nature, we don’t acknowledge how hard a thing we are trying to accomplish. You can’t build such a society if your response to people being concerned about the culture in their communities changing is to call them racist. You can’t do it if you pretend that moderate in-group favoritism is some defect among certain white people, rather than a human trait that is displayed equally by Black and brown people: https://tablet-mag-images.b-cdn.net/production/883104fdaad1810c8dbbb2a6df5a4b6ed7d5036f-2560x1138.jpg?w=1200&q=70&auto=format&dpr=1 https://tablet-mag-images.b-cdn.net/production/883104fdaad18.... You can’t do it if you blithely kick stools out from underneath society without regard to whether they’re serving some critical function gluing our massively complicated heterogenous society together.

3 ms·

Not sure why you're downvoted. I'm always surprised when friends are shocked by racists in the US; the melting pot experiment definitely didn't work.

by okprod 6y ago

Not sure why you're downvoted. I'm always surprised when friends are shocked by racists in the US; the melting pot experiment definitely didn't work.

rayiner 6y ago
The melting pot worked as well as it can work. Certainly better than in Europe. (See Brexit, see France and Muslims, see Germans and Muslims.) And certainly more so than nearly anywhere in Asia. The problem is that you’re trying to solve a devilishly difficult problem that we don’t want to acknowledge is a difficult problem. When Iraq voted for the first time in 2005, it did so along strictly ethnic/sectarian lines. My home country of Bangladesh seceded from Pakistan because even though we were all brown muslims, they were brown Muslims who spoke a different language. Even Belgium to this day had huge economic disparities between French-speaking regions and Dutch-speaking regions. We should seek to build a tolerant multi-ethnic society, but that will fail if, under some false belief in the perfectibility of human nature, we don’t acknowledge how hard a thing we are trying to accomplish. You can’t build such a society if your response to people being concerned about the culture in their communities changing is to call them racist. You can’t do it if you pretend that moderate in-group favoritism is some defect among certain white people, rather than a human trait that is displayed equally by Black and brown people: https://tablet-mag-images.b-cdn.net/production/883104fdaad1810c8dbbb2a6df5a4b6ed7d5036f-2560x1138.jpg?w=1200&q=70&auto=format&dpr=1 https://tablet-mag-images.b-cdn.net/production/883104fdaad18.... You can’t do it if you blithely kick stools out from underneath society without regard to whether they’re serving some critical function gluing our massively complicated heterogenous society together.