Amerika

New research upends the previous ideological crutches we used to try to rationalize diversity as good. For starters, it turns out that racial attitudes are not as simple as “Republicans bad, Democrats good.” People have nuanced racial attitudes arising from culture:

Instead of neatly dividing along party lines, the study paints a patchwork picture, revealing 58 cities where political affiliation and racial attitudes reflect local culture and lived experience more than partisan expectation.

“We found many exceptions to the common narrative,” Stier says. “This reflects what many people experience. In some Southern cities, you might meet people who are kind to individual people from different racial or ethnic groups, yet still vote for discriminatory policies. Meanwhile, there are places that feel more interpersonally exclusionary but vote for inclusive policies.”

Cities like Knoxville, Tennessee, and Spokane, Washington, voted Republican but showed lower-than-expected levels of implicit racial bias, once factors like diversity, segregation, and city population were accounted for.

In Southern cities, people have a culture that emphasizes fairness including ensuring that your group does not get steamrollered by the needs of others. Thus they freely embrace other groups, but vote for their own interests as they assume other groups do for theirs.

We should probably mention that the only real culture in America comes from the South anyway.

Not only that, but it turns out that humans are hard-wired to preserve culture because it gives them a sense of “belonging and identity”:

Each human culture consists of a unique set of values, beliefs and practices. However, a common thread across cultures is the apparent importance of preserving aspects of those cultures throughout generations.

“These cultural aspects likely give people within that culture a sense of belonging and identity,” Cobb said. “This is similar to the way people create internal narratives about themselves that inform different aspects of their lives.”

“This evolving process means that cultural values can shift over time, and also that perceived threats against a population’s cultural heritage often lead to greater efforts to retain important cultural aspects,” Cobb said.

Most likely, those things also involve how we judge our own actions before we take them. Culture provides a series of heuristics, aesthetics, and directions that we can use to assess our own acts, and avoid the ones that clash with culture while striving for ones that will be rewarded.

For example, in the South we recognize that fair play is always expected, and those who strive to make things better are usually rewarded. Certain codes of politeness distinguish the mentally alert from the slobs, and we have an aesthetic of our own and sense of life as a tragi-comedic adventure.

It seems that the root of racial attitudes comes from a desire to preserve culture, not denigrate others, which is why attitudes break down along cultural lines instead of political ones. Since diversity erases culture, many of all cultures are starting to see diversity as hostile.

Tags: diversity, organic culture, racism