Real diversity.

I’m just about to finish up Bill Bishop’s fantastic text on “idea segregation” in America in the last thirty years, called The Big Sort. It’s a really enlightening text. In it, Bishop recounts the history of homogeneous and heterogeneous communities in America, and sheds light on the systems and dynamics that germinated the latest trend in politics-customization city-by-city since the mid 1970s.

There are several things that Bishop does very well; he elucidates the impact of missionaries’ strategies of church growth on American cities, reviews the shift of marketing experts away from demographics and toward lifestyle advertising; and provides data indicating the potential and observed effects of these changes. Yet a particular, and striking, strength of his work is the subtle message that whispers through his explanations. It took a while for me to fully receive it, especially as a student of politics with fairly outspoken political stances. Nevertheless, I think it’s the most urgent lesson of Bishop’s text, and one that I’ve been grasping at elsewhere for a few weeks.  I’ll try and recapture it in blog-form.

I graduated from college less than five years ago. Most of my friends are in the same boat—recent college graduates, mid-20s, looking for a place in the world. Where do most of my friends go to find that place? Cities. And a few particular cities, especially. There are a few reasons that they seek out these cities—Brooklyn, Portland, San Francisco, Austin. One significant and oft-cited reason, appears to me to be fairly noble. They yearn for diversity.

With this yearning I can’t help but empathize. I grew up in suburban Washington, DC, and attended a high school where whites were in the minority. I recall returning to Washington after my first semester at undergrad in Huntingdon, Pennsylvania, which has just over 6,000 residents and only a few dozen non-whites. It felt so comforting to finally return to the diverse community I had gone to school in—to visit a library and see books with different languages, and people of different backgrounds reading them. I find a similar comfort riding the subway in Brooklyn, where Scott and I lived for just over a year. And so I can understand this particular appeal of cities for my contemporaries.

But I, with Bishop, begin to wonder: is demographic diversity enough? Or, in fact, is it diversity at all?

Increasingly, we have the ability to choose our ideological and political communities. Is ‘living in a diverse community’ just another lifestyle that young folks like Scott and I elect to engage in? How interested in ‘diversity’ are we, actually? If we’re in fact willing, or interested, in exposure to otherness, why don’t young bike-riding, composting democrats move to Kentucky, or to Wyoming, to interact with others unlike us? Demographic diversity, in a way, becomes a proxy for a degree of ideological homogeneity.

(Of course, I could here also venture into an examination of the overwhelming homogeneity visible in, say, the Mission district of San Francisco, or in Williamsburg and Bushwick in New York. It certainly is possible that an appeal of cities is not, in fact, “diversity,” but the super-homogeneous niche communities found in larger cities and not elsewhere! But I won’t do that 🙂 )

Here’s the bottom line. If what we need in this country, is really to be willing to be open-minded and to be willing to compromise, that doesn’t just mean that we need to be receptive and respectful of the Latino population and their viewpoints—it also means that we need to be receptive and respectful of folks who don’t agree with increased gun control and restrictions on domestic oil drilling and hydrofracking. This doesn’t mean that one or the other side of these arguments necessarily is or isn’t right or just. But it does mean that we need to return to the solution that our founders established and cemented in our very form of government: dignified, open-minded discussion. And not just with people who look, think, and talk just like us.