Ferguson Forever

Race riots make Americans uneasy. Every 20 years or so, the elegant surface of our denial cracks and we see the anger that lurks beneath. Ordinary people go through their lives thinking the government has done something about “race relations.” I remember a blonde woman telling me she was voting for Bill Clinton because he was “better on race relations.” We hope that welfare, anti-discrimination laws, witch-hunts and anything else to appease blacks will make the problem go away.

We think we should get what we pay for. We pay taxes. We pay in guilt and mea culpas. We pay every time we watch Hollywood propaganda. We pay whenever an affirmative-action incompetent bungles his job. But despite 150 years of subsidies, bloodshed, violence, and occasional burnt cities, the problem will not go away.

Commentators offer different reasons why Ferguson is burning. They blame racial injustice or militarized police or the police officer who shot an unarmed teenager. Some even blame Michael Brown. But all these explanations miss the truth: Ferguson is symptom, not cause, and the cause is diversity. Diversity–“uniting” different ethnic groups in a country under capitalist liberal democracy–doesn’t work.

Diversity fails because it increases distrust. If you were stopped by the police wouldn’t you want the officer to have the same background as you? If we all want police who are like us, there will have to be a member of every ethnic group in every patrol car: black, white, Hispanic, Asian, Arab, and may be a Hmong or two. As a practical matter, diversity means you get the wrong person in the police car.

Diversity also means groups are never equal. If you are black, you are either on the bottom or you take over and whites are on the bottom. Diversity becomes a zero-sum game, in which one race succeeds by displacing others.

Diversity also poses the problem of assimilation. Minorities can choose to assimilate or to resist and stay true to their cultures. If they resist, they miss out on the best opportunities. Their names will be strange, their dress different, their speech odd, and their customs and beliefs may be jarring. But if they assimilate, they will lose what makes them who they are.

Blacks have suffered greatly under diversity. As whites, we tend to see our own suffering first, but the burden of black degeneracy falls mainly on other blacks. Black ghettos are violent, filthy, and miserable. Black people fear white police, laws, economics and social institutions–and for good reason. These things are alien to them. But blacks deserve fair policing too.

Those of us who grew up in the South find racial hatred jarring. For our whole lives, we have known and been friends with black people, worked with them, and even cared deeply for them. Our identity includes a strong sense of ourselves as different from blacks, and with different needs, but this is not born from enmity but from practicality. Each group needs its own standards and rules. One standard for all means different levels of success and that means resentment. From resentment comes the smoldering anger that awaits a spark like Ferguson to detonate.

Of course, we are not alone in suffering under diversity. The Yezidis in northern Iraq face genocide in a region that has been fractured by diversity for centuries. In China, the Uighurs rage against the majority Han. Even Ireland still fights battles between the ethnically distinct Northern Irish and the rest of the population. Race war and genocide are the norm; wherever it has been tried, diversity does not work.

The Aztec empire fell to a few hundred conquistadors because its underclass minority groups turned on their masters and allied with the Spaniards. Rome weakened as it expanded and brought diverse groups back to its homeland to use as labor. The ancient Greeks wrote about the conflict between commerce and culture; commerce brought foreigners who disturbed the social order and created the type of resentment we see in Ferguson today.

All of history indicts diversity. The problem is not a black problem, or a white one; it is diversity itself. Diversity is a failed policy that, like many other failed policies, remains in effect because people are afraid to speak out against it. They fear criticizing it because it seems “good,” it seems “nice.” We are social animals who believe we should be friendly to everyone, but good policy recognizes that people prefer to live near, work with, be policed by, rent to, sell to, and befriend people like themselves. Must we deny reality in order to be “nice”?

What happened to Michael Brown was a tragedy born of diversity. He made mistakes, but he martyred himself on his own racial resentments. Would he have fought with a black officer? Would he have struggled for a black officer’s gun? Darren Wilson, the white officer, is another victim of diversity, who tried only to defend himself. And the store owners and citizens of Ferguson are yet more victims, all paying the price for our foolish, unworkable policies. As we continue down the diversity path, it will be Ferguson forever, everywhere.

Diversity damages us as whites, both in the United States and Europe. Its continued failure encourage us to think we are bad people, who are cruel to impoverished races. We drain our wealth and energy trying to force a square peg into a round hole. We suffer from increased crime and the stronger law enforcement that follows. But worst of all, we lose a sense of who we are. Our national identity has been replaced by the political ideology of diversity, equality, and being nice to everyone.

White people are the ones who work extra hours to subsidize this great experiment in race relations. What we need instead is a sense of who we are: modern Vikings and space explorers and inventors. We need a positive vision of ourselves not tied to the future of any other group. We need to reclaim ourselves, and the only way we can do that is to turn our backs on diversity.